Speaker 1: Hey, Kelly, do you have strong feelings about invasive species?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: I mean, on the one hand, it's usually our fault.
Speaker 3: But I do think that in general, ecologists get a
Speaker 3: bit unnerved when you mess with a local ecosystem.
Speaker 1: But shouldn't you have some sort of like respect for
Speaker 1: these invaders. I mean, they just like came in and
Speaker 1: they were better suited to survival, right.
Speaker 3: I mean, I guess so, but in a lot of cases,
Speaker 3: like the new environment doesn't have their usual parasites or predators,
Speaker 3: so they have like an unfair advantage at least initially.
Speaker 3: But like, also, would you feel that way if advanced
Speaker 3: aliens came and started killing us, Like, would it be
Speaker 3: okay because they can? Would you have grudging respect?
Speaker 1: I actually would have grudging respect, And I hope that
Speaker 1: you know, they would share the physics behind their laser
Speaker 1: beams and immolation devices and all that stuff, and it
Speaker 1: might be worth it.
Speaker 3: Okay, wait, hold on, remember both my kids, who I
Speaker 3: know you're always trying to kill and your kids are
Speaker 3: included on the list of being fried by aliens in
Speaker 3: the scenario.
Speaker 1: I know, but I still learned the secrets of the universe,
Speaker 1: so I already factor that in. I'm still pro invasion.
Speaker 3: All right, that's the first shuttle that goes to Mars.
Speaker 3: I'm putting your name on the manifest I don't want
Speaker 3: you on the same planet as my.
Speaker 1: Kids, no way, fair point. Hi. I'm Daniel. I'm a
Speaker 1: particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I'm
Speaker 1: happy to be negotiating on behalf of Earth when the
Speaker 1: aliens arrived.
Speaker 3: I'm Kelly Waiiner Smith, adjunct at Race University, and I
Speaker 3: hope that Daniel is far away from Earth when the
Speaker 3: aliens arrive. He might trade our children for some tiny
Speaker 3: little physics secret.
Speaker 1: Look, it's all going to be on the table, right
Speaker 1: You never know what the aliens are gonna want. Maybe
Speaker 1: they just want to like scoop up some algae and
Speaker 1: slurp it. But maybe they want to fry our children.
Speaker 3: You keep my children off the table. They can have
Speaker 3: the algae, although I can imagine there being some bad
Speaker 3: downstream effects. My phycology friends would not be happy. But
Speaker 3: definitely you're not giving them my kids.
Speaker 1: Oh you're so parochial. You're on the wrong side of
Speaker 1: history here, Kelly.
Speaker 3: I'm alright with that.
Speaker 1: Well, welcome to the podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the universe,
Speaker 1: where we do our best not to fry our children
Speaker 1: and sacrifice them to invading aliens, but to understand the
Speaker 1: universe anyway. Somehow, with all the photons and the particles
Speaker 1: and the little bits of rock that arrive here on Earth,
Speaker 1: we've managed to piece together and understanding of how the
Speaker 1: universe works. Out there, what's out there? What the tiny
Speaker 1: little quantum particles are, the super massive black holes that
Speaker 1: shape our galaxies. All that is sending us clues, and
Speaker 1: we're trying to digest them and explain them to you.
Speaker 3: And that's why we don't need the aliens and their information.
Speaker 1: But Kelly, we've been doing it for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: and there's still so much we have left to figure out.
Speaker 1: Wouldn't you like to fast forward to a super advanced understanding.
Speaker 3: Not if I'm trading my kids for it?
Speaker 1: All right, everybody, you heard it. If we are living
Speaker 1: in ignorance, it's because of Kelly's selfishness.
Speaker 3: Wait wait, I'll trade Daniel's kids for it, so problem, So.
Speaker 1: Okay, see the negotiation begins. All right, We're starting to
Speaker 1: thaw that cold position of yours. But nobody wants anybody's
Speaker 1: kids to fry, absolutely, But we do want to understand
Speaker 1: the universe, and frustratingly, we are mostly limited to figuring
Speaker 1: it out based on the clues that arrive here on Earth,
Speaker 1: photons that have traveled for billions of light years across
Speaker 1: the universe, little bits of protons and electrons and all
Speaker 1: sorts of cosmic rape particles. We are working hard to
Speaker 1: piece that together to get a picture of everything that's
Speaker 1: out there in the universe.
Speaker 3: And we'll get there without the aliens.
Speaker 1: And while the photons that arrive here on Earth do
Speaker 1: travel almost all the way across the universe, I mean
Speaker 1: we see things from very very early in the universe,
Speaker 1: we are limited when it comes to the stuff that
Speaker 1: arrives here, the actual chunks of stuff that we can
Speaker 1: use to study things that happen on other planets. We
Speaker 1: found little bits of Mars on Earth. We sometimes get
Speaker 1: rocks from elsewhere in the Solar System. But the universe
Speaker 1: is vast, and we would love to have a sample
Speaker 1: of bits from other places. Wouldn't you like to have
Speaker 1: a scoop of a distant star or a sample from
Speaker 1: an atmosphere of an exole planet.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Note that would be pretty awesome.
Speaker 1: Who knows what we could find. Is our solar system
Speaker 1: the same as all those other solar systems? Is it
Speaker 1: totally different? What can be found in the hearts of
Speaker 1: distant stars under the surface of distant exo moons. We
Speaker 1: don't know, and we'd love to find out. And we
Speaker 1: know that the universe is always holding surprises for us.
Speaker 3: Oh, I want to start asking you questions about what
Speaker 3: we might expect, how we might expect those things to
Speaker 3: be different than what we found on Earth. But I'm
Speaker 3: probably jumping the.
Speaker 1: Gun you are a little bit. But today on the podcast,
Speaker 1: we're going to be exploring that question, whether it's possible
Speaker 1: to sample planets around other stars, whether we can just
Speaker 1: sit here on our own little rock and wait for
Speaker 1: those bits to come to us. So today on the podcast,
Speaker 1: we'll be answering the question, have interstellar meteors hit the Earth?
Speaker 3: Oh, there's nothing better when the data comes to you.
Speaker 1: We would you love to just sit at home and
Speaker 1: have all the parasites like walk through your kitchen and
Speaker 1: report for duty.
Speaker 3: Ah, you know what, I actually have mixed feelings about that.
Speaker 3: It depends on the parasites.
Speaker 1: So your kids do live in that same kitchen and
Speaker 1: eat breakfast there, so probably you want to keep a
Speaker 1: sharp line between those.
Speaker 3: Things, all right, Right, it's great when physics data comes
Speaker 3: to us, but the parasitology data I'll go collect.
Speaker 1: And we have done a little bit of exploring, you know,
Speaker 1: we've been to the Moon, and we've sent probes to
Speaker 1: Mars and to orbit other places in the Solar System,
Speaker 1: but really the amount of stuff that we have to
Speaker 1: study that comes from off of Earth is vanishingly small,
Speaker 1: like a few pounds of Mars rocks, a little bit
Speaker 1: of an asteroid that we managed to collect, and most
Speaker 1: of the stuff that isn't from Earth that we can
Speaker 1: study came to us automatically. We didn't send a robot together.
Speaker 1: We just waited for rocks to hit the Earth and
Speaker 1: gather them.
Speaker 3: Is it possible that there's just like loads of rocks
Speaker 3: from our Solar System that are still on Earth, But
Speaker 3: we just look at them and we're like, that's a rock.
Speaker 3: And my friend Callon would say all rocks are interesting,
Speaker 3: but he's a geologist. I'm not quite sure he's right
Speaker 3: about that. But do we probably have tons more data,
Speaker 3: but we just don't recognize it. As being different than
Speaker 3: the Earth rocks.
Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, Meteors are hitting the Earth all the time,
Speaker 1: and they have four billions of years and so these
Speaker 1: things are scattered all around the surface of the Earth
Speaker 1: and even buried within it. I recently read a study
Speaker 1: that showed that they see traces of the proto planet
Speaker 1: that hit the Earth and led to the formation of
Speaker 1: the Moon. They call it fear. It's probably happened four
Speaker 1: billion years ago. They can see bits of it lodged
Speaker 1: in our mantle, like they can identify underground which bits
Speaker 1: came from that proto planet and how it created this
Speaker 1: weird distortion in the shape of our mantle.
Speaker 3: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: So everything on the surface of the Earth and underneath
Speaker 1: reveals its history, its history of bombardment. So yeah, there's
Speaker 1: probably stuff all over the surface of the Earth for
Speaker 1: people to just pick up and learn about our solar system.
Speaker 3: So when my kids come home with like pockets full
Speaker 3: of rocks, I shouldn't throw them out the window when
Speaker 3: they're not looking, because they might be more valuable than
Speaker 3: I realize.
Speaker 1: They absolutely might be. But I agree with your geologist friend.
Speaker 1: Every rock is interesting because every rock tells a story.
Speaker 1: It was formed at a certain moment, and then it
Speaker 1: was weathered, it was oxidized, it captures stuff within it.
Speaker 1: Each of them really tells us something about the billion
Speaker 1: years long journey that they've survived. They're like a little
Speaker 1: time capsule.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know you're right.
Speaker 1: But the most interesting ones are not the ones in
Speaker 1: your kid's pocket, which probably come from Earth, and also
Speaker 1: not the ones that even come from our solar system.
Speaker 1: While little bits of Mars are fascinating, we would love
Speaker 1: to explore much deeper out into the universe and see
Speaker 1: things from other planets, remnants from other solar systems. And
Speaker 1: that's why today we're asking the question about interstellar meteors.
Speaker 1: So before we dig into what, I wanted to know
Speaker 1: what people out there thought about the question of whether
Speaker 1: interstellar metiors have hit the Earth. So thank you very
Speaker 1: much to everybody who participates in this audience play along
Speaker 1: segment of the podcast. If you'd like to join for
Speaker 1: future episodes, don't be shy. Write to me you questions
Speaker 1: at Daniel and Jorge dot com. So think about it
Speaker 1: for a minute. Do you think interstellar meteors have hit
Speaker 1: the Earth? Here's what people had to say.
Speaker 4: Well, it's been around for an extremely long time, so
Speaker 4: you would think that sooner or later some interstellar meteors
Speaker 4: would have hit the Earth. So I'm just gonna go
Speaker 4: with a guess that, yes, interstellar meteors have hit the Earth.
Speaker 1: I suspect they have, but it would be surely very rare.
Speaker 5: I would side probably, but none that we know.
Speaker 2: Of interstellar videos would have to be very lucky to
Speaker 2: even head out galaxy. And even if they made it
Speaker 2: to a galaxy, they would have to be very lucky
Speaker 2: to make it through all the other stars and planets
Speaker 2: and the gravitation gravity that they have to actually if
Speaker 2: but I feel like there's a chance that maybe one
Speaker 2: or two has made it through. So I'm going to
Speaker 2: say yes.
Speaker 5: I'm gonna say no because I imagine coming into our
Speaker 5: Solar system I would probably be caught up in the
Speaker 5: gravitational pull of a different planet or become an orbit
Speaker 5: in one of the asteroid belts.
Speaker 1: Maybe what do you think of these answers?
Speaker 3: Kelly, Well, so for starters, I had never heard O
Speaker 3: how do you say that? Okay, So for starters, I
Speaker 3: had never heard of. Oh muamua and that is an
Speaker 3: incredible name. I love it. It's so much fun to
Speaker 3: say it's beautiful. Uh, and no, I thought these were
Speaker 3: all good responses. I mean, but you know, so like
Speaker 3: we've only been watching the skies for you know, a
Speaker 3: small fraction of humanity's existence. How how do we know, Like,
Speaker 3: you know, if you find a rock in your backyard
Speaker 3: and you're like, well, maybe this is from Mars, how
Speaker 3: could you be sure that it was an interstellar Like
Speaker 3: how do you know that it wouldn't look the same
Speaker 3: because everything's made out of the same stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great question, and we don't know for sure. Right,
Speaker 1: we know something about the formation of our solar system,
Speaker 1: and so we know what rocks on Earth look like.
Speaker 1: And we can tell if a rock was from Mars
Speaker 1: because it has a different chunk of stuff, Like Mars
Speaker 1: is made of different elements and different ratios of those
Speaker 1: elements and different isotopes because of where it was formed
Speaker 1: and how it was formed and its history. So we
Speaker 1: can tell when our rock is from Mars rather than
Speaker 1: from Earth. But what we don't know is if solar
Speaker 1: systems out there have Earth like planets and Mars like
Speaker 1: planets with the same elements, whether you could tell the
Speaker 1: difference between a rock from Earth and a rock from
Speaker 1: some exo Earth, or if they're very very different, and
Speaker 1: our Solar System is unique in some way, so that
Speaker 1: planets formed around other stars could be very different from
Speaker 1: the planets that formed around our star. That's sort of
Speaker 1: the basic question.
Speaker 3: Okay, so it seems like you are sort of starting
Speaker 3: to already tell me why we would want interstellar your
Speaker 3: meteors in the first place, not just because you like
Speaker 3: rock so much, but these rocks in particular could tell
Speaker 3: us something cool.
Speaker 1: Exactly we want interstellar meteors for the same reason we
Speaker 1: want to study meteors. Meteors give us a sample of
Speaker 1: the rest of the Solar System. How exactly did the
Speaker 1: asteroid belt form? What is Pluto made out of and
Speaker 1: where does that tell us about the formation of the
Speaker 1: Solar System? What is really at the core of Jupiter?
Speaker 1: Where did Jupiter form in the inner Solar System or
Speaker 1: in the outer Solar System? Samples from these planets can
Speaker 1: give us clues about the story of the formation of
Speaker 1: our Solar System and the dance of the planets made
Speaker 1: as the whole thing was evolving. And in the same way,
Speaker 1: samples from planets around other Solar systems would tell us
Speaker 1: about how those formed and give us the context for
Speaker 1: the formation of our own solar system. That's sort of
Speaker 1: the most specific answer, that most general answer for like
Speaker 1: why you would want to see in interstellar meteors is
Speaker 1: just curiosity, Like who knows what's in it. We've been
Speaker 1: thinking about the universe and exploring it with photons, But
Speaker 1: every time we've developed a new capability, every time we've
Speaker 1: figured out a way to probe the universe and a
Speaker 1: way we haven't before, it's always revealed something surprising, sometimes
Speaker 1: mind blowing, sometimes in a way that really up ends
Speaker 1: our entire understanding of the universe and the context of
Speaker 1: our lives. So if we got an interstellar media and
Speaker 1: it could study it, it could reveal something totally crazy,
Speaker 1: things beyond what even science fiction authors could imagine.
Speaker 3: Okay, so you've convinced me that this is interesting, and
Speaker 3: I've been convinced that ooh muamoa see how do you
Speaker 3: say it? Oh muama, oh muhamoa is also fascinating. Tell
Speaker 3: me tell me more about that.
Speaker 1: Right, So, we know that some interstellar objects have come
Speaker 1: through our solar system, but we've only ever seen two
Speaker 1: of them, Like, there's thousands and thousands of asteroids out
Speaker 1: there and things hit the Earth all the time, but
Speaker 1: only twice have we identified things that we are sure
Speaker 1: didn't come from within our Solar system. And the first,
Speaker 1: the most famous one. But what I'm kind of embarrassed
Speaker 1: for you, Kelly, that you never heard of as a
Speaker 1: as a deputized physics nerd is O Muamula, which came
Speaker 1: through the Solar system in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 3: I'm a deputized physics nerd.
Speaker 1: Yes, congratulations, thank you.
Speaker 3: Oh I'm sorry I've let you down. This is a
Speaker 3: real emotional rollercoaster for me. But tell me more.
Speaker 1: No, you officially have a PhD in podcast physics from
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge University.
Speaker 3: Fantastic, I'm putting it on my TV.
Speaker 1: But in twenty seventeen, the pan Star's telescope noticed this
Speaker 1: rock and it was moving really fast twenty six kilometers
Speaker 1: per second. But most importantly, it had a non solar trajectory,
Speaker 1: meaning it was moving along a path, a direction, a
Speaker 1: location of velocity which would not allow it to orbit
Speaker 1: the Sun. Meant that had come in from outside the
Speaker 1: Solar System was going to bend around the Sun and
Speaker 1: then shoot again out of the Solar system.
Speaker 3: Was there some giant smashing happening in a different solar
Speaker 3: system and this thing got shot out of their solar
Speaker 3: system super fast?
Speaker 1: It's a great question. There's lots of question marks about
Speaker 1: this object. We saw it sort of on its way
Speaker 1: out of the Solar system. It sort of passed near
Speaker 1: the Sun, and by the time we spotted it, it
Speaker 1: was already headed out. It was moving really really fast.
Speaker 1: So we have really limited data about it. We don't
Speaker 1: know a lot about its shape, we don't know a
Speaker 1: lot about its reflectivity. The best speculation is that it's
Speaker 1: a chunk of ice, probably lost by some other star.
Speaker 1: You know, most stars have not just planets, but like
Speaker 1: big chunks of frozen ice balls and a halo around
Speaker 1: the star, like we have the Ort cloud, which is
Speaker 1: a source of long period comets. These things are little
Speaker 1: chunks of ice and they're really really far away from
Speaker 1: the star, so they are gravitationally bound. But they can
Speaker 1: also be kicked out of their stable orbit by a
Speaker 1: passing star, interactions with other galactic stuff, and so sometimes
Speaker 1: that means it falls inwards towards the inner Solar System
Speaker 1: it becomes a comet, or maybe smashes into a planet
Speaker 1: and kills all of its dinosaurs, And sometimes it means
Speaker 1: they might be lost by that star and just float
Speaker 1: through interstellar space, occasionally randomly encountering another Solar system And is.
Speaker 3: That the only one we've seen? Or maybe I shouldn't
Speaker 3: ask any more questions because I don't want to lose
Speaker 3: my dju physics degree.
Speaker 1: No, once you have tenure, you can't lose it, Kelly,
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1: So that was the first one, and it was very
Speaker 1: spectacular and people really wondered about it. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff we still don't understand about it, like very weirdly,
Speaker 1: as Omuamua was leaving the Solar System, it seemed to
Speaker 1: accelerate a little bit, like it wasn't just moving on
Speaker 1: a pure gravitational orbit. It actually sped up a little
Speaker 1: bit as it was leaving, which led some people to speculate, like, oh,
Speaker 1: is this an alien ship or is it like a
Speaker 1: little bit of alien junk, like maybe a light sail
Speaker 1: lost by some alien civilization these days, the best explanation
Speaker 1: is that it's probably a chunk ice and as it
Speaker 1: was leaving, some of that ice boiled off and gave
Speaker 1: it like a little poof.
Speaker 3: I have decided that my feelings are hurt and that
Speaker 3: it was an alien ship that, you know, maybe was
Speaker 3: watching one of our news channels and was like I'm out,
Speaker 3: and they left as best.
Speaker 1: As they could. Maybe most of the astronomy community and
Speaker 1: the astrophysics community thinks that the chunk of interstellar ice
Speaker 1: is the most likely explanation. On the other side of
Speaker 1: the debate is famous Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who wrote
Speaker 1: a book about how Omumua was probably a chunk of
Speaker 1: alien tech, though most people think he doesn't know what
Speaker 1: he's talking about, and we did a whole podcast episode
Speaker 1: sort of dissecting his claims and why there's no basis
Speaker 1: for them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's just be clear. I really think the ice
Speaker 3: answer is the way to I was joking.
Speaker 1: But these things are pretty rare that we did see
Speaker 1: a second one. In twenty nineteen, an amateur astronomer, someone
Speaker 1: who makes his own tellelescopes, a guy named Borisov, saw
Speaker 1: a second one. This thing also came through the Solar
Speaker 1: system on a trajectory that makes us sure that it
Speaker 1: didn't come from our solar system. The additive velocity in
Speaker 1: a direction that just is not compatible with motion around
Speaker 1: the Sun. And this thing is probably a ten kilometer
Speaker 1: wide comet.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's like extinction level, right.
Speaker 1: Yes, exactly. The closest approach to Earth was about two au,
Speaker 1: so we were in nowhere in danger. But yeah, these
Speaker 1: things can be moving really fast relative to our solar
Speaker 1: system because they're not linked to us gravitationally, and as
Speaker 1: the Sun moves through the galaxy, these things could be
Speaker 1: going in any direction. So yeah, they are a little dangerous, fortunately,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately they're.
Speaker 3: Pretty rare, and they come and go so quickly that
Speaker 3: there's no chance for us to plan a mission to
Speaker 3: go explore them. Is that right?
Speaker 1: Exactly? People thought, oh, let's go sample something from Omuamua,
Speaker 1: but it was already moving so fast that if you
Speaker 1: launched a probe it would take forever to catch up
Speaker 1: and then forever to send back data. And so these
Speaker 1: things are basically once and gone. You're lucky to get
Speaker 1: any pictures of them, not to mention samples, which is
Speaker 1: why everyone would love if one of these things would
Speaker 1: hit the Earth. Obviously, not a really big one, you know,
Speaker 1: not one that's going to vaporize us, but one that's
Speaker 1: going to survive the atmosphere, land on the ground, not
Speaker 1: hurt anybody, and leave us a bunch of clues about
Speaker 1: what's going on out there in the universe.
Speaker 3: But gosh, this was a quick podcast episode because that
Speaker 3: hasn't happened. Right.
Speaker 1: Well, that's exactly what we're going to dig into as
Speaker 1: soon as we come back from this break.
Speaker 3: All right. So Daniel was just about to tell us
Speaker 3: that the podcast episode is over because we don't have
Speaker 3: any interstellar meteors.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Well, there's a really interesting discussion about one possible blob
Speaker 1: that could have been interested.
Speaker 3: Tell me more about that.
Speaker 1: So in twenty fourteen, this is now ten years ago,
Speaker 1: a meteor hit over Papa, New Guinea, and this thing
Speaker 1: is about the size of a dishwasher. They're pretty sure.
Speaker 1: It weighs about half as much as a giraffe.
Speaker 3: All right, so pretty big but not gonna kill us.
Speaker 3: All that's great.
Speaker 1: The thing is big enough to make a detonation in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, but not big enough we think to like
Speaker 1: land on the surface and like have a chunk of
Speaker 1: rock that you can look at and point to and
Speaker 1: even find.
Speaker 3: But it was traveling. So you just told us that
Speaker 3: our other two potentially interstellar visitors were coming from a
Speaker 3: trajectory where we knew that they weren't from our solar system,
Speaker 3: and so this one was was it doing that?
Speaker 1: So that's one of the questions, and av LOBE in
Speaker 1: twenty nineteen, together with the Harvard undergraduate combed through a
Speaker 1: bunch of data from US Intelligence satellites and looked for
Speaker 1: meteors that had a trajectory that might have been interstellar.
Speaker 1: So they combed through this database and they found this one.
Speaker 1: They're like, oh, this is interesting. According to the measurements
Speaker 1: of this thing's velocity and direction, it might have been interstellar.
Speaker 1: And so they got kind of excited about it.
Speaker 3: And by might have been what are the error bars
Speaker 3: on a phrase like that?
Speaker 2: Mmm?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so there's a lot of discussion about exactly that.
Speaker 1: The thing is that this data comes from US Space
Speaker 1: Command and it was observed by US intelligence satellites. But
Speaker 1: the data from those satellites are a little bit obscure,
Speaker 1: Like we don't get the super high precision data from
Speaker 1: US intelligence satellites because the US doesn't want to reveal
Speaker 1: like everything it can measure. This is like classified secrets.
Speaker 1: But in early twenty twenty two, US Space Command issued
Speaker 1: this declaration saying that it was probably interstellar. They said
Speaker 1: that their trajectory was quote sufficiently accurate to indicate an
Speaker 1: interstellar trajectory.
Speaker 3: All right, that's I mean, that's awesome. That sounds that's
Speaker 3: pretty confident.
Speaker 1: That sounds pretty exciting. And so in twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: Lobe and his team at Harvard decided they were going
Speaker 1: to go try to find this thing like it hit
Speaker 1: over the ocean, and they think maybe it fragmented in
Speaker 1: a fireball and then sprayed little bits of itself into
Speaker 1: the ocean, and if they went and dragged a sled
Speaker 1: across the surface of the bottom of the ocean, they
Speaker 1: might pick up little bits of it.
Speaker 3: So that sounds like the ultimate needle in a haystack.
Speaker 3: Activity how hard would it be to retrieve fragments from
Speaker 3: the seafloor.
Speaker 1: It's definitely not easy. But Avy Lobe was like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's at least try. Let's see if we can figure
Speaker 1: it out. And his thought was that some of the
Speaker 1: bits of this meteor were gonna be iron, and these
Speaker 1: things are gonna be magnetic, and so if you could
Speaker 1: drag a magnetic sled across the seafloor. Maybe you'll pick
Speaker 1: up little bits of this thing, little like chunks of
Speaker 1: the meteor that survived the atmosphere and hit the ocean
Speaker 1: and then sank down to the bottom. Now, if you
Speaker 1: have a science mind at all, there's lots of questions here,
Speaker 1: like how sure are you where it landed? How do
Speaker 1: you know about the tides and the currents, how do
Speaker 1: you know where it's going to fall? What else might
Speaker 1: be there? How could you distinguish it from the other stuff,
Speaker 1: How would you know if it was interstell or All
Speaker 1: of these questions are raised immediately by this fishing expedition.
Speaker 3: It's a long list.
Speaker 1: They went and they did it, and so for two
Speaker 1: weeks they dragged this custom built sled equipped with magnets
Speaker 1: and cameras and lights, across the seafloor, and at regular
Speaker 1: intervals they pulled it up and they gathered any metallic bits,
Speaker 1: and in the end they have a bunch of these
Speaker 1: things they call spherules, like basically tiny little iron balls
Speaker 1: around like a quarter of a millimeter up to two
Speaker 1: millimeters in radius.
Speaker 3: Okay, so, first of all, why would you be sure
Speaker 3: that this object had iron in it, And then also,
Speaker 3: aren't there a lot of iron containing objects on the
Speaker 3: seafloor to.
Speaker 1: Begin with, yes, absolutely. It turns out the seafloor is
Speaker 1: covered with these iron spherules from Solar System meteorites and
Speaker 1: from other sources of iron, so it's not that rare
Speaker 1: to find sperials. And in a minute we'll talk about
Speaker 1: analysis by experts in this area and how skeptical they
Speaker 1: are of the claims that Lobe and his team ended
Speaker 1: up making.
Speaker 3: They Okay, they found some, and then what evidence did
Speaker 3: they provide to suggest that these were interstellar instead of
Speaker 3: just like boring old Earth iron.
Speaker 1: They found like seven hundred these things in the area
Speaker 1: where they thought this meteorite had hit, and they also
Speaker 1: went and checked a couple other areas and they found
Speaker 1: fewer of these little spherials, So that led them to conclude, like, oh,
Speaker 1: maybe we found the right region, Maybe we have hit
Speaker 1: on this sort of destruction path, this wreckage from this meteorite,
Speaker 1: because there are more Sperials here than there are nearby.
Speaker 1: And then they did an analysis of these things. If
Speaker 1: you look at their paper, you can see they have
Speaker 1: like super close up pictures of these things, and they
Speaker 1: are like tiny little iron bebes, and they did things
Speaker 1: like measure the elemental composition, like how much beryllium, how
Speaker 1: much uranium, how much iron, what kind of isotope of
Speaker 1: iron are there? And from that they try to learn
Speaker 1: whether or not these things are consistent with bits of
Speaker 1: our solar system or inconsistent with bits of our solar system.
Speaker 3: And you said, tried to, which makes me think that
Speaker 3: the argument was not iron clad.
Speaker 1: So they make two kinds of arguments. One is about
Speaker 1: the ratio of iron isotopes. Like iron is an element,
Speaker 1: but there's a few different varieties of iron. There's iron
Speaker 1: with more or fewer neutrons in it, so it's like
Speaker 1: a tiny bit heavier and a tiny bit lighter. By
Speaker 1: the ratio those isotopes, you can tell something about where
Speaker 1: it came from and like the chemical interactions it's been
Speaker 1: involved in, which will dig into in a minute. But
Speaker 1: they also looked at the beryllium, the lanthanum, and the
Speaker 1: uranium in these things, so like more exotic elements, and
Speaker 1: some of these things have like more beryllium, lanthium, and
Speaker 1: uranium than they expected, and so they claim that these
Speaker 1: things are consistent with an interstellar meteor, for example, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of beryllium in there, and beryllium kind of
Speaker 1: hard to make, so they suggest that maybe the beryllium
Speaker 1: in this thing was made as this interstellar meteor passes
Speaker 1: through interstellar space and it's hit with radiation, which is
Speaker 1: one of the ways that you make beryllium.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 3: But couldn't something that got shot from Mars get hit
Speaker 3: with interstellar radiation before it landed on Earth or the
Speaker 3: argument is that it would have taken a lot more
Speaker 3: time for that, but it could take a long time
Speaker 3: to get from Marster Earth.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you could be floating around in the Solar System
Speaker 1: for a long time. And this is a bit of
Speaker 1: a weak argument, I agree, But the interstellar radiation is
Speaker 1: a little bit different than the inside the Solar system's
Speaker 1: solar wind, so there might be a little bit of
Speaker 1: an argument there.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 1: So they had these spuriles and they looked a little
Speaker 1: weird according to them and based on their expertise, so
Speaker 1: they posted this paper in late twenty twenty three claiming
Speaker 1: spurials of likely extrasolar composition. So like this was a
Speaker 1: big claim. This made a huge splash, like discovering bits
Speaker 1: of an interstellar would have enormous scientific consequences, and.
Speaker 3: So I'm sure they did an enormous amount of work
Speaker 3: to make sure that they were correct before they released this.
Speaker 3: And so my first thought is, you say paper post it?
Speaker 3: Do you mean like paper posted after peer review or
Speaker 3: I mean, I know physicists do things a little differently.
Speaker 3: They tend to post things on archive first before peer review.
Speaker 3: Is that right? So maybe that would be standard, But
Speaker 3: tell me what paper posted meant?
Speaker 1: So they put it on the internet. They put it
Speaker 1: on the archive. It had not yet been peer reviewed.
Speaker 1: And in some fields it's a standard, like actually, in
Speaker 1: particle physics, we post our papers assume as we're done
Speaker 1: with them before they're peer reviewed, but everybody knows they're
Speaker 1: not yet peer reviewed, and so you got to wait
Speaker 1: and see if it really stands up. In astronomy and
Speaker 1: in astrophysics it's actually the opposite. People wait and post
Speaker 1: their papers to the archive after they're peer reviewed. And
Speaker 1: so this was a pretty unusual move, not just because
Speaker 1: they posted the paper before peer review, but also because
Speaker 1: the claims in the paper, Like they didn't just claim
Speaker 1: that these things were likely extra solar composition like a
Speaker 1: hunk of rock from another solar system, they said, and
Speaker 1: I have to quote this because it's amazing. They quote,
Speaker 1: may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin. Like, yes, not only
Speaker 1: are they suggesting these things could just be bits of
Speaker 1: rock from another solar system, already amazing, but bits of
Speaker 1: technological junk from an intelligent civilization from another solar system.
Speaker 1: Like to make that leap to me is just incredible.
Speaker 3: Wait, have we just not yet talked about the evidence
Speaker 3: that they used to support that claim, or because we've
Speaker 3: like skipped it so far, or have we really talked
Speaker 3: about everything.
Speaker 1: No, there is no evidence to support that claim. Just like, hey, look,
Speaker 1: these are weird and they have a strange mix of elements.
Speaker 1: Maybe they come from an alien iPhone. That's really the
Speaker 1: whole argument there, and then and then add to the mix.
Speaker 1: The same day this paper is posted. In twenty twenty three,
Speaker 1: Ivi Lobe publishes a popular book for a mass audience
Speaker 1: called Interstellar, The Search for Extraterrestrial Life that's all about
Speaker 1: his search for little bits of technology from alien species
Speaker 1: elsewhere in the colex and then he gives a bunch
Speaker 1: of interviews and in the interview He sort of like
Speaker 1: conflates whether the paper has been published as in Peer
Speaker 1: reviewed or just post it online, And so he really
Speaker 1: gives people the impression like, oh my gosh, look this
Speaker 1: is really backed up with scientific study.
Speaker 3: Doesn't sound good.
Speaker 1: And so everybody was like, hmm, that's interesting. We'd love
Speaker 1: to believe it, right, we're scientist. Let's keep an open mind.
Speaker 1: Maybe Lobe did discover bits of an alien iPhone. That
Speaker 1: would be fantastic. Nobody wants to reign on the parade
Speaker 1: if it's true, right, But you know, extraordinary claims extraordinary evidence,
Speaker 1: And so I for one, was waiting for a detailed
Speaker 1: critique from experts, people who know, like, how likely is
Speaker 1: a meteor to survive this thing? How likely was it
Speaker 1: that it had an interstellar origin? What can we conclude
Speaker 1: from the elemental composition of this stuff? And very recently
Speaker 1: there was a paper by Stephen Desh and Alan Jackson,
Speaker 1: two experts in this area, professors at ASU and Towson University,
Speaker 1: and they went through in a meticulous fashion and took
Speaker 1: apart his claims.
Speaker 3: Oh boy, so who's who are we going to side with?
Speaker 3: By the end of this episode.
Speaker 1: We're going to decide with the evidence, of course.
Speaker 3: All right, so where do we start then, digging into
Speaker 3: the many arguments we just talked about.
Speaker 1: I want to start by reading this paragraph from desh
Speaker 1: and Jackson's paper, which I think sums it up pretty
Speaker 1: well and like, this is not the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you typically find in a science paper. This is fire.
Speaker 1: So what they wrote is quote. Because of the boldness
Speaker 1: of the claim, it might be expected that Lobe at
Speaker 1: all exercise due diligence to eliminate alternative, more prosaic explanations
Speaker 1: for the data, and would report their results carefully and deliberately.
Speaker 1: They did not flight lowbit all hardly considered, and did
Speaker 1: not test the simplest alternative hypothesis. The spherals they found
Speaker 1: were of a common and well understood type found worldwide
Speaker 1: from Solar System asteroids. Apparently, the authors did not seek
Speaker 1: expert opinion and posted the discovery manuscript before it had
Speaker 1: been peer reviewed and accepted or even submitted to a
Speaker 1: science journal.
Speaker 3: En quote, I am getting I'm getting heart palpitations. As
Speaker 3: a fellow scientist, I cannot handle this. This is very
Speaker 3: My empathy is through the roof right now. But if
Speaker 3: they should have done due diligence.
Speaker 1: I know, being publicly called out like this, not just like, hey,
Speaker 1: look we disagree, we took another look at the evidence.
Speaker 1: We think maybe you were wrong. Have you considered, But
Speaker 1: this is really calling them out for sloppy science, for
Speaker 1: not considering reasonable alternatives, and basically for looking to confirm
Speaker 1: the story they were hoping to find. It's really pretty damning.
Speaker 3: Well let's dig in, Okay, So tell me about more
Speaker 3: about those. Should we start with the spherals or should
Speaker 3: we talk about the you know, how good were the
Speaker 3: trajectories suggesting it was interstellar?
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's start with whether or not this thing even
Speaker 1: was interstellar, which is sort of the reason this whole
Speaker 1: thing got started, right, Like, the US Space Command issued
Speaker 1: this statement that it was an interstellar trajectory. That sounds
Speaker 1: pretty solid, right Yeah, But you know, then NASA chimed
Speaker 1: in and said the short duration of collected data less
Speaker 1: than five seconds, makes it difficult to definitively determine if
Speaker 1: the object's origin was indeed interstellar. What this comes down
Speaker 1: to is the precision of the measurements of this thing,
Speaker 1: Like how well do we know how fast it was
Speaker 1: going and the direction of its motion?
Speaker 3: Wow? So what that doesn't sound good? So how often,
Speaker 3: like when you only have about five seconds worth of data, like,
Speaker 3: how much error do you have in that?
Speaker 1: That's exactly the question to ask. And so in this case,
Speaker 1: whether or not it was interstellar comes down to its velocity. Like,
Speaker 1: anything at our radius that's going about faster than forty
Speaker 1: two or forty three kilometers per second has escaped velocity
Speaker 1: and is not bound to the Sun. So if this
Speaker 1: thing was moving faster than forty two kilometers per second
Speaker 1: relative to the Sun, it's not bound to the Sun
Speaker 1: and it was interstellar. So that's the question. Now, they
Speaker 1: measure the velocity of this thing to have like sixty
Speaker 1: one kilometers per second relative to the Sun, which is
Speaker 1: like almost twenty kilometers per second above the threshold. So
Speaker 1: it seems pretty safely interstellar. But then the question is, well,
Speaker 1: what are the uncertainties. If it's sixty kilometers per second
Speaker 1: plus or minus one or two, yeah it's interstellar. If
Speaker 1: it's sixty kilometers per second plus or minus sixty kilometers
Speaker 1: per second, then you really don't know very much, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: so low, But his paper claims that based on US
Speaker 1: space command, we can be ninety nine point ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent certain this thing is interstellar. But in Desh's paper
Speaker 1: they reveal the source of this, and it's basically just
Speaker 1: an assumption. They assume that the uncertainties are like ten percent,
Speaker 1: that this thing is like, you know, sixty kilometers plus
Speaker 1: or minus six kilometers.
Speaker 3: Oh that's not good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it's basically just an assumption. And there are
Speaker 1: other people who have studied the accuracy of these measurements
Speaker 1: from US Space Command. Sometimes you get like two different
Speaker 1: measurements of the same rock as, so you can say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: let's see how accurate it is. And it turns out
Speaker 1: that this data from the intelligence satellites, maybe because they're
Speaker 1: not precise, maybe because it's fudged, maybe because it's purposely
Speaker 1: smudged because it's intelligence data, shows really large variations. So
Speaker 1: the uncertainty could easily be much more than ten kilometers
Speaker 1: per second.
Speaker 3: So there's there's pretty good reason to believe that the
Speaker 3: error is so big that it would include objects that
Speaker 3: are not of interstellar origin exactly.
Speaker 1: So even if this thing is measured to be sixty
Speaker 1: kilometers per second with an uncertainty of ten or fifteen,
Speaker 1: that seems to still keep it above the forty two
Speaker 1: kilometer threshold. But remember how the statistics here like it
Speaker 1: gives it like a one in one thousand chance of
Speaker 1: being mismeasured. And you might think, oh, that's still pretty good,
Speaker 1: Like it's got a one in one thousand chance of
Speaker 1: being mismeasured and a nine hundred and ninety nine out
Speaker 1: of a thousand chance of being accurately measured to be interstellar.
Speaker 1: But remember that there are lots and lots of these rocks,
Speaker 1: and so if you look at thousands or millions of rocks,
Speaker 1: you're going to see one in a thousand events every
Speaker 1: once in a while. It's like if you roll the
Speaker 1: dice a thousand times, you're going to see really rare
Speaker 1: stuff eventually.
Speaker 3: And we have essentially been rolling the dice thousands of times,
Speaker 3: right exactly.
Speaker 1: There are thousands of things in this database, and so
Speaker 1: if you look through the whole database, you'll see really
Speaker 1: rare looking events just because you've looked lots and lots
Speaker 1: of times. And so the evidence that this thing is
Speaker 1: interstellar is actually pretty weak. It might just be a
Speaker 1: very mismeasured solar system asteroid, and you expect a mismeasured
Speaker 1: solar system asteroid to it looked like an interstellar object
Speaker 1: one in a thousand times.
Speaker 3: About okay, so it might not have been traveling from
Speaker 3: an interstellar location. That's problem one. Let's move on to
Speaker 3: critique two. Where are we going next?
Speaker 1: So next, Dish points out that this thing probably would
Speaker 1: not have survived reentry. The idea that enough of it
Speaker 1: survived to like land in the ocean and cause these
Speaker 1: spherals seems really unlikely. This thing was coming into like
Speaker 1: one hundred and forty times the speed of sound, and
Speaker 1: at that speed, like the front of it gets melted
Speaker 1: and heated and vaporized and the whole thing would have
Speaker 1: come apart. So Desh did a calculation that showed that
Speaker 1: ninety nine point nine nine nine nine nine percent of
Speaker 1: it would have been vaporized. So basically, like almost all
Speaker 1: this thing is gone. It's just like in little individual
Speaker 1: particles by time it reaches the ocean surface.
Speaker 3: And then it's going to slowly sync to the bottom,
Speaker 3: and your chance of finding it, if anything survived, would
Speaker 3: have been pretty low. But yeah, basically, and we probably
Speaker 3: have pretty good data on this right because we've probably
Speaker 3: observed a lot of stuff that hits our atmosphere and
Speaker 3: burns up in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1: Absolutely people know how this works. And DSH actually went
Speaker 1: back to Lobe's paper and checked their calculations, and they
Speaker 1: found a mistake, like they cannot confirm the number that
Speaker 1: load calculates for like how this thing would have melted
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere. So they suspect that they just like
Speaker 1: plugged in the wrong number and that's why they misunderstood exactly.
Speaker 1: So so far, it looks like this thing was probably
Speaker 1: not interstellar, and even if it was, probably would not
Speaker 1: have left any remnants when it hit the atmosphere. It's
Speaker 1: just too small for anything to survive all the way
Speaker 1: through the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, But so let's say it was interstellar
Speaker 3: and something did survive, how likely are we to have
Speaker 3: been able to find it and then know that it
Speaker 3: was interstellar once we got it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is basically or question when you first heard this, right, like,
Speaker 1: how would you even find this thing? It's a needle
Speaker 1: in a haystack. So yeah, assume it's interstellar and that
Speaker 1: some of it survives, and then you get enough iron
Speaker 1: that it hits the surface of the ocean that sinks
Speaker 1: down that you could potentially find it, that it's even
Speaker 1: there for you to find it. Another big problem is, hey,
Speaker 1: the ocean is really big. It turns out and find
Speaker 1: finding like basically Bebe's on the bottom of the ocean.
Speaker 1: You need to really know where you're looking. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of uncertainty about this thing. We got like
Speaker 1: five seconds of data about its trajectory, and if you
Speaker 1: extrapolate that to the surface of the ocean, there's a
Speaker 1: pretty wide range where this thing could be. And now
Speaker 1: you're going to like drag your tiny little magnetic sled
Speaker 1: over this thing. You know, what are the chances you're
Speaker 1: even dragging it in the right place?
Speaker 4: Well?
Speaker 3: And can we take one more step back? And I'm
Speaker 3: sorry if you said this, and my brain was just
Speaker 3: discombobulated at the time. How do we know for sure
Speaker 3: that it's gonna be that it would be iron, and
Speaker 3: that this magnet is what we should be using to
Speaker 3: collect it. How can we be sure that this intertellar
Speaker 3: thing is iron?
Speaker 1: We can't. But there's a lot of iron out there
Speaker 1: and a lot of heavy metals, and iron is a
Speaker 1: pretty common thing because it's like the end point of
Speaker 1: nuclear fusion, making things heavier than iron is hard, and
Speaker 1: so iron is pretty widely distributed in rocks in the
Speaker 1: solar system and maybe in rocks in other solar systems.
Speaker 1: But it's a great question, like maybe our solar system
Speaker 1: is weird, and once we get samples from other solar systems,
Speaker 1: we'll discover, Wow, iron isn't as common as we thought.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is a big assumption that rocks from
Speaker 1: other solar systems will have enough iron to make little
Speaker 1: metal balls we can pick up with our magnets.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, So let's assume it is iron for sure,
Speaker 3: and that the magnet method is gonna work. The ocean
Speaker 3: is big and deep, and so what like range of
Speaker 3: like locations where it would have fallen, like how good
Speaker 3: was there certainty? And where it would have potentially fallen.
Speaker 1: So the location data we have, if you believe it,
Speaker 1: gives a box that's like twenty kilometers by twenty kilometers
Speaker 1: or where this thing might have landed, and like that's huge, Right,
Speaker 1: You're not going to drag your magnetic sled to cover
Speaker 1: an entire square twenty kilometers by twenty kilometers. So lob
Speaker 1: in them did is use a little bit more data.
Speaker 1: There's a seismometer on an island about ninety kilometers away
Speaker 1: that also measured like a blip around the same moment,
Speaker 1: And so they use that information to try to narrow
Speaker 1: it down a little bit, and they find like a
Speaker 1: little band through this box that they think maybe is
Speaker 1: where this thing landed. So they have like a slightly
Speaker 1: narrower region, and they drag their sled basically through this
Speaker 1: band and then a couple other spots to get control measurements.
Speaker 3: Did that blip on the seismometer. Does that increase our
Speaker 3: confidence that maybe something did make it to the ocean
Speaker 3: bottom or did survive re entry.
Speaker 1: The seismometer is actually most likely measuring the detonation in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, right, because this thing, as it comes through
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, it's going to explode as like pockets of
Speaker 1: gas or whatever inside of it heat up unevenly. So
Speaker 1: probably this is measuring the explosions in the atmosphere. But
Speaker 1: as deshan All point out number one, all these measurements
Speaker 1: are very uncertain, like the seismometer itself is very uncertain
Speaker 1: if you take a look at the data, like there
Speaker 1: are a lot of blips nearby that could have been anything,
Speaker 1: so lob in them assigning this blip from the seismometer
Speaker 1: to this particular bit of rock is very very speculative,
Speaker 1: you know. Basically, they were just looking for a way
Speaker 1: to slice the region down and hope they find something.
Speaker 1: There's not really strong evidence that this is the region.
Speaker 1: The most damning thing that Desh points out is that
Speaker 1: according to Space Command, there's two possible locations. There's the
Speaker 1: box that lobe serch, and then there's another location that
Speaker 1: could have been where it hit like sixty kilometers away.
Speaker 1: So it could be they were looking in completely the
Speaker 1: wrong place.
Speaker 3: Oh man, okay, all right, So might not have been interstellar,
Speaker 3: probably wouldn't have survived reentry. If it did survive re entry,
Speaker 3: where we're not super sure where it landed, and only
Speaker 3: one of two possible spots was searched, and maybe not
Speaker 3: even all of the possible of one of the two spots.
Speaker 3: Let's take a break to build suspense and then and
Speaker 3: then let's talk about the spheres that they did find
Speaker 3: and how they tried to argue that. How good was
Speaker 3: the evidence that those were not from here?
Speaker 2: All Right?
Speaker 3: I feel like my blood pressure is going up as
Speaker 3: I'm watching someone else's arguments get dismantled. It's a weirdly
Speaker 3: personal it's a weird experience.
Speaker 1: But okay, so I know, I know, you don't want
Speaker 1: anybody out there in science to like be publicly dismantled.
Speaker 1: It's terrible, it's embarrassing. If people are making good faith
Speaker 1: efforts to do their science, we should treat it with
Speaker 1: respect and we should take it seriously. The question here
Speaker 1: is like whether Lob and A really are making a
Speaker 1: good faith analysis of this data or whether Lobe is
Speaker 1: just promoting his book.
Speaker 3: Well, And also, at the end of the day, sometimes
Speaker 3: people are going to be made uncomfortable because science needs
Speaker 3: to be picked apart for the process to work. And
Speaker 3: so so here we go. Okay, so tell me more
Speaker 3: about those speruals and how certain we are that they
Speaker 3: were interstellar, right.
Speaker 1: Because even if you don't believe this thing was interstellar
Speaker 1: and might have not a survived reentry and you don't
Speaker 1: know where to look, they did drag something across the seafloor,
Speaker 1: and if they found something weird that we can't explain,
Speaker 1: those other arguments don't really matter, right, Like they found
Speaker 1: something cool, maybe it was a different interstill in media
Speaker 1: or whatever. So let's think about what they actually found.
Speaker 1: So they did find a bunch of these ferules, and
Speaker 1: they did compare the number that they found on their drags,
Speaker 1: so numbers in other areas. They're like, you know, boat
Speaker 1: it over to other regions and drive the sled across
Speaker 1: a couple other spots to try to understand what was typical,
Speaker 1: what was common? How many ferals do you expect to
Speaker 1: find on the ocean floor. And according to their analysis,
Speaker 1: they found more in this region where they were looking
Speaker 1: for this interstellar meteor than in the other spots.
Speaker 3: But there's not only one reason for why one area
Speaker 3: could have more spherals than others, right.
Speaker 1: Exactly exactly, And so when you readsh this paper, you realize, boy,
Speaker 1: it'd be helpful to understand this field at all before
Speaker 1: you dive into it, because it turns out number one,
Speaker 1: the ocean floor is littered with these things, like the
Speaker 1: Earth is getting slammed by meteors all the time, where
Speaker 1: little bits of it are making to the ocean surface
Speaker 1: and then sinking to the ocean floor. Like you drag
Speaker 1: a magnetic sled across anywhere in the ocean, and you're
Speaker 1: gonna find these fuerals and then they're going to vary. Apparently,
Speaker 1: the variation in the number of ferials you find depends
Speaker 1: on lot of stuff, the currents, the shape of the
Speaker 1: ocean floor, all sorts of stuff affects the variation. And
Speaker 1: the number of sphereals is just huge. There's millions of
Speaker 1: these little balls of iron per square kilometer, and so
Speaker 1: even if this thing did happen to land here, this
Speaker 1: metior would contribute like much less than one percent of
Speaker 1: all the little spheres you find on the ocean floor.
Speaker 1: Even if it was there, it'd be very hard to
Speaker 1: find spheres from this particular meteor among the like millions
Speaker 1: of spheres you expect to find on the ocean floor.
Speaker 1: And Lobe's team only found like seven hundred, So you
Speaker 1: would expect like a very small number to be from
Speaker 1: this medior even if it did hit in this region.
Speaker 3: Okay, all right, and so that but the seven hundred
Speaker 3: that they found, and.
Speaker 1: One more comment on the number, even the seven hundred
Speaker 1: they found, Lobanoll claim is like, ooh, we found extra
Speaker 1: in the region we were searching compared to the control regions.
Speaker 1: They didn't take enough data in the control regions to
Speaker 1: really measure how much should be in the control regions.
Speaker 1: So the variation the claim like oh we found more
Speaker 1: here than elsewhere, is not even statistically significant. But all right,
Speaker 1: maybe they were lucky and maybe they found something really exciting.
Speaker 1: So what they did is they measured what's in these spherules,
Speaker 1: like how much iron is there and which iron isotopes,
Speaker 1: and then also what are the weird elements that are
Speaker 1: in it. So first the iron isotopes, they measure iron
Speaker 1: in all these different isotopes. There's iron fifty four, iron
Speaker 1: fifty six, iron fifty seven, and the ratio of these
Speaker 1: isotopes tells you something about wars formed and what's happened
Speaker 1: to it since, and.
Speaker 3: Was it weird?
Speaker 1: So low in them look at the ratios and they
Speaker 1: see something a little weird. That's true. Earth isotopes tend
Speaker 1: to have a particular ratio of fifty seven to fifty
Speaker 1: four and fifty six to fifty four, and a lot
Speaker 1: of these little iron balls that they found had like
Speaker 1: more or less of one of these two iron isotopes.
Speaker 1: The problem is that this can be very easily explained
Speaker 1: by chemistry, like a m out where you take an
Speaker 1: iron sphereal from the Earth and you do some chemical
Speaker 1: process like interaction in the atmosphere or interaction with seawater.
Speaker 1: Even then it tends to lose the lighter isotopes faster
Speaker 1: because the interaction depends on the mass, and things that
Speaker 1: are lower mass will move around more and interact more.
Speaker 1: So this changes like these ratios in a very predictable way.
Speaker 1: And all of the iron balls that they found on
Speaker 1: the seafloor lie exactly across the line you would expect
Speaker 1: stuff to happen if it came from our solar system
Speaker 1: and then interacted with seawater. This is like exactly what
Speaker 1: you would expect for a solar system iron balls.
Speaker 3: And they'd been sitting down there for a decade or something, right,
Speaker 3: so there's plenty of time. If this is from the
Speaker 3: right asteroid that they were trying to find, it would
Speaker 3: have been down there for a decade.
Speaker 1: Reacting yeah, exactly. And so Lobes team seem to claim, oh, look,
Speaker 1: these are different from the nominal ratio we expect, but
Speaker 1: they doesn't seem to understand like the seawater chemistry will
Speaker 1: give you exactly this kind of variation. Did they took
Speaker 1: us like a real dagger in the heart of their claims.
Speaker 1: It proves that these are Solar system iron balls because
Speaker 1: they lie exactly on this line. If things came from
Speaker 1: another Solar system, you might expect them to have a
Speaker 1: very different elemental composition. If it came from a star
Speaker 1: from like five billion years ago, maybe there was less
Speaker 1: iron form because it was earlier in the universe, and
Speaker 1: just like less metal had been made, and so you
Speaker 1: might expect like really weird elemental compositions. But what they
Speaker 1: found is like pretty normal, the kind of stuff you
Speaker 1: find on the sea floor all the time. They just
Speaker 1: didn't seem to understand the context.
Speaker 3: Ouch uh, so have we is the massacre done? Or
Speaker 3: is there is there more?
Speaker 1: There is a tiny little bit more. They claim that
Speaker 1: the composition of the other elements like beryllium, lanthanum, and
Speaker 1: uranium is very unusual. But it turns out also that
Speaker 1: this beryllum can be explained with just interaction with the seawater.
Speaker 1: And you would never even get this much beryllium from
Speaker 1: interstellar travel, Like even interstellar travel would not create this
Speaker 1: much beryllium, But you can do it just by sitting
Speaker 1: on the seafloor and interacting with seawater. We'll do this.
Speaker 1: If they've done a more systematic scan of the ocean floor,
Speaker 1: they would have found lots more examples of this stuff,
Speaker 1: not just where they thought the interstellar media hit, but
Speaker 1: elsewhere in other places. These things are not that unusual.
Speaker 3: So you know, there's always a part of me that
Speaker 3: holds out a little bit of hope for the scientist
Speaker 3: who's getting kind of destroyed in an argument like this.
Speaker 3: Have they has Loben his collaborator responded to these arguments
Speaker 3: to provide some counterpoints or is this pretty much the
Speaker 3: final word?
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine them responding in a way that
Speaker 1: their claim survives. So far, we haven't heard anything from them.
Speaker 1: But before this paper came out, Lobe complained that nobody
Speaker 1: is taking his sign seriously. That is like dismissed by
Speaker 1: the mainstream science community. And this is evidence that like
Speaker 1: academia's closed minded and science is dogmatic. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's the kind of thing people tend to say when
Speaker 1: their work isn't taken seriously, that there's some other reason
Speaker 1: other than like, well, maybe your work is not that serious.
Speaker 1: And so Lobe, because he's a Harvard astrophysicist, you know,
Speaker 1: he has a lot of credibility with the media, and
Speaker 1: so he complains that nobody took him seriously. And then
Speaker 1: he said, quote, if someone comes to me and says,
Speaker 1: for these scientific reasons, I have a scenario that makes
Speaker 1: much more sense than yours, then I'd rip up that
Speaker 1: paper and accept it. That's a direct quote from Lobe.
Speaker 1: So now it stands to see like somebody has come
Speaker 1: forward with scientific reasons, with a much more plausible scenario
Speaker 1: that fits the data much better. Let's see if Lobe
Speaker 1: concedes or if he comes back where the scientific Rebuttalance says, actually,
Speaker 1: here's another way to analyze the data.
Speaker 3: How long has it been since the counter paper came out?
Speaker 1: So Deshen Jackson's paper came out November thirteenth, so it's
Speaker 1: in about a month since this recording. So everybody's waiting
Speaker 1: to see what Lobe is going to come back with.
Speaker 1: But I thought it was important that we discussed this
Speaker 1: today in the podcast, because you know, we're teaching everybody
Speaker 1: to think like a physicist, to be skeptical but also excited,
Speaker 1: and you have to balance those things. You have to remember,
Speaker 1: like we want to be open to crazy, new surprising
Speaker 1: discoveries and learn things about the universe, but we also
Speaker 1: have to be very careful in our methods, and we
Speaker 1: have to make sure that what we're doing is reasonable,
Speaker 1: so that we're building knowledge and not just spinning fantasies.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Absolutely. And it's so easy to get super excited
Speaker 3: about a results that you know would be a real
Speaker 3: game changer. But those are the times when you really
Speaker 3: need to think, Okay, how what do I need to know?
Speaker 3: You want to try to prove yourself wrong in as
Speaker 3: many ways as possible, and it doesn't feel like that
Speaker 3: due diligence was done here.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Before I publish any paper, I'm always attacking it myself.
Speaker 1: I'm always asking what could we have done wrong? Or
Speaker 1: how could we have been confused? Used, et cetera, et cetera,
Speaker 1: Because it'd be terrible to publish something and be like, oops, sorry,
Speaker 1: we misled everybody, even if it was in good faith.
Speaker 1: And so while it seems clear here that the science
Speaker 1: is not solid, we can't actually say it wasn't in
Speaker 1: good faith. But it certainly doesn't feel like a good
Speaker 1: faith science argument.
Speaker 3: Yeah, agreed. Whenever Zach and I are talking to someone
Speaker 3: about their new results, our go to question is what
Speaker 3: is the least interesting explanation for your results, because often
Speaker 3: it's problem, it's probably the answer, And it seems like
Speaker 3: here the least interesting explanation wasn't considered thoroughly enough exactly.
Speaker 1: And I'm like the biggest cheerleader for this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: Like I would love to meet aliens, and I would
Speaker 1: love for it to be evidence that aliens have visited Earth,
Speaker 1: or even that rocks from other solar systems have landed
Speaker 1: on Earth and we could study them. I so much
Speaker 1: want to believe that, but that makes me also need
Speaker 1: to be skeptical, because again, we want to uncover the truth,
Speaker 1: not just tell ourselves stories.
Speaker 3: Right, And you want to know when you're emotionally invested
Speaker 3: in an answer, so that you can try to particularly
Speaker 3: keep your eye on those sorts of questions.
Speaker 1: Or financially invested because you're selling a book about how
Speaker 1: you discovered alien technology. That's right, all right, Well, thank
Speaker 1: you very much everybody for listening to today's episode, and
Speaker 1: thank you for Kelly for taking his ride with me
Speaker 1: where we take a careful and critical look at some
Speaker 1: astounding claims in science.
Speaker 3: Thank you for letting me ride shotgun on this uncomfortable journey.
Speaker 1: So far, our children are safe and your children are safe,
Speaker 1: and no aliens have arrived for us to negotiate away
Speaker 1: with their lives. But stay tuned.
Speaker 3: If those aliens come, I am hiding my kids from you,
Speaker 3: all right.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening, everybody, See you next time. For more
Speaker 1: science and curiosity, come find us on social media where
Speaker 1: we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Disport,
Speaker 1: Instant and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that
Speaker 1: Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.