What Do We Do if They Are Here? with Avi Loeb

0:00You have fallen into event horizon with John Michael Goedea. In today's episode, John is joined by Professor Avi Loeb. Avi Loeb is a Frank B. Burd, Jr. professor of science at Harvard University, chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation within the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

1:02He also chair the Advisory Committee for the Breakthrough Star Shot Initiative, serves as the Science Theory Director for all initiatives of the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, as well as chair of the Baudon Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the author of four books, and over 700 scientific papers. He is an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society and the International Academy of Astronautics. In 2012, Time Selected Loeb is one of the 25 most influential people in space. If you would have asked Clyde Tambao, what to send, he probably would have said, hair or something like that, something that you can... A stem cell. Yeah, a stem cell. Or it could also be an electronic record of his DNA so that anyone finding it would be able to reproduce him. And unfortunately, ashes are of no use. You can't do anything with them. It makes no sense to send ashes.

2:02It's just the ritual that came from the time that humans did not really understand what the DNA is. You know, it's interesting, though, because maybe the aliens couldn't first something anthropologically about us. They could say, well, they have funeral rituals that involve cremating. If you could even tell that, it may just simply be carbon. But they may also say, why did they send us a carbon sample? What's the tool? Yeah. I mean, if you ask me why was this ritual developed, most likely it's to prevent disease from people that die. If you burn it up, then the likelihood of anything surviving is practically zero. But in retrospect, you can't use those ashes to celebrate the person who was burned. So that makes no sense. It bothers me. So well, we live in a dangerous world. We know that. And we could have a nuclear war and we could perhaps even go extinct.

3:05And if they find a spacecraft full of ashes and they look at our planet and it's full of ashes, then what would they conclude? Well, they would simply conclude that we are not that intelligent. One reason I seek intelligence in space is that I don't find it very often here on Earth. We're still precariously killing each other, unfortunately, which you would think that we could have gotten past that by now, but we haven't. Well, there is hope in the sense that if we do find evidence for a smarter kid on the block, perhaps it would convince us that we should treat each other as equal members of the human species. Because if you look at the human history very often, you find a group of people trying to feel superior relative to other people. And that is the cause of wars and the killings and so forth. And that would make no sense if there is something out there that is far more superior relative

4:08to all of us. And if we saw such a thing, maybe we could think in that mindset that has been pointed out many times before. If we see an alien civilization, perhaps then we become the human species as opposed to groups. Yeah. In a way, that's what religion brings. It brings a sense of humility because of the belief in a higher power. And what I'm saying is that even people who do not believe in God once they realize that there is something superior out there, they might behave differently. There is very small chance that if we find others, they would be at the same evolutionary stage as we are. Because the recent technological and scientific advances that we made were made only over the past century. And that's one part in a hundred million of the age of the earth. So the chance of us finding another civilization exactly at our technological development stage

5:10is very small. Most likely it would be far more advanced than we are, let's say a thousand years from now, or much more primitive than we are, the way we were over the past million years before the last century. So if they are primitive, perhaps the only way for us to find them would be to go to the jungles of an exoplanet and such for them. But that is very demanding because we have to send a spacecraft, you would pick a huge amount of time to get there, and then we have to search through the jungles. So that's not very promising. The second possibility is that at least one or some of them are much more advanced than we are. In which case, our job is relatively easy. They will come to visit us and they may have done it already. So all we need to do is allow for that possibility and search the sky. And if you think about it, it's most natural that military personnel will identify evidence

6:11for unusual objects because their day job is to monitor the sky for national security purposes. Astronomers are focusing on very large distances. They worry about galaxies that billions of light years away. So if something passes in front of their telescope, they just ignore it. And they also focus on a very narrow field of view. The James Webb Space Telescope looks out. It doesn't look at Earth. And so it's only the government that is really interested in objects near Earth. And it's striking that the director of national intelligence talks about objects that military personnel report about that perhaps are detected by our satellites. And then the first two interstellar objects that were discovered, the interstellar meteor from 2014. And Oumuamua, both of them looked like outliers.

7:12Didn't look like the comets or asteroids we find in the solar system. So my point is we only started to look carefully recently over the past five years or so. And we already see things that are unusual. So perhaps the answer to Fermi's paradox is why don't you look through your window if you're worrying about where your neighbors are. You can't just sit on the sofa and say where is everybody expecting that your neighbors will sit next to you. Now let's take the three-prong approach of the Galileo project. And let's start first with the UAP and then we'll go to oceanic searching and intercepting. Oumuamua like objects. But first with the UAP and trying to identify what that is and maybe figuring out if there's anything there as far as an alien civilization activities go. Let me ask you a very vague question, a very vague question and I want to vague answer.

8:14So when you move the instrument around, do you have a list of areas where UAP activity is hot that you can put this instrument to try to collect data on them? I mean, are you compiling a list of candidate areas that are hot spots for this sort of thing? Yes. The answer is yes and we will have to select the most promising site. And it's not just a matter of a site that has a lot of reports coming from it. We also need some infrastructure. We need the electricity, internet connectivity because we need to feed the data into our computers. So there are various considerations that are taken into account. But the key is that we have full control over our instruments. We are calibrating them. We understand them. And moreover, we are looking at the entire sky at any given location. So we don't need to focus on a small part of the sky.

9:15We can look at the entire sky at all times. And then once we identify an object of interest, we could, in principle, use another camera that will just track it and get a high resolution image of it. And hopefully our artificial intelligence algorithms will be sophisticated enough that after gaining some experience with objects in the sky, they would be able to immediately tell us if there is something unusual out there. Now what of looking, say you see something at one of these sites and you're like, there's something there. What about trying to detect radio emissions or radar from it? We do have sensors for that. Now the philosophy of the project is not to shine anything at the sky, not to be active, but rather passive. And one reason is, if we don't know what's out there, we don't want to induce any interaction

10:18with it. Including if it's a military equipment or civilian equipment, we just don't want to do anything to it. But in addition to that, of course, if it's a populated area, we don't want to do something that would affect the people around it. So our approach is completely passive. And our radar system, we look at the reflection of radio waves from objects in the sky. These radio waves are emitted by radio stations or TV stations and we will just look for the reflection from objects in the sky without transmitting anything. And then in addition, we have an instrument that detects any emission from the object itself. So yes, we are definitely sensitive to radio emission from objects in the sky. So at what point, and I know this is highly speculative, but that's what I do, at what point do you try to induce communication with something like this that you're confident

11:21that this is not of earthly origin? How do you talk to it? But that's an excellent question. As I said before, most likely it would be representing technologies that we don't possess, far more advanced than we can imagine. Just think about humans from a few centuries ago, seeing the technologies that we use today, it would look like magic to them. And that's just a few centuries ago. Think about the civilization that is a thousand or a million years more advanced than we are. If their probes are visiting us, we won't be able to figure out easily what they're doing. So the first task is to identify them and their properties to see what they're doing. And then I think there needs to be some international organization because it starts being of importance to humanity as a whole as to how to engage with those objects once we find them. It's not clear that the objects that were reported are indeed extraterrestrial.

12:24They could be still human-made or natural. So that's the first thing we need to clarify. But if we do, for example, read off the label made on some exoplanet, we will know that they didn't come from this earth. And if they behave in ways that far supersede what we can produce, then obviously they represent technologies that are more advanced. And at that point, there is no protocol as to how to engage and who represents humanity and what to do about it. I think it will be something that many countries will have to come together and decide what to do. It's complicated because it's just like having a visitor in your backyard. You need to respond promptly. And you need to do it responsibly not to trigger something that would damage humanity. So nobody thought about this. The SETI community thought about how to respond to a radio signal, for example, or laser

13:26signal, that comes from very far away. And of course, for that, there is plenty of time because it takes that signal, for example, tens of thousands of years to traverse the Milky Way galaxy. So there is no rush in responding. But having a visitor in your backyard is a much more pressing requirement for us to respond. And we have to be careful, of course, not to misinterpret the intention. So I think at the moment we identify an object like that, the first goal would be to trace it as well as we can and figure out what information it's seeking and try to analyze that data. And more we know about it, the better we can decide how to respond. Do you think that it would be best to first send a scientific message to anything we contact, whether it's a radio signal from very far away or a UAP hovering over the ocean? Should we send out something along the lines of a, okay, 1420 maker hurts hydrogen line,

14:32we send out a signal. And then we send out, after that, a signal stepping up from that that shows a depiction in radio of, say, the Lyman series, which is ultraviolet. But if you see it radio, it obviously is artificial. A scientific signal that any scientist in the galaxy will recognize may be the best way to begin a communication. Do you agree or disagree? How do we talk to this? No, I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. Because if there is a large technological gap, if that technology, as I said, is much, much more likely to represent a civilization much more advanced than we are, then anything we do is completely irrelevant. Just imagine ants on the sidewalk, they can decide about a protocol, how to signal to people passing by something. But if a biker rides along that sidewalk, the biker wouldn't care less about the signals

15:38that the ants are trying to relay. The biker may actually go over some of these ants being careless. And also it doesn't really matter which crack in the pavement, those ants occupied. So national borders are completely irrelevant. And it all depends on the blueprint of those devices that we might find. What are they trying to seek? What are they trying to accomplish? One possibility that you can think of is these are self-replicating devices. They were first envisioned in 1948 by John Fonoiman, the mathematician physicist who talked about self-reproducing automata. It was a thought experiment and he was thinking about systems that can replicate themselves, even with mutations in the sense that the information they passed from one generation to another could change as long as the device that replicates that information remains constant.

16:41And he came with the idea before the double helix structure of the DNA was discovered. So he actually realized an idea that you can find in nature. And when DNA structure was understood, then it became clear that in fact there is an example of those self-replicating systems and in our genetic material and that replicates cells. But an interesting question. I mean, this is terrestrial life. Could we generalize it from natural selection of evolution to technological selection, to space, interstellar space? Is it possible that there are devices that were manufactured by another civilization that can replicate themselves just like the DNA does it? But they are made of technological equipment that was designed to behave this way and

17:42is using the raw materials that such devices find on an exoplanet. And even if they are propelled just by chemical rockets, they can traverse the entire Milky Way Galaxy in half a billion years. And that means that within a billion years they can replicate exponentially. And in principle, every habitable planet in the Milky Way Galaxy could have some of those in its atmosphere. And the question is, do we live in that reality? Perhaps these unidentified objects in the Earth's atmosphere are just those devices. And obviously if we get more data on those UAP, we could tell. We don't know if UAP are extraterrestrial, whether they are self-replicating using materials on Earth. But as I say, let's find out. Let's collect that data. That's what the Galileo project is trying to do. And the more data we have about what an extraterrestrial object is doing, what information it's seeking,

18:50we could at least get a sense of what it's trying to accomplish. And then decide about the protocol, whether to engage with it. And as I said, these are autonomous, most likely autonomous systems that have a goal in mind. And they may be equipped with artificial intelligence with 3D printers or with whatever devices allow them to replicate or probe the environment. But we should find more about them if they exist. And it would be fascinating to learn from them. So say we have a von Neumann probe. A von Neumann 3D printer sitting in the solar system that's been there for, y'all knows how long printing out probes, atmospheric probes that are dipping in the atmosphere and people are seeing them. And voila, you have a UIP of alien origin. But if you have that von Neumann 3D printer, the question is, could we find that?

19:51In other words, as opposed to a Mo Mo cooking through the solar system and we see really strange characteristics, do you think we have any hope of ever identifying a von Neumann 3D printer in the solar system? In the vastness of it, just sitting there printing out probes? Oh, definitely. All we need to do is examine the properties of objects that we see close to Earth. We can't see objects very far away because they reflect very little sunlight. But there are two types of objects we can imagine finding. There are those that behave just like nuhorizance will behave in a billion years. It will not be functional anymore. It will be spaced trash. So you could find a lot of objects that are defunct, that are just floating through space without doing anything. Perhaps even fragments of a bigger spacecraft that disintegrated as a result of a collision or something like that. And then there are those functional probes that could be hovering near trying to do something.

20:55And in order to figure out the properties of such objects of both categories, we just need to monitor the sky. And those that are not functioning could, if they collide with the Earth, they would burn up like meteors. So here is a possibility for the interstellar meteor. It was some artificial equipment that was not functional anymore. And I don't know what Humu was, but what we need to look for are objects that do not resemble rocks. And what happened with Humu Muay is that it exhibited qualities that are not shared by rocks we had found before. And so my colleagues in the mainstream said, okay, well, it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before. That was the explanation given by the mainstream community, dismissing an impossibility for an artificial origin. And I say, if it's a rock of a type that we've never seen before, we better allow ourselves

21:56to find equipment. The idea of a rock of interstellar origin of a type we've never seen before, which it seems to be metallic, the way it held up is in itself absolutely astonishing. But my question for you here is, are you prepared to do isotope studies to see what exactly, what is the origin of this is this from the solar system? Even if it's something really, really strange, like a solid piece of titanium or something that shouldn't exist, do you have your thought of ways to determine if it's interstellar origin based on isotope studies? Definitely. So the moment we will collect those fragments, we will study them. And my goal is to keep it a scientific project. I was approached by various people who asked whether they can commercialize this expedition and I declined because I want the fragments to be available in a museum or university to

23:00any scientist worldwide to analyze them later. I actually also spoke with the curator of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. And she said that she would be delighted to put those fragments on the exhibit because it may represent modern art, especially if it's artificial in origin. But we will figure out the composition using standard methods of extrace spectroscopy, of mass spectroscopy and various methods. And at the very least, even if it's natural in origin, like an iron meteorite, we could confirm that it came from outside the solar system because, as you say, the abundances of different isotopes or elements would be different than we find in solar system rocks. And from that, we will be able to tell that it was interstellar irrespective of the speed that the object was moving in. So those doubters that say they don't believe the US government and this object may have

24:04had large uncertainties in its speed that the government is not allowing us to see, all these doubts will not be founded because we will be able to confirm that the composition of the object is different from solar system objects. So there is that potential. But there is also the potential of finding an object with the composition that nature doesn't put together. I have a difficult question, Dr. Lowe. And this is something that, when thinking about the SNOM skeptic, I'm skeptic regarding UAP of an alien origin hypothesis, anyway, naturally. But what if it is? And we have the US Navy with intense interest in the phenomena right now, being driven by congressional hearings and things like that. What if they try to unilaterally communicate with it? In other words, they're sitting on an aircraft carrier group trying to communicate with

25:05these things before we have any sort of international consensus. Do you think that that is a danger right now that we might make a misstep by having not the wrong people, but misguided people trying to contact the UAP? Well, I'm not so worried about the Navy or military or government trying to do that. I'm more worried that once we collect scientific data and it's clear that we identified an object, let's say, of extraterrestrial origin, which is not guaranteed. But just imagine that scenario that even if there is an international committee that decides about a protocol, there might be some irresponsible person deciding to engage with the object in ways that would endanger the rest of humanity. That's what I'm worried about, not an organization like the military or the government doing it, but an individual just being irresponsible trying to get the headlines.

26:06And it's not clear how you can police all people such that this will not happen. Moreover, the response of the public may be unpredictable because some people will behave in a way that is not rational. And hopefully those devices are intelligent enough to avoid the risks that come together with such a response. Now, the third prong of the Galileo project looking for interstellar objects passing through the solar system. And of course, obviously the very ribbon observatory is going to be of great importance here. If you see a population, so we see a MoMA and MoMA is clearly very strange, whatever it is. And we have two options here. Either we'll see a population of them. And we say, well, we have some kind of new object, whether it's an alien origin or not, but we have some kind of a new object. But what would the connotations be of not ever seeing anything like

27:10umo moa again? In other words, it becomes a wow signal. Right. So that really depends on what the nature of umo moa was because you can think of two scenarios. Suppose there are artificial objects out there. One scenario is that they target the habitable region around stars. The region where life may exist because they're seeking information about those forms of life that may exist around each star. And in that case, those probes will be on plunging orbits. Orbits that go ahead towards the star and get within the habitable region around it. And for any object that you find within the habitable region, you can calculate how many were sent from far away towards that region. Okay. Given the travel time, given the amount of time that you were looking,

28:11another scenario which is very different says, let's imagine those probes just floating through space with no intention. And then they have a uniform distribution and random directions of motion. And then you find one of them by chance within the region that the Earth covers as it moves around the Sun. Now you might say, okay, so how different are these scenarios? It turns out since the solar system is 100,000 times bigger than the Earth Sun separation, the volume that it occupies is 10 to the power 15 times bigger than the volume of the region that the Earth circles around the Sun, which is roughly the habitable region. So that means that there should be 10 to the power 15 more objects in the second scenario compared to the first scenario, if you just randomly find an object in both scenarios.

29:15That's a big factor 10 to the power 15. And in fact, the interpretation of a Muammua as a natural rock of a type that we've never seen before has requirements for the total mass that is ejected in such objects from stars that is quite unusual. We wrote a paper a decade before a Muammua was discovered where we tried to forecast how many interstellar objects should be out there. And the number was much, much smaller than the number implied from the detection of a Muammua. We thought that nothing will be found. But the Muammua was found so that revised the population upward to a very uncomfortable level. Most models for planetary disks cannot accommodate such a large population of interstellar objects. You need more than an Earth mass of such objects ejected from every star. And that's a lot.

30:15So the alternative is these are probes that are directed into the habitable zone. Then you cut down the amount of mass that you need to eject or the amount of production of such object by a factor of 10 to the power 15. So it all depends on what these objects are. My question for you now is much more earthly. And say, for example, you start collecting data on UAP. And you begin to suspect that this might be the actions of a nation state. And that were someone recently commented to me that you know, it's like a cat laser, you know, a cat pointer that that you can drive animals crazy with. And it can light can defy the laws of physics seemingly if you have a beam of light and things like that. If you begin to suspect that you're seeing some top secret technology, a spoofing technology from another nation state. Given the openness

31:18of the Galileo project, do you just throw that out there publicly or do you warn governments? What do you do if you start to think you're seeing something top secret from another nation state? Well, I actually met Averyl Haynes in the green room of the Washington National Cathedral before we went on stage back in November 2021. And I made a promise that anything that appears to be human made, you know, I'm happy to deliver it straight to DC, Washington, for those who are interested in it. Because for us, it's not of great interest. And the same, I'm happy to do with anything that looks natural. We have a high resolution image of a bird. I would be glad to deliver it to us all, I have no interest in that. So we focus on something else. And because that's a subject of great interest to astronomers, to scientists more broadly, and to humanity at large. And anything to do with humans is not very interesting to me. I mean, it could represent technologies

32:24that we don't possess. Maybe some adversaries have. But the point of the matter is that in a decade or two, these technologies would be regarded as old fashioned. So it's not of interest to me. It's of course of interest to intelligence agencies. And I would assume they know more than me about what's out there that is human made. So they would never speak to Congress about objects they cannot identify if they had a suspicion that humans made it. Yeah, which is interesting in and of itself. Yes, that thought has occurred to me. Now, you have written in the past on the idea of searching for technosignatures, signatures close by in the context of looking for city lights, artificial lighting on exoplanets that say, Proxima, be close by it. If we were to find some kind of a signature like that, that was very close next star system over, that would statistically speaking suggest a population of alien civilizations that's enormous. Someone has populated the galaxy if they're that close,

33:30not necessarily, but it would suggest it. So if we did find something like that, do we have to start asking questions about prior technological civilizations on Earth? I mean, could it be something that came from this planet as opposed to something from another word, another star system entirely? Well, this is a question worth studying irrespective of seeing anything out there. We can examine the face of the moon if there was a lunar landing that predated the Apollo era, then it may have been related to a previous civilization that existed on Earth. We should check. I mean, the surface of the moon is like a museum. It records everything that landed on it. But regarding lights, artificial lights, about a decade ago, we visited with a colleague of mine, Ed Turner from Princeton, there was a conference in Abu Dhabi when NYU celebrated their new campus there. And we went there and there was a tour. And the tour guide

34:36bragged about the fact that Dubai can be seen all the way from the moon. It generates so much light that you can see it from the moon. And that inspired my colleague and me to ask the question, if we were to use the deep images of the Hubble Space Telescope and now the web telescope, what can we see and how far away in terms of city lights? So we found that you can see a city like Tokyo all the way to the edge of the solar system out to the Coipur Belt. So if there was a city like that on Pluto, or if you had a spacecraft that generates a much light as Tokyo, then those deep images that the web generates could reveal those lights. And how would you be able to tell that it's actually artificial light source rather than reflection of sunlight? Well, it's very easy. Even if they have exactly the same spectrum as the object changes its distance from the sun.

35:42Reflected sunlight fades away inversely with distance to the fourth power, whereas a source of light, like a light bulb, fades away as inversely with distance squared. And the extra factor of one over distance squared is simply because when you reflect sunlight, the amount of sunlight impinging on the surface of the object, declines inversely with distance, where and on top of that, what we see from that object after it reflects that sunlight has another factor for one over distance squared. So you can tell by how objects fade away as they move away from the sun, whether they produce their own light or reflect sunlight. And when I asked a scientist from Caltech, called Mike Brown, who discovered many objects in the cooper belt, I asked him, did you ever check how they change their flux as they move away from the sun? Does it decline inversely with distance to the fourth or distance squared? He said, why should they check? It's obviously inversely with

36:47distance to the fourth. And so that illustrates the way astronomers often think. They think they know the answer in advance. And here I was talking with an observer. And that, well, Mike Brown, that's a planet nine as well, you know, the idea that maybe there might be something else out there, another planet. Yeah. So a year later, he came up together with Constantin Batiggen, who used to be a postdoc next door to my office. They came up with a suggestion that maybe there is an unusual object called planet nine out there. But what I'm saying is the vocabulary of what is called unusual, really is on the eyes of the beholder. For example, we don't regard birds as unusual. We see birds all the time. And people have been seeing them for millennia. But only about 120 years ago, the right brothers were the first to imitate how birds fly. And before that humans never

37:52did what birds do. So even though it looks unusual, birds are actually quite extraordinary. If you think about it, that we were able to imitate them only a century ago. And then to me, that illustrates the fact that what people, regardless, ordinary or extraordinary, is really a psychological matter. And many times we put blinders. We don't look because we assume that we know the answer in advance. So any thing in the sky must be a natural rock. Any object in the coiper belt must be reflecting sunlight. And my point is, let's just be open-minded and check because we might be surprised and that may provide an answer to Fermi's parado. Avi, do you think that in the current climate, whether it's radiostronomy or any other search for extraterrestrial intelligence, do you think we would miss it if it was right under our nose in the scientific community just because we

38:56perhaps might be too skeptical? Yeah, I do accept I'm trying to change it. There was an interesting paper that came out on the archive last week that suggested that most astronomers make a choice of this of a career in astronomy as a result of being fascinated by science fiction. That was a surprise to me because I don't like science fiction. I like science and I enjoy fiction, but I don't like the marriage of the two because the storyline very often violates the laws of physics. But given that, I would have expected my colleagues to be much more open-minded and invest more funds in the search, not just the search for radio waves, which is traditional seti, which is just like trying to have a phone conversation. You need the counterpart to be active when you're listening. And that's not always possible because we cannot listen to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on the phone.

39:58We can find the notes, the music notes that he wrote. And in much the same way, we can find objects that were launched into space by other civilizations, but they may be dead by now, because most of them existed billions of years ago. And so the traditional seti is not the full story. It's also not necessarily the best way to find evidence. It's better to engage in interstellar archaeology, looking for objects that are relics of civilizations that died by now. And what I find is hostility towards that engagement, towards that search. And currently the Galileo project is funded by private donations. I think it should have been funded by the traditional funding agencies, just the way we are funding the search for dark matter. We have been searching for decades. Billions of dollars were invested. We haven't found it yet. So if we will invest billions of dollars in the search for technological equipment from other civilizations and not find anything

41:02within a few decades, we'll be at exactly the same point as the search for dark matter is right now. And so what I'm saying is, given the fact that the public is very interesting, this question, apparently the government is very interested, and that a lot of astronomers made this career choice by being fascinated by science fiction. It would be just natural for us to engage in this search. And I'm trying to change the intellectual culture such that this would be acceptable and not to ridicule. Now my last question for you, Dr. Loeb, is in regards to results from the Galileo project early on that there are papers in the works? And I'm not asking you to talk about the papers or anything like that, but is there science that we can look forward to being done that will come out soon when they publish and that we can chew on and start to gain a perspective on what's going

42:06on behind the scenes scientifically? Yeah, so those papers that represent the first year of the Galileo project, they summarize the suite of instruments that were developed and provide technical details about what we're planning to do with them, including the computational aspects of the project, but they do not yet discuss any data because we haven't obtained it. That will be the goal of the second year of the Galileo project. So hopefully the next batch of papers will have data and analysis of data and I would be delighted to speak with you again when that comes out. Of course, now other instruments are you planning other instrument packages to be distributed around and collect data from multiple points? Yeah, so we might we purchased already a magnetometer that measures the magnetic field of objects in the sky and also counter for energetic particles and then our audio

43:06system is sensitive to wavelengths that go outside the sensitivity of the human ear. We go all the way to long wavelengths, which is called infrasound, wavelengths of a few kilometers and also to very short wavelengths that are called ultrasound, but I should say that the human ear was selected such that it will identify threats and we are sensitive to those wavelengths that are most relevant for survival. So very short wavelengths of sound waves damp dissipate across short distances in the atmosphere and so you can't really hear anything from far away that would warn you in advance of a threat and very long wavelengths do not carry much information. So it's interesting that natural selection basically dictated the sensitivity of the human ear, but within the Galileo project, we have sensors that go way outside of it and we can listen to the entire spectrum and we shall see

44:12what that system is already working and collecting data. It also can warn us if there is anything anyone coming close to our system of sensors because we are recording everything all the time. Amazing, I can't wait to see the results. All right, Dr. Loeb, thank you for appearing with us today and I wish you great luck and I am very, very keenly interested in seeing what the Galileo project turns up in its second ear. Thank you so much for having me.