Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean

Hi, this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm, sunny Colorado. Today is August 29th, 2023, and we get to talk about aliens, or at least spherules from different places. Many of that I finance a lot of interesting projects, such as the Hoskinson Center for Formal Mathematics and our work in synthetic biology and regenerative medicine. However, I’m also very interested in astronomy, particularly in changing narratives. There’s a project called the Galileo Project, led by Avi Loeb from Harvard University.

He took a huge risk by being one of the few astronomers and astrophysicists willing to discuss the existence of extraterrestrial life. It’s a bizarre concept that we’re this tiny blue marble in the middle of a vast ocean, yet we’re only allowed to talk about deterministic, mechanistic things, effectively ignoring the idea of intelligent life. Avi had the courage to write many interesting papers about how the universe could be populated with intelligent life and what we should look out for. I’ve always been a fan of his work. I saw him on Joe Rogan and Lex Friedman, and we both share a friendship with Lex.

Eventually, when he sought financing to go to Papua New Guinea to launch an expedition to retrieve something that had fallen into the ocean in 2014, which had a high probability of being an anomaly, I decided to take a look at the science. After several discussions about how we would conduct the expedition, the types of people needed, and the technologies required, we reached an understanding, and I financed it. Between June 14th and June 28th of this year, we were 60 miles off the coast of Manus Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It was so far out that you couldn’t see anything but ocean. We were on a catamaran made of aluminum, working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, getting used to our sea legs.

We deployed a magnetic sled and dragged it behind the ship over a large search area, recovering over 700 spherules, ranging in diameter from 0.05 to about 1.3 millimeters—smaller than a human hair. Like all good academics, we wrote a paper together. This is the first time I’ve ever written a paper out of Harvard, and the paper is now public.

It is 44 pages long, and I’d like to cover a few details with you. The paper is titled "Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean of the CNES and EOS 20140108," referring to January 8th, 2014. We refer to it as IM1. You’ll see various authors from Berkeley, the PNG University of Technology, and many from Harvard, including myself. In the abstract, we conducted an extensive towed magnetic sled survey during the period from June 14th to June 28th over the seafloor about 85 kilometers north of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.

We found about 700 spherules with diameters ranging from 0.05 to 1.3 millimeters. Of these, 57 were analyzed. Approximately 0.

26 square kilometers of seafloor was sampled in the survey, centered around a calculated path of the asteroid or interstellar object, with control areas to the north and south. The spherules significantly concentrated along the expected meteor path, retrieved from seafloor depths ranging from about 1.5 to 2.2 kilometers. It’s important to understand that when we dropped this sled, it took over an hour to reach the seafloor because it was two kilometers down—6,000 meters.

Imagine that, more than 6,000 feet. We performed mass spectrometry on the 47 spherules, and the short version is that the unique spherules showed an excess of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium by up to three orders of magnitude relative to the solar system standard of CI chondrites. We call these below-type spherules, which have never been seen before. They also have very low refractory lithophile elements, such as rubidium, while volatile elements like magnesium, zinc, and lead are depleted as expected from evaporative losses during a meteor outburst. The paper discusses how we collected everything.

We sampled not just the spherules but also took control samples far away from where we thought the meteor landed for comparison. We analyzed the samples and broke them into four groups. The electron microscope images of the spherules show that some melted off the skin of the object and merged together. We were able to see the different elements in them, such as carbon, oxygen, magnesium, aluminum, and silicon. You’d expect to see a lot of silicon due to contamination from the seafloor.

We refer to these new types of differentiated spherules as D-type spherules, which have never been described in the cosmic spherule literature. There are two subtypes of the D differentiated spherules: low lanthanum and bilau. The distinct elemental patterns are shown in the figures of the paper. This is an active scientific project that has been submitted to a journal specializing in oceanography. Because it’s novel to recover these types of things from the ocean, there will be follow-up papers focusing more on the astrophysics and astronomy side as we analyze more samples.

Analysis is happening simultaneously at Berkeley, Harvard, and in Berlin. The conclusion is the fun part. The magnetic sled survey around IM1’s path discovered about 700 spherules of varying diameters. The spatial distribution of these spherules is significantly concentrated along the bolide path. Mass spectrometry measurements show a high enrichment of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, with extremely strong enrichment of refractory lithophile elements and very low refractory lithophile elements such as rubidium.

Volatile elements like magnesium, zinc, and lead were mostly lost during evaporation. The abundance pattern suggests that IM1 may have originated from a highly differentiated crust of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system. Its high speed of 60 kilometers per second and the large number of similar objects per star statistically challenge common dynamical processes. The overabundance of heavy elements could have originated from an enrichment and fragmentation process of ejecta from a core-collapse supernova or neutron star mergers. However, the bilau pattern also displays s-process enrichment, which must have a separate origin, such as asymptotic giant branch stars.

Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin. These interpretations will be critically considered along with additional results from the spherule analysis. In summary, we found something that, based on its composition, is likely not from our solar system, which is why we can assert that it is extrasolar. However, we don’t yet have enough knowledge to definitively say whether it’s extraterrestrial or originated from a collapsed star or a different type of planet. This is, I believe, the first extrasolar object definitively recovered on Earth as a spherule.

The exciting part is that we’ve been able to isolate where the larger pieces landed. With enough material, we could determine whether this is of natural or artificial origin. We discussed crystallized magma and how it could come from the core of a planet. This is an amazing piece of science, and a tremendous amount of work went into it, especially from Stein Jacobson, who meticulously prepared the samples. This project involved a stellar team, including Art Wright, a retired Navy captain who has a legendary background in finding Russian nuclear subs.

We also had young talents like Amir Siraj, a graduate student. This was truly an all-star team. We learned an enormous amount from this expedition. Our next steps will involve planning further expeditions and continuing the peer review process. Netflix filmed a documentary about it, directed by Jason Cohen.

We’ll likely do appearances on platforms like Joe Rogan, but we need to focus on the science first. If you’re interested in the paper, I’ve put a link to it in the show notes, and I encourage you to read it and send your questions to Avi and the team. Thank you all for listening. This was a fun project, and I hope it inspires others interested in astronomy and the search for intelligent life in the universe.