Yoshua Bengio is one of the most-cited researchers in artificial intelligence (AI). A pioneer in creating artificial neural networks and deep learning algorithms, Bengio, along with Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun and former Google AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, received the 2018 Turing Award (known as the "Nobel" of computing) for their key contributions to the field.

Yet now Bengio, often referred to alongside his fellow Turing Award winners as one of the "godfathers" of AI, is disturbed by the pace of his technology’s development and adoption. He believes that AI could damage the fabric of society and carries unanticipated risks to humans. Now he is the chair of the International Scientific Report on the Safety of Advanced AI — an advisory panel backed by 30 nations, the European Union, and the United Nations.

Live Science spoke with Bengio via video call at the HowTheLightGetsIn Festival in London, where he discussed the possibility of machine consciousness and the risks of the fledgling technology. Here's what he had to say.

Ben Turner: You played an incredibly significant role in developing artificial neural networks, but now you've called for a moratorium on their development and are researching ways to regulate them. What made you ask for a pause on your life's work?

Yoshua Bengio: It is difficult to go against your own church, but if you think rationally about things, there's no way to deny the possibility of catastrophic outcomes when we reach a level of AI. The reason why I pivoted is because before that moment, I understood that there are scenarios that are bad, but I thought we'd figure it out.

But it was thinking about my children and their future that made me decide I had to act differently to do whatever I could to mitigate the risks.

BT: Do you feel some responsibility for mitigating their worst impacts? Is it something that weighs on you?

YB: Yeah, I do. I feel a duty because my voice has some impact due to the recognition I got for my scientific work, and so I feel I need to speak up. The other reason I'm involved is because there are important technical solutions that are part of the bigger political solution if we're going to figure out how to not harm people with AI's construction.

Companies would be happy to include these technical solutions, but right now we don't know how to do it. They still want to get the quadrillions of profits predicted from AI reaching a human level — so we're in a bad position, and we need to find scientific answers.

One image that I use a lot is that it's like all of humanity is driving on a road that we don't know very well and there's a fog in front of us. We're going towards that fog, we could be on a mountain road, and there may be a very dangerous pass that we cannot see clearly enough.

So what do we do? Do we continue racing ahead hoping that it's all gonna be fine, or do we try to come up with technological solutions? The political solution says to apply the precautionary principle: slow down if you're not sure. The technical solution says we should come up with ways to peer through the fog and maybe equip the vehicle with safeguards.

BT: So what are the greatest risks that machine learning poses, in the short and the long term, to humanity?

YB: People always say these risks are science fiction, but they're not. In the short term, we already see AI being used in the U.S. election campaign, and it's just going to get a lot worse. There was a recent study that showed that ChatGPT-4 is a lot better than humans at persuasion, and that's just ChatGPT-4 — the new version is gonna be worse.

There have also been tests of how these systems can help terrorists. The recent ChatGPT o1 has shifted that risk from low risk to medium risk.

If you look further down the road, when we reach the level of superintelligence there are two major risks. The first is the loss of human control, if superintelligent machines have a self-preservation objective, their goal could be to destroy humanity so we couldn't turn them off.

The other danger, if the first scenario somehow doesn't happen, is in humans using the power of AI to take control of humanity in a worldwide dictatorship. You can have milder versions of that and it can exist on a spectrum, but the technology is going to give huge power to whoever controls it.

BT: The EU has issued an AI act, so did Biden with his Executive Order on AI. How well are governments responding to these risks? Are their responses steps in the right direction or off the mark?

YB: I think they're steps in the right direction. So for example Biden's executive order was as much as the White House could do at that stage, but it doesn't have the impact, it doesn't force companies to share the results of their tests or even do those tests.

We need to get rid of that voluntary element, companies actually have to have safety plans, divulge the results of their tests, and if they don't follow the state-of-the-art in protecting the public they could be sued. I think that's the best proposal in terms of legislation out there.

BT: At the time of speaking, neural networks have a load of impressive applications. But they still have issues: they struggle with unsupervised learning and they don't adapt well to situations that show up rarely in their training data, which they need to consume staggering amounts of. Surely, as we've seen with self-driving cars, these faults also produce risks of their own?

YB: First off, I want to correct something you've said in this question: they're very good at unsupervised learning, basically that's how they're trained. They're trained in an unsupervised way — just eating up all the data you're giving them and trying to make sense of it, that's unsupervised learning. That's called pre-training, before you even give them a task you make them make sense of all the data they can.

As to how much data they need, yes, they need a lot more data than humans do, but there's arguments that evolution needed a lot more data than that to come up with the specifics of what's in our brains. So it's hard to make comparisons.

I think there's room for our improvement as to how much data they need. The important point from a policy perspective is that we've made huge progress, there's still a huge gap between human intelligence and their abilities, but it's not clear how far we are to bridge that gap. Policy should be preparing for the case where it can be quick — in the next five years or so.

BT: On this data question, GPT models have been shown to undergo model collapse when they consume enough of their own content. I know we've spoken about the risk of AI becoming superintelligent and going rogue, but what about a slightly more farcical dystopian possibility — we become dependent on AI, it strips industries of jobs, it degrades and collapses, and then we’re left picking up the pieces?

YB: Yeah I'm not worried about the issue of collapse from the data they generate. If you go for [feeding the systems] synthetic data and you do it smartly, in a way that people understand. You're not gonna just ask these systems to generate data and train on it — that's meaningless from a machine-learning perspective.

With synthetic data you can make it play against itself, and it generates synthetic data that helps it make better decisions. So I'm not afraid of that.

We can, however, build machines that have side effects that we don't anticipate. Once we're dependent on them, it's going to be hard to pull the plug, and we might even lose control. If these machines are everywhere, and they control a lot of aspects of society, and they have bad intentions…

There are deception abilities [in those systems]. There's a lot of unknown unknowns that could be very very bad. So we need to be careful.

BT: The Guardian recently reported that data center emissions by Google, Apple, Meta and Microsoft are likely 662% higher than they claim. Bloomberg has also reported that AI data centers are driving a resurgence in fossil fuel infrastructure in the U.S. Could the real near-term danger of AI be the irreversible damage we're causing to the climate while we develop it?

YB: Yeah, totally, it's a big issue. I wouldn't say it's on par with major political disruption caused by AI in terms of its risks for human extinction, but it is something very serious.

If you look at the data, the amount of electricity needed to train the biggest models grows exponentially each year. That's because researchers find that the bigger you make models, the smarter they are and the more money they make.

The important thing here is that the economic value of that intelligence is going to be so great that paying 10 times the price of that electricity is no object for those in that race. What that means is that we are all going to pay more for electricity.

If we follow where the trends are going, unless something changes, a large fraction of the electricity being generated on the planet is going to go into training these models. And, of course, it can't all come from renewable energy, it's going to be because we're pulling out more fossil fuels from the ground. This is bad, it's yet another reason why we should be slowing down — but it's not the only one.

BT: Some AI researchers have voiced concerns about the danger of machines achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) — a bit of a controversial buzzword in this field. Yet others such as Thomas Dietterich have said that the concept is unscientific, and people should be embarrassed to use the term. Where do you fall in this debate?

YB: I think it's quite scientific to talk about capabilities in certain domains. That's what we do, we do benchmarks all the time and evaluate specific capabilities.

Where it gets dicey is when we ask what it all means [in terms of general intelligence]. But I think it's the wrong question. My question is within machines that are smart enough that they have specific capabilities, what could make them dangerous to us? Could they be used for cyber attacks? Designing biological weapons? Persuading people? Do they have the ability to copy themselves on other machines or the internet contrary to the wishes of their developers?

All of these are bad, and it's enough that these AIs have a subset of these capabilities to be really dangerous. There's nothing fuzzy about this, people are already building benchmarks for these abilities because we don't want machines to have them. The AI Safety Institutes in the U.K. and the U.S. are working on these things and are testing the models.

BT: We touched on this earlier, but how satisfied are you with the work of scientists and politicians in addressing the risks? Are you happy with your and their efforts, or are we still on a very dangerous path?

YB: I don't think we've done what it takes yet in terms of mitigating risk. There's been a lot of global conversation, a lot of legislative proposals, the UN is starting to think about international treaties — but we need to go much further.

We've made a lot of progress in terms of raising awareness and better understanding risks, and with politicians thinking about legislation, but we're not there yet. We're not at the stage where we can protect ourselves from catastrophic risks.

In the past six months, there's also now a counterforce [pushing back against regulatory progress], very strong lobbies coming from a small minority of people who have a lot of power and money and don't want the public to have any oversight on what they're doing with AI.

There's a conflict of interest between those who are building these machines, expecting to make tons of money and competing against each other with the public. We need to manage that conflict, just like we've done for tobacco, like we haven't managed to do with fossil fuels. We can't just let the forces of the market be the only force driving forward how we develop AI.

BT: It's ironic if it was just handed over to market forces, we'd in a way be tying our futures to an already very destructive algorithm.

YB: Yes, exactly.

BT: You mentioned the lobbying groups pushing to keep machine learning unregulated. What are their main arguments?

YB: One argument is that it's going to slow down innovation. But is there a race to transform the world as fast as possible? No, we want to make it better. If that means taking the right steps to protect the public, like we've done in many other sectors, it's not a good argument. It's not that we're going to stop innovation, you can direct efforts in directions that build tools that will definitely help the economy and the well-being of people. So it's a false argument.

We have regulation on almost everything, from your sandwich, to your car, to the planes you take. Before we had regulation we had orders of magnitude more accidents. It's the same with pharmaceuticals. We can have technology that's helpful and regulated, that is the thing that's worked for us.

The second argument is that if the West slows down because we want to be cautious, then China is going to leap forward and use the technology against us. That's a real concern, but the solution isn't to just accelerate as well without caution, because that presents the problem of an arms race.

The solution is a middle ground, where we talk to the Chinese and we come to an understanding that's in our mutual interest in avoiding major catastrophes. We sign treaties and we work on verification technologies so we can trust each other that we're not doing anything dangerous. That's what we need to do so we can both be cautious and move together for the well-being of the planet.

Editor's note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

HowTheLightGetsIn is the world's largest ideas, science, and music festival, taking place each year in London and Hay. Missed out on their London festival? Don't worry. All the festival's previous events, including all the debates and talks from the recent London festival, can be watched on IAI.TV. Spanning topics from quantum to consciousness and everything in between, you’ll find videos, articles, and even monthly online events from pioneering thinkers including Roger Penrose, Carlo Rovelli, and Sabine Hossenfelder. Enjoy a free monthly trial today at iai.tv/subscribe.

What's more? The next festival returns to Hay from 23-26 May 2025, following the theme 'Navigating the Unknown'. For more details and info about Early bird tickets, head over to their website.

Timothy Morton is an enigmatic character. An English professor at Rice University, but one that specializes in ecology and the way it interacts with cultural issues, and a leading member of the object-oriented philosophy movement. Their latest book "Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology" explores how religion overlaps with science in strange and surprising ways, while another recent project involved working with Andrew Melchior of U.K. trip-hop collective Massive Attack and MIT's Kiyoshi Masui to make music about fast radio bursts.

They are also known — by their own admission rather embarrassingly — as "the prophet of the Anthropocene." We spoke to them ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, which takes place this weekend (Sept. 21-22), about how they got this title, what the Anthropocene means, and why we need to stop trying to define when it started and accept that we've been in it for millennia.

Alexander McNamara: You've been described as the "prophet of the Anthropocene." Can you explain what the Anthropocene is and how you got the title?

Timothy Morton: It's the title of an article about me in the Guardian newspaper that showed up in 2017. This guy [Alex Blasdel] interviewed me and my colleagues and friends for about half a year and produced this huge think piece called "The Philosopher Prophet of the Anthropocene" and that's me.

At that point there weren't that many people in humanistic scholarship actually looking at this [the Anthropocene]. I had been going around the world talking about a concept I developed called Hyperobjects, which many people found very engaging as a way to think, talk, and also make art about global warming. It's a thing that's so big and so vast, it's hard to see it. You can visualize it, you can understand it, but you can't see "it." It's got this kind of sinister, multi-dimensional quality to it, and the Anthropocene is a similar thing.

It is a geological period — and I'm going to give the strict definition of the Anthropocene — there is a layer of human-made materials in the top layer of Earth's crust that goes back to roughly 10,000 B.C. And that's the Anthropocene that geologists are talking about. This layer is everywhere.

It's a hard concept for people to get their head around. It's a fiercely contested period right now because they [the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which approves new geological time periods] decided to nix the concept.

Since that happened, I've been on the case. I wrote a piece about how rejecting this concept is a terrible mistake. It is scientifically imprecise to reject the fact that there is a layer of human-made materials of plastics fused with concrete fused with pottery within the top layer of Earth's crust.

The fact that there's this stuff everywhere shouldn't be a testimony to human being's greatness in any way whatsoever, it's just the case that humans became a geophysical force on a planetary scale. From a scientific point of view, that's neither good, nor bad. That's just a thing, right?

AM: So when did the Anthropocene start?

TM: This is hard to get a handle on unless you realize that an event is more like an explosion or a ripple in a pond than a dot on a Wikipedia [time]line. In fact, I'm going to be very firm here and say, it isn't a dot on a line, it's in motion.

[When] humans started to settle across Earth, there was a sort of mild global warming that caused scarcity of food, so people started to build cities, which were in effect gigantic granaries for human beings. And this gave rise to measurable effects.

Then, in 1945 there was this "golden spike," where suddenly all the Earth systems go haywire. There had been build-up points [prior to this day] but then there's this uncanny fact that after [the Second World War], there's a layer of radio nucleotides and stuff like that in the Earth's crust, [which] is another moment of the Anthropocene people call the great acceleration.

AM: Why is it so important that we drop this idea that we have to find a definitive point, and just accept that we're in the Anthropocene?

TM: To a certain extent, who cares when [the Anthropocene] started? Who cares even why it started? All we have to do is realize that there's something happening to the biosphere, human beings are doing it and it's happening on a massive scale. I don't have to waste time proving when it happened, when it started or who did it.

It's sort of like this with global warming. Rule number one of surviving a shocking thing is knowing you are in a shocking thing. This has happened. Rubbernecking how it happened and when and why is one thing, how to get the hell out of there is another, right?

We're all small people in relation to the planet. Part of our inhibition is that we've been reduced to teeny tiny people watching grown-ups in the form of [oil companies], committing crimes upon our bodies and the bodies of other life forms and it's deeply disturbing and shocking. When you are in a state of traumatic shock, [you put your fingers in your ears and say] it's not really happening or it's not happening yet. But there is a kind of relaxation in knowing it's already happened.

I think that's another reason why people have trouble with the Anthropocene; it's telling you that the bad thing has already happened. Human beings did a thing, and have been doing it for 12,000 years, in particular for the last 50 years [by] burning so many fossil fuels. I want to help people acknowledge that we did it. It's caused by fossil fuel emissions. Let's motivate ourselves to stop those fossil fuel emissions. It's amazing that the solution is very simple. You just stop burning them. Why aren't we doing it? That is the complicated question.

Live Science has partnered with HowTheLightGetsIn festival, which takes place from Sept. 21 to 22 at Kenwood House in London. See how you can get a special discount.

Dr. Dinesh Bhugra became interested in psychiatry while dissecting cadavers in medical school in Pune, India. From the inside, the bodies looked so similar, yet people think and behave so differently, he mused. He became fascinated with the forces that shape differences in behavior, eventually focusing on culture.

"Most of my active research has been on culture and mental illness," said Bhugra, who previously served as president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) and the British Medical Association.

Bhugra, who is also a professor emeritus of mental health and cultural diversity at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London, has spent much of his career striving to improve public mental health. He's addressed gender-based interpersonal violence and worked to reach underserved populations, including refugees, asylum seekers, elderly populations, and the LGBTQ+ community. Bhugra, the first openly gay president of the WPA, has also been outspoken on how prejudice and discriminatory policies impact the mental health and suicide rates of LGBTQ+ people.

Live Science spoke with Bhugra ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, where he will discuss mental health, how we define "normal behavior" and whether those definitions are actually useful benchmarks in the context of psychiatric care. His talk will take place Sept. 22.

Related: Newfound 'brain signature' linked to multiple psychiatric disorders

Nicoletta Lanese: You emphasize that psychiatry deals with a complex mix of biological, cultural and socioeconomic components. Do you feel like that concept is well incorporated into modern psychiatry?

Dr. Dinesh Bhugra: I think there are still gaps. Quite often as clinicians, we do not have enough time to explore everything. I've seen it in places like India, where the consultation is so short. So, you know, a patient starts speaking, you kind of give them a prescription — but it [psychiatric care] is much more than that.

What I've found in clinical practice is that most patients can live with their symptoms as long as they have a job, they've got some money in their pocket, they've got a relationship, they've got a roof over their head. As clinicians, we are focusing on symptom eradication or symptom management. So there is a tension there, which is much worse in some countries where resources are not adequate. I know colleagues in India who may see between 50, 100 patients a day, so you're giving five-minute consultations. Whereas in the U.S.A. and U.K. you probably get a bit more time, but often not enough [to really get to know a patient].

Something else which has been intriguing me in the last few years has been the notion of identity. We all have multiple micro-identities, and those are kind of a mosaic. Depending upon who you're talking to, bits of the identity light up — whether it's gender, religion, sexual orientation, profession. And quite often in clinical settings, we see the identity as that of "the patient," not an individual.

And I think that needs to shift. … It's incredibly important to see the individual as an individual rather than as a set of symptoms.

NL: I know you do a lot of work related to training the next generations of psychiatrists. I'm wondering what you see as a good way of helping them develop that cultural understanding?

DB: Firstly, everybody has a culture. And one of the things in cultural competency is understanding your own culture, its strengths and its weaknesses. And then, you know, looking at the individual … through that lens, to understand "Why are they feeling like this? Why are they expressing their distress in this way? Am I really understanding that?"

You can't be an expert in every culture, but [what's crucial is that] you're aware that this individual is different [from others even within their own culture and geographical setting].

Equally importantly, if you don't know something, be prepared to acknowledge that. "No, I don't know this, but I know somebody who might be able to educate, inform, teach me," whether it's community leaders or an individual's family. The family will tell you whether this person is behaving as "normal" or "abnormal." And that's the crux: how cultures define what is deviant, what is normal, what's acceptable.

NL: On that note, could you give us a preview of what you might talk about at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival?

DB: It's about "What's normal?" And again, from a cultural perspective, what's normal in one culture is not normal in another. Particularly from a psychiatric point of view, we need to be sensitive to those variations and variables. And it's also worth considering that what is normal today may not be normal in a year's time; what was normal 50 years ago may not be acceptable, may be seen as deviant now.

One of the examples that quite often I give in terms of cultural variations: In the U.S.A. post-Stonewall riots, in 1973 homosexuality was taken out of the diagnostic and statistical manual. So overnight, millions of people were "cured"; they did not have a mental illness anymore. So how do we as clinicians and researchers and the interested public make sense of those kinds of things which are sometimes imposed upon us — that this is "deviant," this is not acceptable.

Cultures influence cognitive development. Cultures influence the way we see the world. So we may be seeing the same mosaic from different angles. And part of the challenge is, how do we bring those two differing views together? Any definition of "normal" changes.

Particularly for psychiatric disorders that's even more relevant because we have few objective tests. So making sense of individual experience then becomes absolutely vital in the context of the family, community, culture, society, national and international norms.

Related: 'Fossil viruses' embedded in the human genome linked to psychiatric disorders

NL: In gaining that cultural understanding, how can psychiatrists-in-training recognize their own learned biases?

DB: I always start off by saying that, "Everybody has at least one prejudice." So the challenge really is, how do you know what it is and what are you going to do about it? That's the starting point in that dialogue about being aware of one's own biases, whether they're conscious or unconscious, whether they are visible or not.

One of the other things that I've been writing about quite a lot recently is the notion of "other" — we create "others" because that gives us our identity. I am not like you; I am different, you are different. How do we accept that difference? How do we make sure that I'm aware, whether it's a gender bias or religion bias or age bias or socioeconomic bias or skin color?

In clinical settings that's absolutely critical because we can then get into ridiculous stereotyping, which gives us a shortcut but it's problematic. No two patients who have similar symptoms will respond or explain [their experience] in the same way.

NL: What role do you feel psychiatry plays in confronting norms that may be bigoted or harmful? I'm thinking of the criminalization of homosexuality, for example.

DB: Psychiatry as a discipline and psychiatrists as professionals have a major role to advocate for our patients. Quite often, patients are not in a position, or may not have the capacity or ability to advocate for themselves. And we are privileged, both in terms of our professional experience, context, learning, but also as members of society [in that psychiatrists hold status and influence]. So we've got a dual role in that advocacy to the policy makers, to funders for research, funders for services. … We are well-placed to be advocates.

But it's really important for us to learn from other cultures as to how they're doing things differently, perhaps with better results. Perhaps doing it in the context of working across barriers — working with religious leaders, working with community leaders, working with teachers, and so on and so forth. So how do we learn from each other?

NL: Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to close on?

DB: I'm going to leave with two key messages. One is that mental health is an integral part of health and it should not be seen as something out there, somebody else's problem. We all need to look after our mental health and well-being so that we can look after our physical health, and vice versa.

The second take-home message really is that health cannot be seen in a silo, or in isolation. Education, employment, housing, justice, health, they're all interlinked. And across all the age ranges from childhood to older adulthood, there are external factors which will impinge upon our health, including mental health. And we need to be aware both from a policy perspective, but also from [the perspective of improving] prevention of mental illnesses and distress and promoting well-being and mental health.

Live Science has partnered with HowTheLightGetsIn festival, which takes place from Sept. 21 to 22 at Kenwood House in London. See how you can get a special discount.

For more than 70 years, scientists have sought evidence of intelligent aliens by hunting for radio signals — interstellar messages beamed billions of miles across space. But for Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence begins much closer to home: In Earth's oceans.

In summer 2023, Loeb led an expedition near Papua New Guinea to dredge up hundreds of tiny metal spheres he proposed were potential remnants of an interstellar meteor that broke up over the Pacific Ocean a decade earlier. For Loeb, this mission wasn't just about finding rare evidence of an object from beyond our solar system — but also a chance to probe the spheres for traces of potential alien technology.

The expedition's lofty goal garnered criticism from the scientific community — but for Loeb, even a faint possibility of learning something new about our cosmos is reason enough to investigate.

"I'm not pretending to know more than I know," Loeb told Live Science in an interview. "I'm willing to consider possibilities that others may completely discount."

Loeb, who is a professor of astrophysics and the Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center of Astrophysics, says he came by his academic success unintentionally, after a lifelong passion for philosophy led him to astrophysics. Live Science caught up with the professor ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, where Loeb will be speaking later this month, to discuss his research, his hopes for future expeditions, and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

Brandon Specktor: You’ve said that, from a young age, you wanted to be a philosopher. Do you have a philosophy that guides your scientific research?

Avi Loeb: Humans, in general, existed for a few million years on Earth, which is just one part in 10,000 of the age of the universe. So we just came at the end of the cosmic play. And we know, thanks to Copernicus and Galileo, that we are not at the center of stage. And so the play is not about us. And we better stay humble and curious. That's my fundamental philosophy.

BS: You've shared many ideas about where humans should look for extraterrestrial life. If you were given a blank check to pursue any of your ideas about aliens, how would you spend it?

AL: I think we should do a better job with Mars, because Mars had liquid water on the surface. We know that for sure. There was some preliminary evidence that perhaps the soil on Mars has some tantalizing signatures of life that were first hinted at with the Viking mission [in 1976]. There are lots of things we can do which are not more difficult than were done already in the '70s. It's just a pity that NASA is not doing it.

[Editor’s note: NASA has collected as many as 30 geological samples on Mars, and is working with the private sector to develop a plan to return them to Earth for analysis. The budget for such missions remains an issue.]

Another thing I would do is, there are millions of objects, roughly a meter in size, that came from outside the solar system. At any point in time, there are a few millions of those that are within the orbit of the Earth around the sun. They don't reflect enough sunlight for us to discover them with our existing telescopes. So I would establish an experimental program attempting to detect them.

I would like to see if, among the rocks that arrive into the solar system from other stars, there is any technological debris. It could be space trash or it could be functional, but it should be easy to differentiate between rocks and something else. So if I had all the money in the world, I would establish an experimental program to monitor objects within the orbit of the Earth around the sun.

We have already detected 'Oumuamua, an interstellar object about 100 meters [330 feet] in size — the size of [SpaceX's] Starship, the biggest spacecraft that humans ever produced. There must be many more objects that are much smaller.

BS: Can future satellites — like NASA's NEO Surveyor, an infrared telescope focused on tracking near-Earth objects — help detect potentially interstellar objects?

AL: Definitely. But only if they come close to Earth. There will be a bigger telescope called the [Vera C.] Rubin Observatory in Chile that will start operations in 2025, and that will likely find many more interstellar objects close to Earth, or within Earth's orbit around the sun. I'm working with my postdocs and students on a program to find those as soon as the data comes in from the Rubin Observatory.

I'm very excited. You see, if you are driven by curiosity, additional data is a blessing. If you are driven by something else, like showing off or establishing your stature, then you would respond to something like Oumuamua the way one of my colleagues did — saying "I wish it never existed."

You see that quite routinely in science, where you have experts that are disturbed and really upset about anomalies. They claim the anomalies do not exist. There is nothing new. We already know everything. The people who are pointing out the anomalies should be discredited. The papers should be ignored ... We should forget about it, and move on. You see that, and unfortunately, that suppresses the progress of science.

BS: You've received some pushback on a recent study of metal spherules that you dredged from the ocean near Papua New Guinea, which you claim to be pieces of an interstellar meteor. Do you put any stock in papers that are critical of your findings? Do you read them with an open mind and see if they actually have compelling evidence?

AL: Yeah. So for example, there was a claim that what we recovered is coal ash. So we looked at 55 elements from the periodic table after this claim was made and showed that it's not coal ash. We made a diagram in which we demonstrated that the abundances of many chemical elements is not that of coal ash.

I submitted this research note to a journal that published the original argument that it's coal ash. The editor said, "well, I'm not sure that there is a point in publishing this"… So I wrote to the chief editor above him, and eventually it got published.

This is all to say that there is an agenda sometimes behind what is happening. It's not a fair game.

BS: So are you planning on returning to Papua New Guinea to look for more evidence of this meteor?

AL: We are planning to do it again in a year. I announced it a few months ago, and I have a few interested parties in funding it. It will be $6.5 million.

BS: How will this expedition be different from the last one?

AL: Last time, we were at sea just for two weeks. The equipment we designed collected the tiny spherules less than a millimeter in size, less than the size of a grain of sand. Of course, that was very valuable, allowing us to find that a fraction of them, 10% of them, had an unusual chemical composition. But it still doesn't tell us the nature of the object. Because these were molten droplets that lost some elements in the process of being molten.

What we want to find are bigger pieces, a centimeter in size, at least several millimeters, that we can use to, first of all, get a full census of all the chemical elements. But also we can examine the material properties. We know that this object had a material strength tougher than even iron meteorites from the solar system because it exploded only in the lower atmosphere where the stress was much greater than witnessed by other meteorites. We want to test the material properties. Also, if we get a big piece, we can do isotope analysis and date the age of the material to demonstrate that it's different from the age of the solar system.

Finally, most importantly, is that we can tell if it's a natural object like a rock or something else, a part of a gadget. The next expedition, we will use a remotely operated vehicle that we will place on the ocean floor, and we will have a video feed, and it will collect [spherule samples]. The hope is to collect bigger pieces and examine them in the laboratory afterwards.

BS: How confident are you that we will find evidence of alien life in your lifetime?

AL: I'm very hopeful because [we are taking] a path that was not taken before, in this case, searching for the nature of objects that arrived into the solar system from outside. The traditional [search for intelligent life] was for radio signals, which is just like waiting for a phone call. Here, we're looking for packages that may be in our mailbox. It's a very different approach. I'm hopeful that we will see something unusual, especially since two out of the known three interstellar objects appear to be weird, we will learn something new. I think within the coming years, there is a good chance that there would be exciting results, either from the Rubin Observatory or the expeditions that we are planning. After the one I mentioned to you, we will go for the second interstellar meteor that is between Portugal and the Azores. It's a very different place.

BS: And just to be clear, you think studying interstellar objects is the most promising avenue for finding evidence of alien life?

AL: I think so. First of all, it's easy to tell the difference between a natural object and an artificial object. There could be a lot of space trash generated by past civilizations. We have been searching for radio signals for 70 years. We need to change the approach. Frankly, radio communication was just a very early technology that humanity developed. However, space exploration, to me, sounds like a generic activity that an advanced civilization will engage in. We should search for those things. I think there is a chance we will find something remarkable. Obviously, without searching, we will not find anything.

It's just like Blaise Pascal argued that you can't just dismiss offhand the possibility that God exists, because if God does exist, the implications are huge. That was the argument of Pascal. I revised it in the context of extraterrestrials. I say, this has to be part of the mainstream of scientific inquiry, because the implications are huge.

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