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Speaker 2: Doctor Lowbe. I have to tell you what I'm most
Speaker 2: excited about your new book, Interstellary, is that it is
Speaker 2: so hopeful, it's positive. There's a sense of excitement in
Speaker 2: this book.
Speaker 1: It's like a.
Speaker 2: Message, Let's go learn about this, Let's dig into it.
Speaker 2: Let's find out our true place in the cosmos, our
Speaker 2: position and the universal pecking order. You know, find out
Speaker 2: are we alone? Do you set out to purposely make
Speaker 2: it kind of a hopeful, positive message?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think one of the things I learned about
Speaker 3: life is that it's often a self fulfilling prophecy. So
Speaker 3: it's better to be an optimist. If I would think
Speaker 3: that I will not find anything in the Pacific Ocean,
Speaker 3: I would not go there and I wouldn't find anything.
Speaker 3: So it's much better to be positive because every now
Speaker 3: and then your wishes come true. And you know, there
Speaker 3: is a book, a famous book by Steven Weinberg and
Speaker 3: the physicists who won the Nobel Prize called the First
Speaker 3: three Minutes, and towards the end of it, he says,
Speaker 3: the more we comprehend the universe, the more pointless, it seems,
Speaker 3: and that's a depressing thought. The universe is pointless. And
Speaker 3: I thought about it, and I realized that he's completely wrong.
Speaker 3: The reason he finds the universe pointless, and by the way,
Speaker 3: it's not only him, but it's all my colleagues that
Speaker 3: work on studying the universe is because they focus on
Speaker 3: lifeless objects, you know, elementary particles, radiation, things that have
Speaker 3: no life. And we know from our own life that
Speaker 3: finding a partner brings a meaning to your life, and
Speaker 3: loneliness is pointless. And so my advice is, let's search
Speaker 3: for a partner out there, for a neighbor, because that
Speaker 3: would change our perspective. Suddenly the universe would appear to
Speaker 3: be meaningful. And you know, that is a very basic
Speaker 3: perspective that could change the future of humanity because if
Speaker 3: we find a partner, a neighbor that is more accomplished
Speaker 3: than we are, we could learn something new that we
Speaker 3: haven't yet learned in the last century of science and technology.
Speaker 3: They could inspire us to go into space, and at
Speaker 3: the very least I can imagine that, you know, it
Speaker 3: would convince us that what we are doing now makes
Speaker 3: no sense. I mean, we are engaged in conflicts. Two
Speaker 3: trillion dollars a year is going to military budgets worldwide,
Speaker 3: and just you know, think about using this money for
Speaker 3: space exploration. I calculated that we could reach every star
Speaker 3: in the Milky Way galaxy by sending probes within one century.
Speaker 3: Billions of probes with this budget in one century, we'll
Speaker 3: go towards every star. So it's just a matter of priorities.
Speaker 3: And perhaps if we realize that we have a neighbor
Speaker 3: out there and they reached our doorstep before we reached
Speaker 3: their doorstep, you know, that would convince us to work
Speaker 3: together because we are all in the same boat earth,
Speaker 3: sailing through space. And when I was in the Pacific Ocean,
Speaker 3: I realized, you know, all the team members were working together,
Speaker 3: selflessly towards the success of the mission. That's the kind
Speaker 3: of attitude that I'm really hoping for. If you know,
Speaker 3: there would be this way coming from a neighbor, that
Speaker 3: will change the priorities of humanity, make us all work
Speaker 3: together as equal members of the human species.
Speaker 2: This expedition you made out into the Pacific sounds like
Speaker 2: a just a rollicking grand adventure. Could you share with
Speaker 2: our audience why you picked that spot, what you were
Speaker 2: looking for and what you found.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the story starts on January eighth, twenty fourteen,
Speaker 3: when US government satellites detected the fireboard from the collision
Speaker 3: of an object with Earth. And that's called the meteor
Speaker 3: when an object collides with Earth and burns up in
Speaker 3: the atmosphere as a result of friction with Earth. What
Speaker 3: was unusual about this one is that the object was
Speaker 3: moving very fast. It actually came from behind the Earth
Speaker 3: in its orbit around the Sun. And even though it
Speaker 3: came from behind the Earth, it was moving at forty
Speaker 3: five kilometers per second, faster than Earth relative to Earth itself.
Speaker 3: And we calculated in twenty nineteen. January twenty nineteen, when
Speaker 3: that was exactly five years after this object was found
Speaker 3: by the US government. It was just put in a
Speaker 3: catalog of NASA, and I was interviewed about another meteor
Speaker 3: that landed near Kamchatka, and it's called the Kamchatka meteor,
Speaker 3: just a couple of weeks earlier. So the radio interviewer
Speaker 3: wanted to ask questions about that, and I looked at
Speaker 3: the online and found this catalog of NASA, and I
Speaker 3: asked my student to check if any of the objects,
Speaker 3: the fastest objects might have originated from outside the Solar System,
Speaker 3: because I was already intrigued by Omuamua that looked unlike
Speaker 3: any rock that we're familiar with in the Solar System,
Speaker 3: and so I said, why don't we find if there
Speaker 3: is any me that came from outside the source system?
Speaker 3: And we found this one and then submitted the paper
Speaker 3: for publications and the refere is. My colleagues rejected it.
Speaker 3: They said, we don't believe the US government. So at
Speaker 3: the time, I was chair of the Board of Physics
Speaker 3: and Astronomy of the National Academies, and I complained about
Speaker 3: it to my colleagues there. I said, look, I mean
Speaker 3: this is data that you know, the US Space Command
Speaker 3: is getting more funding than NASA, and we should trust
Speaker 3: the you know, the data, because you know, they're supposed
Speaker 3: to alert the US President if a ballistic missile is
Speaker 3: coming from North Korea, and if they make mistakes, they
Speaker 3: will say no, it's going to Mexico while it's heading
Speaker 3: towards Washington. So it's you know, they know what they're
Speaker 3: talking about anyway. So as a result of me frustrated,
Speaker 3: one of the people with behind the National Security Defense
Speaker 3: suggested to help, and it ended up with a person
Speaker 3: from the White House reaching to the US Space Command,
Speaker 3: and there was the letter issued by the US Space
Speaker 3: Command in March twenty twenty two, three years later, saying
Speaker 3: that they confirm after looking at the data again, they
Speaker 3: confirmed that it's of interstellar origin. This meteor came from
Speaker 3: outside the Solar System, and they do it at the
Speaker 3: ninety nine point nine nine percent confidence. That was a
Speaker 3: letter sent to NASA. The Department of Defense basically came
Speaker 3: to my defense on this matter, and our paper was
Speaker 3: accepted for publication at that point, and the government also
Speaker 3: released the data about the fireball, the light curb from
Speaker 3: this meteor, and that allowed us to conclude two things. Well.
Speaker 3: First of all, it came with a very high speed
Speaker 3: already outside the Solar System, faster than ninety five percent
Speaker 3: of the stars in the vicinity of the Sun relative
Speaker 3: to the local frame of the Milky Way galaxy. That's unusual,
Speaker 3: faster than ninety five percent of the stars near the Sun.
Speaker 3: And moreover, it exploded only in the lower atmosphere, where
Speaker 3: the stress on the object was far greater than on
Speaker 3: all other space rocks that we had seen as meteors
Speaker 3: two hundred and seventy two of them in the NASA
Speaker 3: catalog over the past decade. So the object was unusually
Speaker 3: tough material strength, larger than even iron meteorites, which make
Speaker 3: up five percent of the meteors. So you know, if
Speaker 3: that raised the possibility that it may be a voyager
Speaker 3: like meteor. Just imagine our own spacecraft voyager going to
Speaker 3: interestellar space and eventually colliding with a planet like the Earth.
Speaker 3: It would appear as a meteor in the sky of
Speaker 3: that planet. Is of unusual material strength because it's made
Speaker 3: of stainless steel, and unusual speed because it was propelled
Speaker 3: by a rocket. And so I decided to go to
Speaker 3: the side of the meteor and find what it was
Speaker 3: made of. And that was a big challenge. You know,
Speaker 3: there were many failure points. First, we had to get
Speaker 3: one and a half million dollars had to fund the expedition,
Speaker 3: and gladly Charles Hoskinson and the Thunder contacted me out
Speaker 3: of the blue and we had a zoom call and
Speaker 3: he said, you have the money. And then organizing a
Speaker 3: team of twenty eight people, the best in the world
Speaker 3: by the way, and that was again a very fortunate
Speaker 3: circumstance that those people agreed and joined, and actually many
Speaker 3: of them volunteered to join us. And then we built
Speaker 3: a sled with magnets on both sides that is one
Speaker 3: wide and two hundred kilograms in mass, and we placed
Speaker 3: it on the ocean floor, connected with a cable to
Speaker 3: the ship that was fittingly called the Silver Star, and
Speaker 3: we basically dragged the sled back and forth, just like
Speaker 3: mowing the lawn across the region that is seven miles
Speaker 3: in size, and the ocean is more than a mile deep.
Speaker 3: And what we were looking for are the molten droplets
Speaker 3: from the surface of the object when it was exposed
Speaker 3: to the fireball the immense heat that surrounded it, and
Speaker 3: those droplets were supposed to be a millimeter or best
Speaker 3: in size, the size of a grain of sand. So
Speaker 3: just think about it, searching for planes of sand at
Speaker 3: the bottom of the ocean a mile deep, across the
Speaker 3: region of seven miles in length. And so many of
Speaker 3: my colleagues obviously said, you will find nothing. It's a
Speaker 3: waste of time. And I said, you know, why don't
Speaker 3: you sit back and relax. I'm not asking you to
Speaker 3: do anything. I'm doing the heavy lifting and if I
Speaker 3: come back with nothing, you can say that's what I expected.
Speaker 3: So we went there, and then after six days, I mean,
Speaker 3: at first the sled was not lying on the ocean
Speaker 3: floor because the cable was lifting it. It was guiding,
Speaker 3: and the exceptional engineers that we had on the ship
Speaker 3: realized that we need to go with the current in
Speaker 3: order to keep it on the floor. But then we
Speaker 3: started collecting materials and most of it was volcanic ash.
Speaker 3: This is black powder from volcanic activity. And then after
Speaker 3: the sixth day, I mean, I wrote forty three diary
Speaker 3: reports altogether, and after the sixth day I wrote an
Speaker 3: essay on mediu dot com. All of them were published,
Speaker 3: by the way, and there were few millions millions of
Speaker 3: people around the world who read those reports. They were
Speaker 3: very excited, and then they were translated to Spanish. And
Speaker 3: on the sixth day I wrote a report with the
Speaker 3: title where are the sperrels? These are the molten droplets.
Speaker 3: We didn't find them yet, And then I was straightforward,
Speaker 3: we didn't find them, And then the following day we
Speaker 3: started filtering the black powder. The particles that are small,
Speaker 3: We let them out with a mesh and that had
Speaker 3: the size of a quarter of a millimeter, and then
Speaker 3: we started looking at the big particles through a microscope
Speaker 3: and lo and behold, we found a sparrow. It looked
Speaker 3: very distinct from the background sand. It was like a
Speaker 3: metallic marble. And I basically hugged the person who found
Speaker 3: it first on the microscope. And I was so thrilled
Speaker 3: because I knew that if you find an aunt in
Speaker 3: the kitchen, there must be many more out there. And
Speaker 3: then we found the fifty of them during the expedition
Speaker 3: that lasted two weeks between June fourteenth to twenty eight,
Speaker 3: twenty twenty three. And when we came back to had
Speaker 3: I shipped the materials by FedEx. It arrived a few
Speaker 3: days later to my home. I realized that a few
Speaker 3: days of a delay is not a big deal, because
Speaker 3: this material took millions of years to arrive to us
Speaker 3: from far away. And then I brought it to a
Speaker 3: laboratory of Stein Jacobson at Harvard that has the best
Speaker 3: mass spectrometer in the world to analyze the composition of
Speaker 3: the squirrels, and we found that there isn't a excess
Speaker 3: of cereals along the meteor path. We made the map
Speaker 3: my post dot Laura Domini made that map, and we
Speaker 3: saw concentration of extra excess of cerreals along the path,
Speaker 3: and of course there were some background ferrols in the
Speaker 3: control regions and also in the area of the meteor,
Speaker 3: but on top of that there was an excess. And
Speaker 3: then we found a special type of cereals that were
Speaker 3: along the meteor path in those regions of excess, and
Speaker 3: that the composition of that was never seen before in
Speaker 3: the scientific literature. Its materials that have a very different
Speaker 3: abundance of elements than in the solar system. You know,
Speaker 3: elements like lanthanum, uranium, beryllium are hundreds of times more
Speaker 3: abundant in those serals, and that was never seen anywhere.
Speaker 3: And so we reported the results the findings. And now,
Speaker 3: I mean, so far we analyzed only about the tenth
Speaker 3: of the spirals we have. When we came back to Harvard,
Speaker 3: my summer intern found six hundred more in addition to
Speaker 3: the fifty we had on the ship, and so altogether
Speaker 3: we have about seven hundred right now. So we analyzed
Speaker 3: fifty seven and we are now in the process of
Speaker 3: analyzing many more. And it's just, you know, an amazing story.
Speaker 3: Of discovery, taking risks despite all odds, and being successful.
Speaker 3: And you know, there were so many points of failure
Speaker 3: that every team member was essential for the success of
Speaker 3: this mission. And we will go again because for now
Speaker 3: we can just say it came from outside the Solar System,
Speaker 3: but to be able to tell if it uh natural,
Speaker 3: if it's if it was a rock that came from
Speaker 3: an unusual environment different than the Solar System, or it
Speaker 3: was technological gadget, maybe we found the element of semiconductors.
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