Avi Loeb

And if you give up on the search, if you say there is nobody out there,

you will never find a partner.

So the mistake that Fermi made was that he didn't build the telescope.

He didn't really search for it.

He just said, I don't see anyone having lunch, any extraterrestrials sitting next to me at lunch in Los Alamos in 1950.

Therefore, where is everybody?

Oh yeah, so right now the best survey telescope we have is called the Rubin Observatory in Chile.

It was funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy.

Just started operations half a year ago and it has a camera with a 3.2

billion pixels.

So a thousand times more pixels than your cell phone camera or the camera that you're looking through.

So it's an amazing instrument.

The camera is roughly half the height of a person.

It's quite amazing and it will survey the southern sky every four days.

So it could alert us to interstellar objects bigger than a football field.

Every few months we should potentially find something like that.

However, it's only limited to the southern sky and we need a copy of it in the northern sky.

So that would require an investment of a billion dollars to have a second one.

And I think it will be worthwhile so that we cover the entire sky.

And that would be sort of an alert system to big objects, bigger than a football field, that come from interstellar space.