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Speaker 1: Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

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Speaker 2: And welcome back to Coast to Coast George nor are

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Speaker 2: you with you? Along with doctor Brian Keating. One of

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Speaker 2: his books includes Focus Like a Nobel Prize winner. We'll

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Speaker 2: talk about that in a moment, Brian, I'm going to

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Speaker 2: give you some scenarios for three IAD lists and give

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Speaker 2: you your thoughts on that. You ready, Yeah, let's do it.

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Speaker 2: It's a comment, yes or no? What do you think?

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Speaker 3: Well, you know, scientists don't like to give yes or

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Speaker 3: no question answers because that kind of makes it seem

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Speaker 3: like we're certain about our answers. So instead we do

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Speaker 3: Baysian or likelihoods. So I'll say the likelihood of it

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Speaker 3: being a natural comment to me is about seventy five percent.

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Speaker 3: I wouldn't say it's a slam dunk. You certainly wouldn't

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Speaker 3: get on an airplane if you thought it would have

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Speaker 3: a only twenty five percent chance of making it, you know,

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Speaker 3: out of it in time. So I'd say about twenty

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Speaker 3: about seventy five percent or so. An asteroid asteroid is

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Speaker 3: sort of similar to a comment, except this one has

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Speaker 3: some bizarre features. In its composition. It seems to have

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Speaker 3: an anomalous amount of more rare ratios of cobalt, nickel

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Speaker 3: and very highly magnetic attributes, which could be an asteroid.

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Speaker 3: But we know for certain it's not from our solar system.

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Speaker 3: Nobody's disputing that it came from another solar system, and

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Speaker 3: in fact, that solar system has other worlds within it.

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Speaker 3: The question is did one of those worlds make this

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Speaker 3: object or are they still guiding or piloting it.

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Speaker 2: It's a meteor.

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Speaker 3: Meteors or effectively what we call asteroids when they start

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Speaker 3: to enter the Earth's atmosphere. So it would go along

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Speaker 3: with the probability maybe thirty percent of it being an asteroid.

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Speaker 2: It's an alien probian craft.

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Speaker 3: Well there, you have to be very careful. It could

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Speaker 3: be it could be alien craft. It could be an

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Speaker 3: alien garbage barge. It could be you know, alien advertising

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Speaker 3: billboard for something we don't know, so alien, let's just

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Speaker 3: take alien in general. I'd say, from my perspective, much

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Speaker 3: less than one percent, but not zero. I would never

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Speaker 3: say it's zero. I mean, the odds of us being

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Speaker 3: alone are extremely extremely small by one calculation, but another calculation.

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Speaker 3: You look at the odds of us being here having

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Speaker 3: this conversation, and they too are astronomically low, so I

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Speaker 3: wouldn't rule it out, but I think it's the least plausible.

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Speaker 3: And I've told Avi this.

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Speaker 2: I'm not telling tales out of school right now. There's

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Speaker 2: three to one add lists similar to Amu and Moa.

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Speaker 2: It is.

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Speaker 3: It's very similar to it in many ways. That first

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Speaker 3: one and most importantly is it's interstellar. That om was,

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Speaker 3: you know, instead of three I is one eye. It

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Speaker 3: was really the first ever detected object from another solar

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Speaker 3: system that we knew for sure was not created or

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Speaker 3: formed in our solar system. That was really exciting. That

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Speaker 3: was only in twenty seventeen. George, Don't forget we haven't

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Speaker 3: known about these types of objects. We've speculated on them.

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Speaker 3: People thought they could exist. And I told Abby at

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Speaker 3: the time when he wrote his first book about Omoamua,

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Speaker 3: that you know, if I were him, I would maybe

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Speaker 3: devote some of the billions of dollars at Harvard. Nowadays

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Speaker 3: they're kind of strapped for cash next to the Trump administration,

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Speaker 3: but back then they were kind of rich, and they said,

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Speaker 3: you know, why don't you get some of that Harvard

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Speaker 3: money and build a spacecraft to go chase after it.

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Speaker 3: And at that time Abby told me, no, don't worry, Brian,

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Speaker 3: There'll be many more that come. And I said, well,

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Speaker 3: you don't know that for sure. Where As you do

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Speaker 3: know for sure that this object of Muamoua, which you

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Speaker 3: claim could plausibly be alien technology or alien evidence again,

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Speaker 3: garbage barge or whatever, it doesn't have to be a

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Speaker 3: piloted craft. So I said, Abby, you're giving up this chance,

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Speaker 3: and he said no, there'll be many more. So at

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Speaker 3: that time I felt like, well, I don't want to wait.

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Speaker 3: If you knew something was really carrying this precious cargo

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Speaker 3: or this precious signature, you do anything in your power

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Speaker 3: to go after it. But he hasn't taken me up

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Speaker 3: on that. He has instead looked very deeply into ways

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Speaker 3: You can detect objects through a variety of different means,

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Speaker 3: including audio you know which appeals to you and me

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Speaker 3: as radio and podcast defficionados, to light flashes, to things

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Speaker 3: you know that go make strange signs in the sky,

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Speaker 3: as was just announced yesterday. I mean this, as I said,

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Speaker 3: this month this year has been extraordinary. Not only are

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Speaker 3: there comments you can see with your naked eye right

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Speaker 3: after sunset and from a dark place on Earth that's

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Speaker 3: called Comet lemon or with a small telescope that's called

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Speaker 3: Comet Swan. But yesterday, two days ago, assigned to in Europe,

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Speaker 3: announced that she had found and published this data. She

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Speaker 3: published it in Precidious Journal that they had found evidence

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Speaker 3: for non trivial or non natural reflections of light in

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Speaker 3: Earth orbit prior to nineteen fifty seven. Also October nineteen

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Speaker 3: fifty seven, George, you remember what happened in October nineteen

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Speaker 3: fifty seven.

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Speaker 2: October nineteen fifty seven Spotnik Spotnik.

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Speaker 3: So these data were collected in nineteen fifty two, in full,

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Speaker 3: five years before spot Nek. And she claims it could

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Speaker 3: be relic technology that existed in geostationary orbit. We talked

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Speaker 3: about the moon. The Moon's in a geosynchronous orbit of

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Speaker 3: a kind. But besides that and maybe that mini moon

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Speaker 3: you mentioned at the very top, we don't know many

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Speaker 3: things that could reproduce these signals. So it's an incredibly

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Speaker 3: exciting time for extra solar, extraterrestrial perhaps technology or just observation.

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Speaker 2: Ryan, was it new technology that allowed us to find

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Speaker 2: out about three ied list and a more and more,

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Speaker 2: I would.

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Speaker 3: Say it wasn't necessarily new technology that allowed us to

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Speaker 3: find them. Uh, the big telescope in Hawaii that was

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Speaker 3: really an Air Force monitoring telescope. Don't forget these objects

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Speaker 3: could be, according to AVI, trojan horses. You know that

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Speaker 3: even if they're you know, sort of benign, we don't

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Speaker 3: know what treasure you know on the outside applies for

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Speaker 3: what lurks within it. So I think you know Avi's

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Speaker 3: point is, let's be cautious about these things, these so

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Speaker 3: but so too. When you find things that could be

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Speaker 3: extraterrestrial intelligence and technology. The same tools that discover that

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Speaker 3: are good at looking for natural human based technology like

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Speaker 3: missiles or you know, a Chinese spacecraft that is doing

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Speaker 3: something in space. So the same tools that the Air

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Speaker 3: Force was very interested in looking for satellites and spy

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Speaker 3: devices and balloons and stuff like that throughout to be

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Speaker 3: very good at finding interstellar objects. Now that being said,

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Speaker 3: there's a new telescope that came on just this past

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Speaker 3: may even much more recent than the last time you

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Speaker 3: and I spoke a couple of years ago, called the

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Speaker 3: Verra Ruben Observatory in Chile. And this is a phenomenal.

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Speaker 3: Truly knew never before deployed type of technological tool the many,

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Speaker 3: you know, twelve twenty feet across something like that, with

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Speaker 3: a camera that scans the sky every moment of every night,

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Speaker 3: and they found George. In just about ten hours of data,

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Speaker 3: they found two thousand, two thousand asteroids that had never

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Speaker 3: been discovered before. Now imagine if just you know, zero

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Speaker 3: point one percent of them could hit the Earth. That's

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Speaker 3: two of them, and they found that in just ten hours.

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Speaker 3: They're going to go for the next ten years, George.

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Speaker 3: At that rate, they're going to discover millions of objects.

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Speaker 3: That technology did not exist before this instrument was deployed,

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Speaker 3: nor did the technology the artificial intelligence and machine learning

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Speaker 3: tools to analyze all that fire hose of data. So

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Speaker 3: this is an incredibly exciting time to be an astronomer.

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Speaker 2: Brian, you've talked about dark energy, that it could be weakening.

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Speaker 2: Explain what dark energy is and what you mean by weakening.

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Speaker 3: So dark energy was really postulated by Einstein himself. Again,

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Speaker 3: he was the greatest scientist that ever lived. In some

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Speaker 3: people's estimation, he certainly ranks up there in mind. He

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Speaker 3: was working in the early nineteen hundreds, and he only

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Speaker 3: had the data of his time, and at that point

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Speaker 3: it's hard to imagine George. But people didn't know what

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Speaker 3: other galaxies were in nineteen fifteen. They thought there were

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Speaker 3: just smudges of light called nebulae. And it wasn't until

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Speaker 3: Hubble proved that those galaxy, those nebulae were actually other

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Speaker 3: island universes with just like the Milky Way has one

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Speaker 3: hundred billion stars in each one. They were at great distances.

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Speaker 3: They weren't in our Milky Way. They were like our

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Speaker 3: Milky Way, but much much farther away. That wasn't known

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Speaker 3: in Einstein's time. So he said, as a good physicist,

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Speaker 3: I have to account for the data and observations I

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Speaker 3: have at hand. It looks like the universe is our galaxy,

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Speaker 3: and our galaxy doesn't look like it's expanding. It doesn't

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Speaker 3: look like it's expanding or contracting like normal matter will

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Speaker 3: gravitationally attract like anybody who's throwing a baseball up in

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Speaker 3: the air and noose. So in that sense, Einstein did

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Speaker 3: what was prudent. He said, I have to insert something

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Speaker 3: in my equation to keep the universe from collapsing on itself.

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Speaker 3: Otherwise we wouldn't be here to ask the question of

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Speaker 3: why do we exist? Because gravity would have sucked all

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Speaker 3: the matter, all the stars, all the planets into a

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Speaker 3: black hole. So we shouldn't exist. So there must be

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Speaker 3: some other force, some repulsive gravity, and that he called

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Speaker 3: the cosmological constant, and that is what we for many

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Speaker 3: decades dismissed dark energy because we saw the versus expanding.

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Speaker 3: But in late nineteen nineties, astronomers discovered that actually the

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Speaker 3: galaxies aren't just expanding away from us every day. The

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Speaker 3: rate of expansion is accelerating. That means not only would

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Speaker 3: be farther apart tomorrow, it's like someone's flooring the cosmic accelerator.

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Speaker 3: And because of that we had to reinvoke dark energy,

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Speaker 3: which Einstein had discarded as his biggest blunder. Nowadays, let's

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Speaker 3: fast forward from nineteen ninety seven when dark energy was

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Speaker 3: discovered until just this year. The DESI Dark Energy Spectroscopic

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Speaker 3: Instrument has been operating for the better part of ten

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Speaker 3: years now, and that team released data that suggests that

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Speaker 3: the rate of acceleration is decreasing. So follow this with me, George.

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Speaker 3: The universe is expanding, it's expanding we know that's expanding

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Speaker 3: at the Hubble constant rate. That's a constant rate of expansion. However,

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Speaker 3: we discover that the rate of expansion increased about five

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Speaker 3: billion years ago in the universe's history. Now we see

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Speaker 3: that at later times the universe is acceleration. It's still accelerating,

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Speaker 3: but someone's letting off the gas, so that dark energy

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Speaker 3: is decreasing. And many astronomers think that's a sign that

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Speaker 3: our understanding of dark energy has to be modified. But

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Speaker 3: it's really exciting because we cannot experiment with this stuff.

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Speaker 3: It's not like flubber, it's not like something we can

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Speaker 3: play around with in the lab. George. Only way we

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Speaker 3: can do it is when we use the universe, the

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Speaker 3: entire universe as our laboratory, where the atoms in the

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Speaker 3: universe in the laboratory are actual galaxies. So it's incredibly

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Speaker 3: painstaking data. It takes a lot of attention to detail.

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Speaker 3: Machine learning, artificial intelligence and my colleagues have been working

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Speaker 3: on this. They seem to be confident, but it's very controversial.

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Speaker 3: We don't really understand if this result will stand up

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Speaker 3: to scrutiny, but it does seem like something weird is

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Speaker 3: going on. It makes it for a very exciting time

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Speaker 3: for astronomers.

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Speaker 2: Again. By the way, I want a promotional contest. When

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Speaker 2: I was about eleven for flubber.

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Speaker 1: Ver you goet.

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Speaker 3: That beats my you know, egg drop experiment where I

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Speaker 3: ruined my mom's dozen eggs.

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Speaker 2: Flubber is the thing to buy. Once you bounce it,

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Speaker 2: watch it fly. They love that.

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Speaker 3: That's great.

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Speaker 2: What do you think of the universe, Brian? The complexity

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Speaker 2: of the universe. We're going to get into how you

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Speaker 2: think it was formed. But it seems like everything has

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Speaker 2: a purpose and has order to it, doesn't it.

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Speaker 3: In many ways it does.

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Speaker 1: You know.

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Speaker 3: When we look at the majestic patterns of the of say, galaxies,

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Speaker 3: we find that there are patterns that keep repeating. Whether

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Speaker 3: it's the fact that we are in a solar system

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Speaker 3: where there are many patterns of different objects and these

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Speaker 3: objects have a certain phenomena in common with each other.

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Speaker 3: From the tiny little asteroids comments meteors, meteoroids all the

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Speaker 3: way up to the giant gas planets like Jupiter, Saturn

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Speaker 3: and Neptune Uranus. Those objects of nothing like us, and

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Speaker 3: yet and yet we are in a relationship with them.

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Speaker 3: We have properties that are similar to them. The thing

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Speaker 3: that's so interesting to me about the universe, I think

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Speaker 3: the only two interesting questions that I ever want to

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Speaker 3: know the answer to is what happened on the Tuesday

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Speaker 3: before the Big Bang? You know, was there a universe

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Speaker 3: before our universe? And is there life in the universe?

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Speaker 3: That's technological, that's conscience that we can have in a

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Speaker 3: relationship with We just don't know. And so the most

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Speaker 3: delightful and frustrating aspect of the universe is that it's

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Speaker 3: just comprehensible enough to kind of get your appetite really

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Speaker 3: fired up, but you may never be able to see

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Speaker 3: or hear or learn the answers to these most fascinating questions.

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Speaker 3: I think of God, Brian, Well, you know, I am

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Speaker 3: what I call myself is a practicing devout agnostic, meaning

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Speaker 3: most of my colleagues, George, are atheists. They affirm the

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Speaker 3: belief that there is no God. There are very few

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Speaker 3: non atheists in the foxhole of science, and I think

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Speaker 3: that's partially due to arrogance. We think of scientists that

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Speaker 3: we can explain everything, when in reality we have to

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Speaker 3: have a concession that we don't know what happened at

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Speaker 3: the very beginning. We don't know how life began. We

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Speaker 3: don't know what consciousness is, let alone how it arises.

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Speaker 3: So I think the most humble way is to be scientific.

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Speaker 3: For me, I look for answers, I look for data.

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Speaker 3: I approach God as a puzzle, as a mystery. Again,

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Speaker 3: I may never be able to solve this puzzle, but

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Speaker 3: it doesn't for it doesn't mean I have an excuse

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Speaker 3: not to grapple with it. I think a lot of

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Speaker 3: people think of God as scientists. They think of God

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Speaker 3: as a eye and a white beard and floating around

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Speaker 3: in space. I think that's infantile. I also don't believe

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Speaker 3: in that. George. However, I think when you dismiss it

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Speaker 3: as infantile in that way, then you kind of say, oh,

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Speaker 3: I'm not going to take it seriously. But I think

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Speaker 3: that's a cop out. I think most of my colleagues

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Speaker 3: cop out. They're scared to admit to the responsibility they

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Speaker 3: would have to have if God were true. So I

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Speaker 3: search for God, but I don't let it God. I

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Speaker 3: don't replace my searching for evidence with faith or belief.

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Speaker 3: I think they can be compatible, but you have to

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Speaker 3: separate those two domains.

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Speaker 2: Do you ever explain the Big Bang to people.

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Speaker 3: All the time, But it's extremely difficult because even to

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Speaker 3: my children, you know, I'm always curious about it. At

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Speaker 3: some point they'll say, you know, why did this happen?

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Speaker 3: Why did this happen? By the way, I think that's

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Speaker 3: sometimes I give a lot of credit to my religious friends,

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Speaker 3: but also sometimes I say to them, look, if you

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Speaker 3: say God does everything, everything's a miracle, like a rainbow

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Speaker 3: is a miracle. If you just said that, as many

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Speaker 3: people believe that it's just a pure miracle. Yes, it's miraculous,

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Speaker 3: but we understand it very accurately through diffraction, through color theory,

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Speaker 3: through water droplets and scattering, and so we understand it. Now.

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Speaker 3: You may ask, at the very beginning of all, how

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Speaker 3: did the hydrogen first get there? Well, that's an open question.

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Speaker 3: We have to discover, you know, as far back as

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Speaker 3: we can and only invoke God in a sense to

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Speaker 3: fill in those gaps. And I know a lot of

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Speaker 3: scientists don't like that. But at the same time, I

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Speaker 3: think of the Big Bang, as you know, it could

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Speaker 3: be perhaps incomprehensible, but it could. George, if some of

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Speaker 3: my colleagues believe that our universe came about because another

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Speaker 3: universe collapsed and died and sort of sacrificed itself for

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Speaker 3: our existence. It's very you know, scatological in sense. So

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Speaker 3: in that sense the Big Bang, isn't that, you know,

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Speaker 3: isn't that surprising? Or isn't that you know? Difficult to

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Speaker 3: comprehend because it would come about because another universe died. Now,

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Speaker 3: the incomprehensible one is how did it emerge from nothing?

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