We’re Not Saying It’s Aliens, But...

Advisory Opinions

The Dispatch

News, Politics, Government

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today on the pod, it’s a guest for whom David has been waiting for—Avi Loeb, an astrophysics professor at Harvard University who thinks it might just be possible that aliens have visited earth. Loeb talks about his research into Oumuamua, the first known interstellar object that’s passed through our Solar System, and gives his thoughts on the recently released UFO report from the Office of National Intelligence. Loeb also tells David and Sarah about his scientific philosophy—how science is like a fishing expedition where you throw out a hook and see what happens. Show Notes: -Avi Loeb’s book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth -On Oumuamuaby Avi Loeb -Office of National Intelligence UFO report

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the advisory opinions podcast. This is David French with Sarah Isker. And welcome
0:09.7	to our August series of podcasts where we're going to move away from the Supreme Court.
0:15.4	We're going to move away from the courts and we're going to dive in to the things that
0:19.6	really we really love to read about. We love to understand and we love to know. And I'm
0:26.4	particularly excited about this guest. So our guest today is Professor Avi Loeb from the,
0:35.3	he is the Frank B. Bear Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University's Department of
0:41.1	Astronomy. And Sarah, Professor Loeb received his PhD in Plasma Physics at age 24 as one does.
0:47.8	Indeed, yes. And he has been all over the news and all over the media for really months and
0:59.0	months and months now, beginning with, I don't know if it's really beginning with, but sort of
1:04.2	that what really put him in center stage in the news is this object in space called, and I'm
1:14.5	going to butcher the pronunciation, O Muamua. So two things. One, Professor, thanks for joining
1:22.4	us. And number two, can you tell us what O Muamua is? Right. Well, thank you very much for hosting
1:31.0	me, but I'm fundamentally a farm boy, I should say. And I regard science as the privilege of
1:38.4	maintaining my childhood curiosity. So all the labels that I acquired over the years are
1:44.1	not so significant as far as I'm concerned. I'm just trying to figure out the world. And, you
1:49.5	know, I'm not afraid of getting bruised in the process because it's a learning experience. And
1:55.0	we should all be intrigued when there are things that do not quite match up what we expect about
2:01.1	the world, about reality, because that's an opportunity to learn. So one of these instances where
2:07.5	we confronted something that we haven't expected was in 2017, October, when the first object from
2:16.6	outside the solar system was discovered. It was given the name O Muamua because it was discovered
2:22.6	by a telescoping Hawaii. And O Muamua means a scout in the Hawaiian language, a messenger from far
2:28.8	away. And the actual detection of this object was a surprise to me because a decade earlier,
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