Avi Loeb

Let's search for intelligence for 50 years, invest billions of dollars.

If we don't find anything, we'll be at the same place as the dark matter searches are right now.

So it's not an unusual request.

And I think it makes a lot of sense given the interest of the public.

We can search, for example, for city lights on the night side of exoplanets.

We can search for industrial pollution in the atmospheres, not just for microbes.

And we haven't done that.

Of course, what we did do, I mean, there is a community...

that was searching for radio signals.

But if you think about radio communication, it's just an old technology that we are slowly abandoning.

And the communication in the future might be handled with lasers.

Right now, we have fiber optics used on Earth for communication.

So it's not at all clear that a century from now or a thousand years from now or a million years or a billion years, this technology will be actually being used.

So why are we putting all our eggs in one basket, searching for radio signals?

It's also like waiting for a phone call.

You might wait forever.

Nobody would call you.

And it's a very different approach to search for a package in your mailbox.

or some tennis ball thrown by a neighbor in your backyard.

Looking for physical objects is a completely different approach because you don't need the sender to be active or to be alive.