Name: Scientist Thinks Mysterious Interstellar Object is Extraterrestrial
Uploaded: 2021-01-18T21:17:26.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scientist Thinks Mysterious Interstellar Object is Extraterrestrial' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Scientist Thinks Mysterious Interstellar Object is Extraterrestrial' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-01-18. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience you came on my radar when you were discussing Amuamua
that's the right Amuamua which is an object that we detected in space that
you believe could possibly have been extraterrestrial in origin meaning from
some sort of a civilization right yeah why did you did what please explain to
people what Amuamua is why it's so extraordinary and why you think it's
possible that it came from some other intelligent civilization right so I'm a
scientist and I basically follow the evidence just like Sherlock Holmes trying
to find solutions it's a detective story you have some anomalies some things
that
don't quite match what you expected and you're trying to find an explanation
and
the thing about Oumuamua is that it was discovered on October 19th 2017 a
little
more than three years ago and it was the very first object that visited our
vicinity in the solar system from outside the solar system it moved too fast to
be
bound to the Sun very first object that we have found coming to us from interstellar
space from other places and at first astronomers said oh yeah it's probably
just like the objects we had in our solar system all the rocks that we have
seen
before we've seen comets and asteroids so a comet
is a rock that is covered with ice water ice so when it gets close to the Sun
the
surface gets warmed up and the ice turns into vapor gas and you see this
beautiful
cometary tail behind it that's what a comet is an asteroid is just rock without
much ice on it
actually the first person to explain what comets are was at Harvard the
university that I am affiliated
with and the the story goes that I mean it was Fred Whipple that he went to
Harvard square and saw all
the slush during the winter day you know and came up with the idea that it's
just
icy rock or icy rocks or you know rocky ice and that's what a comet is and the
comets come to us from
the periphery of the solar system and you know astronomers said okay other
stars may have them as well
and you know since they are loosely bound if they are in the periphery they can
be easily ripped apart from
their host star and some of them will fly in our direction we will see them so
they said Oumuamua is
probably a comet the only problem is there wasn't any cometary tail so you look
for a duck but it doesn't
look like a duck you know so then the question is what is it and so people said
okay it's just a rock
without any ice on it then the problem was that it exhibited an extra push away
from the sun and
usually you get it from the rocket effect that when when you make the cometary
tail
it pushes the object in the opposite direction just like a jet plane a jet
plane works by throwing gas
out and that's pushing you forward so a comet has an extra push when it evaporates
but there was no
cometary tail so why did it show an extra push that was the key question in my
mind at which point i
started thinking maybe it's not a comet and not an asteroid something else you
know and the other
strange thing about it it it changes its brightness by a factor of 10 or more
and the brightness of the
object the light that we see is simply reflected sunlight so just think about
it think about a
piece of paper razor thin piece of paper tumbling in the wind and changing the
area that we can see
the projected area of that piece of paper by a factor of 10 as we look at it
that's exactly what we
inferred from this object spinning around every eight hours but changing its
brightness by a factor of
10 meaning that the area projected on the sky that we see that reflects
sunlight changed by a factor of
10 so that means it has an extreme geometry most likely flat if you try to
interpret the light that it
reflected over as it was tumbling around and so a flat object about the size of
a football field
that has an extra push if it were a comet it needed to lose about a tenth of
its weight so a lot of
evaporation you can't just say oh it's a little bit of evaporation and
therefore that's why we don't see
it it should have lost a tenth of its weight you know if we go on a diet and
lose a tenth of our weight
that's that's a big chunk of of mass right so this object didn't lose that
because we didn't see it and
the spitzer space telescope looked very deeply behind it to see if there are
any traces of dust or gas didn't
see anything so then you know just like sherlock holmes i was trying to think
together with a postdoc of
mind the shmuel bialy what could explain it and the only thing that came to
mind is reflecting sunlight
so the object itself is being pushed by the sunlight reflecting off its surface
and you know
that would agree with everything we know about the object but in order for it
to work
the object needs to be very thin like a sail you know the sail on a boat so a
sail is pushed by a wind
but you can also push an object a thin object by light and that is called the
light sail and we're
actually using this technology now developing it for space exploration the big
advantage is you don't
need to carry the fuel with the spacecraft you just reflect light off it and it's
being pushed
now there's a science fiction movie that did something like that i think it was
called sunlight
quite possibly i should mention an anecdote in september just a few months ago
in september 2020
there was another object that showed an extra push no cometary tail and then
astronomers so astronomers gave
it a name 2020 so okay september 2020 and then they extrapolated back in time
and found that it came from
earth actually and then they looked at the history books and show and and saw
that indeed there was a
rocket booster from a lunar lander that was kicked into space and this is the
object now why did it
show this push because it's a hollow it's a very thin structure so here is an
example where we can tell
it's artificial and we know that we made it but omua could not have been made
by us because it was
passing near us just for a few months very quickly faster than any rocket that
we can launch that's why
we couldn't really chase it when it was receding away from us and it came from
outside the solar system
so you know i just do one plus one equal two i say okay it looks very peculiar
maybe it belongs to
another civilization i just put it in a scientific paper i didn't think you
know we didn't have any
press release then it went viral the public got extremely interested and the
thing that really
surprised me is that my colleagues were pushing back they were very upset that
this possibility was
even mentioned you know we had a a seminar a lecture about this object at harvard
and a colleague of mine
after the lecture said this object is really weird i wish it never existed now
to me you know that i was
really appalled by this how can you say something like that you should you
should be happy about whatever
nature gives you you know you learn something new if if something doesn't look
right it actually
teaches us oh it's a learning experience we learn that we have to revise the
way we think about reality
you know that's a good thing that's not a bad you shouldn't always be in your
comfort zone and think
that the future will be the same as the past so i actually see it as a blessing
you know i can't imagine
why anybody would be upset that it exists like i wish it didn't exist that's
kind of hilarious because it
takes you away from your comfort zone you know i know but it's if you're
studying the heavens you're
studying the cosmos what is the ultimate thing that you could find another
civilization or a piece of
something another civilization that's exactly my point but if you go back in
time let me give you two
examples uh galileo galilei said i think the earth moves around the sun but at
the time philosophers
knew for sure that the sun moves around the earth you see it moving in the sky
it was consistent with
their religious beliefs everything so they said we don't want to look through
your telescope to change
our view we will put you in house arrest now what did they achieve by that and
by the way i'm in house
arrest but it's because of the pandemic not because so what did they achieve by
that they maintain their
ignorance and the earth continued to move around the sun you know reality is
the one thing that never
goes away irrespective of whether you ignore it you can ignore it now there is
another example there is a
student a student at harvard that as a result of my book on this subject that
is about to come out in
in a week or so she she was inspired to do her phd by you know on the theme of
my book so she invited me
to a thesis exam just a couple of months ago and one of the examiners a
professor asked her do you know
why giordano bruno an italian guy was burnt at the stake and she said well he
was an obnoxious guy he
irritated a lot of people which is true you know he was an obnoxious guy but
the professor corrected her
and said no it was because he said that other stars are just like the sun you
know there are stars like
the sun and they have planets like the earth around them and there may be life
on those planets and that
was offensive to the church because if there is life there and it had sinned
you know then christ
should have visited those planets to save them to save the life life forms and
you know you need
multiple copies of christ to to visit those planets and that was unacceptable
so they burned the guy
burned them alive so you see that you know throughout history people are not
really
open-minded about the sky the heavens as you said catch new episodes of the joe
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