Avi Loeb

just in the Milky Way galaxy.

And so my guess is that we are not at the top of the food chain, that there are things better than us.

And that's an opportunity for us to learn.

And so it makes a lot of sense to invest in the search.

Unlike Enrico Fermi, who just asked the question, we can actually search for partners.

And when you go on blind dates, the best advice that...

someone could give you is to aim high, not to aim low.

You should look for a partner that is better than you.

And at this time, the astronomy community is focused on searching for microbes.

And I argue, you know, this is lower than us.

I want to find something better than us.

So I would like us to invest billions of dollars, you know, in parallel to searching for microbes, also in the search for a higher level of intelligence, technological civilizations out there.

If we are searching for primitive life, let's search for technological civilizations at the same time with us.

Same level of investment because the signatures of technological civilizations might be easier to detect because they create products that are different from nature.

And if we find any of these products in our backyard, we would know that they exist.

And finding microbes is very challenging from a distance.

Yeah, that's an object that is close to us that we can visit and look for the signal.

Well, Mars is a dead planet right now because it has a desert and very little atmosphere there and no liquid water on the surface.

But the idea of the mainstream of astronomy right now is to search for molecules like oxygen or methane in the atmospheres of exoplanets, planets in the habitable zone around the other stars.

The problem is not only that it's very challenging to find those backer fingerprints that are very faint and difficult to detect, but also that once we find them, it will not be obvious that the same molecules cannot be produced by geological processes.