Avi Loeb

We call it dark matter.

And we are investing billions of dollars in searching for dark matter for about 50 years now.

We haven't found it.

So searching for things that we don't know if they exist is part of frontier science.

And we already spent billions of dollars on searching.

Just a couple of weeks ago, there were two experiments that were searching for a ghost particle, which is called sterile neutrino.

And the two experiments cost $90 million.

And they obviously took a decade for the people working on those experiments to bring them to fruition.

And at the end of the day, they ended up not finding the particle.

Even though they had good reasons to expect that it might be there based on anomalies in other experiments, it was not found.

So very often, you find in the mainstream an investment of large amounts of money, a lot of research, a lot of time dedicated in a direction that proves to be...

There was a search for a new symmetry of nature called supersymmetry by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

And that Large Hadron Collider cost them $10 billion or so.

It was also searching for dark matter.

Haven't found supersymmetry, no dark matter.

And it's part of doing science.

And of course, all I'm saying is that on a question that is so important for the public, where the public funds science, the question of whether we are alone, is there intelligent life out there?

How can the scientific community ignore that question and say it's too speculative and let's invest just in the search for microbes?

That is unclear to me.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a matter of common sense to say, let's at least invest as much time and money as we did in the search for specific types of dark matter.