Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb
Uploaded: 2025-10-28T17:00:33.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-28. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-10-28. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2401 - Avi Loeb

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
All right, good to see you, sir.
Great to be with you, Joe.
It's a perfect time to bring you on because things are getting very wild.
Yeah, there is a lot of misinformation.
You know, some people said, I invented 3i Atlas, this object,
in order to distract attention from the Epstein files.
Is that what people are saying?
Yeah, and I said, look, this object is the size of Manhattan Island.
It's at four and a half times the Earth-Sun separation.
If I was able to put it out there, you know, I would be more powerful than the
Pope.
And because we're talking about a giant object that you can see from any place
on Earth.
You know, you can buy online a telescope that will allow you half a meter in
size
that will allow you to see it.
It's out there.
It cannot be faked.
Well, those people are fools.
You can't listen to those people.
I don't listen to those.
I don't listen to many people, you know.
Initially, a lot of people were dismissing your concerns,
and they were saying that this object is nothing but a comet, and it's very
normal.
But then as it got closer and as we got more data, it seems like you're correct.
Well, this is a very unusual object.
Well, I have—
There is something really important to recognize here, that usually when you
deal with scientific
matters, they have very little impact on the future of humanity.
Very little.
You know, if the neutrino has a little bit of a mass, it doesn't really matter.
You know, when we discovered the Higgs boson, the biggest impact was to confirm
some idea
we had back in the 60s.
And, you know, obviously that affected, you know, those people who got the
Nobel Prize.
But most of us continued, as if nothing happened.
However, here, if we ever encounter alien technology, everything will change.
It will affect the financial markets.
It will affect politics in a major way.
So my point is simple.
This is different than other scientific matters.
And the intelligence agencies know very well that events with very small
probability have
to be considered seriously because they have—they could have major
implications.
Just think about October 7th.
The Israeli intelligence agencies had a theory that the Hamas will do nothing.
And they got data that indicated something is going on out there.
But they dismissed it because of their theory.
Now, because as a result of their mistake, which was clearly a blunder, a lot
of people
died on both sides for that this could have been avoided if they were to
consider a black
swan event, an event that you put a small probability for it happening.
But you look at anomalies in the data and say, look, the implications are so
huge, we have
to consider it.
And, you know, this idea was already considered by the philosopher-mathematician,
Blaise Pascal.
He talked about God.
And he said, look, of course, you might think that God doesn't exist.
The probability for that is small.
But the implications, if God exists, the implications are so huge that we have
to discuss it.
That was the argument Pascal's wager.
And the intelligence agencies know that.
Believe me, the Israeli intelligence agencies will not make that mistake again.
Now, here comes an object from outside the solar system, and it shows anomalies.
The scientists would say we should be as careful as possible at talking about
anything other
than a rock.
Now, they say that when they know that we launched humanity, launched a lot of
space junk, you know,
a lot of technological objects to space.
And we also know that there are 100 billion stars like the sun in the Milky Way
galaxy alone.
Most of them formed billions of years before the sun.
And there are billions of billions of sun analogs.
Now, we all believe that we came out of a soup of chemicals.
You know, that's the scientific narrative of how human intelligence came on
this earth.
And so, it's quite likely that, you know, we are not the first one.
Sorry to break the news.
Elon Musk was probably not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the
Big Bang 13.8 billion
years ago.
And therefore, we should consider the possibility that things like us existed
long before us.
And you can ask the question, how long does it take our own technology, the Voyager
spacecraft
that we launched out of the solar system, how long does it take it to move to
the opposite side of the Milky Way galaxy?
You know, thousands of light years away takes less than a billion years.
And that means that all these civilizations that had their history initiated
billions of years before ours could have done it.
And all we need to do as responsible scientists is to check if among all the
rocks that come from outside of our backyard are really rocks.
Or maybe one of these objects might be a tennis ball that was thrown by a
neighbor.
And the reason I say that is, you know, we live at our home, on Earth next to
the sun.
We look around us in the cosmic street and we see a lot of houses just like
ours.
There are billions of them probably.
Now, my colleagues, those scientists who think traditionally, they say, well,
you know, microbes came to Earth very early.
Therefore, they must be everywhere.
So let's define our highest priority, searching for microbes on other houses in
our cosmic street.
And I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home.
You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's
yards.
But you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that
would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes, you know, on exoplanets.
And think about the possibility that there was actually there is a resident in
one of those houses.
You know, that resident might show up in your front door at some point.
Or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from
that resident.
A black swan event.
A black swan event.
Or you might see some construction project from a distance.
That might be easier to detect than microbes.
So we should hedge our bets.
You know, we should invest billions of dollars on both fronts.
At the moment, the scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10
billion to searching for microbes.
But no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for
intelligence.
And I say that that is an oversight.
Now, they have found evidence of microbes on Mars, correct?
Well, it's not conclusive.
Not evidence?
We need to bring materials back.
It's called sample return.
And NASA has plans.
We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories we can do
isotope analysis
and make sure that whatever signatures we see on the rocks there that do look
as if they were made by microbes.
Because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.
By the way, Mars may have had life before the Earth because it's a smaller body.
So it has a bigger surface area for its mass.
The mass of the object tells you how much heat it can retain from the formation
process.
And then the surface area tells you how fast it can cool.
And Mars could have cooled faster than the Earth.
So life may have started on Mars, actually, because it had rivers, lakes,
oceans of water.
And it could have been actually delivered to Earth.
You know, we might be all Martians.
And when Elon Musk, you know, considers going to Mars, it might be the second
trip around.
We might be going back to our childhood home because there were tiny astronauts
inside rocks
that were chipped off the surface of Mars that arrived to Earth.
And seeded the Earth with life as we know it.
Panspermia.
Panspermia.
Yeah.
And in fact, you know, we can find out if we get this material back to Earth,
as NASA is planning
to do, hopefully within a decade, then we can make sure that these were
microbes.
And perhaps we can infer whether the building blocks of these microbes are
similar to the
ones we have here on Earth, whether the DNA, RNA kind of process took place in
both places.
Have you ever done any research on the structural anomalies that are on Mars,
particularly the
right angles that appear to be a square, this enormous structure?
Yeah, I've seen the data.
It's not conclusive, but it's intriguing because both Mars and the Moon have no
atmosphere right
now.
So what happens on Earth is that when an object roughly the size of a person,
you know, or
smaller goes through the atmosphere, it burns up, creates a fireball, just like
an atomic
explosion, you know.
And actually, you have an object of order emitter colliding with Earth every
year.
Every year, there is an atomic explosion size fireball in our atmosphere.
It's not reported in the news because it happens pretty high at an altitude of
50 kilometers.
So it doesn't do anything.
And, you know, 71% of the Earth is covered by oceans.
But, yes, so these meteors, and, you know, they are quite important.
Obviously, we know that the dinosaurs 66 million years ago were extinguished by
a giant impact
by an asteroid the size of Manhattan Island.
And we are aware, by the way, that such an impact could endanger us.
And that's why the U.S. Congress tasked NASA to find all objects that come
close to Earth
with a size bigger than a football field, about 140 meters, so that we avoid
the fate of the
dinosaurs.
So we think we are smart.
We can see these rocks coming.
But just imagine alien technology.
It will not follow a path that you expect if it has some intelligence in it.
And that's a risk that was never attended to.
And I wrote a white paper to the United Nations and to the International Astronomical
Union
to develop a strategy for monitoring interstellar objects, objects that come
from outside the
solar system, like 3-I Atlas, that could, that show anomalies that could
potentially be
technological in origin.
The structures on Mars, like, what do you think when you look at them?
When you see that one that looks like a square?
I think it's very intriguing, both Mars and the moon have no atmosphere, so the
objects
that come into them do not burn up, as I mentioned before about Earth, and
therefore they serve
as museums.
Okay?
So any, you know, space junk that might have landed on Mars over the past two
billion years
It would not have burned in the atmosphere, it would have landed, and we can,
we need to
check the surface, even if we know that, you know, there wasn't any
civilization out there
over the past two billion years, because conditions are really harsh, Mars may
have collected technological
debris from other civilizations because it would stay on the surface.
It's just like a museum.
This is an enormous structure.
It's at least, they think, I think they think 300 meters, but possibly quite a
bit longer.
Yeah, but that's not enormous, because 3-I Atlas, the size of 3-I Atlas, is at
least five kilometers
in diameter, and I derived it in a paper a couple of weeks ago, because we know
that it's losing
mass, so, and it's mostly from the side that is facing the sun, and you would
have gotten
some recoil as a result of that in the opposite direction, just like a rocket.
And I used, together with two colleagues, 4,000 data points from 227 observatories
around the
Earth, 3-I Atlas, that monitored its motion across the sky, and we were able to
say that the trajectory
is sculpted only by gravity.
There is no evidence for this recoil.
And that means that the object is very massive, and I derived a value of 33
billion tons.
A huge thing, which, if you take solid density, it means it's more than five
kilometers in diameter,
so when you mention a few hundred meters, that's nothing.
And this object, by the way, was discovered just over the past decade of surveying
the sky,
you know, so who knows how much debris collected on the surface of Mars or the
Moon, because
there are good museums, you know?
And by the way, I see that as their most important value.
Let me just say one thing about my fundamental point of view.
Okay.
You know, each of u