Avi Loeb

That's another surprising fact about it, that it wasn't a comet.

Who knows what is in the solar system?

By the way, within the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, there are about 35 million objects that are roughly the size of a person from interstellar space.

From interstellar space.

And we can't see them because they don't reflect enough sunlight.

So there is a huge reservoir of interstellar rocks that we are not aware of.

And once every few years, one of them collides with Earth, one of those meter-sized rocks.

But what I'm trying to say is that the information we have is very limited.

For example, even with the Rubin Observatory, state-of-the-art,

If an object were to move 10 times faster than the rocks of the solar system or the planets of the solar system, which are moving at tens of kilometers per second, if you had an object moving at hundreds of kilometers per second, it would spend very little time in each snapshot of the sky that we take with those telescopes.

It would appear as a streak.

And, you know,

300 km per second, 10 times more than Earth's speed around the Sun, is just 0.1% of the speed of light.

Three orders of magnitude smaller than the speed of light.

So there is a huge range of velocities that are larger than our rockets.

that we would miss if objects were moving in our backyard very fast.

Just think about your own backyard, and if someone passes through very quickly, you wouldn't even notice that, and that's the situation that we're in.

In addition to the fact that small objects are not recognized, objects of the size of Voyager or most of the space objects that we launched are not being detected, and they could be all around us.

What would you have put on Voyager's golden record?

Oh, I would never put music from the 60s.