Avi Loeb

it will get brighter faster than just the reflection of sunlight makes it brighter.

That's because the amount of sunlight impinging on its surface declines inversely with distance squared, and then it sends out the reflected light in our direction, and you have another factor of 1 over distance squared, so altogether 1 over distance to the 4.

I had a visitor to my office

um who discovered most of the copper belt many of the copper belt objects um and i asked him he's from caltech and the minute he sat in my sofa i said look i just wrote this paper that if an object generates its own light the brightness will increase inversely with distance squared and

If it's reflecting sunlight, it will change inversely with distance to the fourth.

Did you ever check if the objects you discovered in the Kuiper Belt follow one or the other laws?

And he said, why should I check?

It must be one with distance to the fourth.

That's the answer from the person who discovered many of the Kuiper Belt objects.

Why check?

Why check?

Oh my goodness.

So then you ask yourself, okay, is there any evidence for extraterrestrial technological...

signatures and the answer no no we haven't detected anything why because we're not trying to detect anything and when someone suggests that there is an anomaly that we should attend to we cut it out of the scientific literature did you see anomalies with atlas as well yeah so aside from it coming in the plane of the planets around the sun there was until it came closest to the sun there was much more nickel than iron detected around it

meaning that it's anomalous because in all astrophysical objects, you find nickel and iron at similar amounts.

They are produced by the same process of exploding stars, supernovae.

And this is the first case where you see nickel with no detection of iron.

So the only other place where you see it is industrial production of nickel alloys that are used for aerospace applications.

So I pointed this out and...

But the people who wrote the scientific paper reporting about that said, well, maybe the same carbonyl process that is used by our industries to separate iron from nickel operates in nature.