Avi Loeb

Right now, there are 8 billion.

Where is everybody?

They died.

So the same is true about civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.

Most of them died.

Most of them perished.

We were not around to listen to their cries for help.

We just came recently to exist with telescopes just over the past century.

And maybe when we hear cries like that, we say, oh, no, it's nothing.

It's a natural process that makes those cries when we detect fast radio bursts or something.

And my point is there were lots of things like us or even better than us for billions of years, just like the earth was moving around the sun for 4.5 billion years before the Vatican even existed.

We can live under the illusion that we are the most important actor on the cosmic stage, but we are probably not.

And we should approach it from a sense of modesty that we are just minor actors.

Let's figure out what's going on here.

Let's find them and then have some relationship with those.

These are siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations.

I had a group of religious scholars that came to Harvard

just last year, and they asked me, if we find extraterrestrials, will it affect our religious beliefs?

And I said, look, I have two daughters.

And when the second one was born, it didn't take away any of the love that I have to the first one.