Avi Loeb

It's called planetary defense, okay?

And we are dealing not with rocks.

We are dealing with technological gadgets.

So it should be much more sophisticated.

So I'm saying let's start with the level of billions of dollars just search.

If we encounter a clearly technological alien object, then...

the budget will rise by a factor of a thousand from the military budget uh... portion going into it in addition to that of course we should look for technological signatures in other ways and i wrote papers about it over the years i suggested searching for artificial lights you know you look at the planet it's illuminated by the star from one side so as it moves around the star it's just like the moon you know you can see it the illuminated side from different angles

However, if it has on the night side, if it has artificial lighting,

then what you see, you don't even have to resolve the planet, you see more light than you expect based on reflection of starlight, okay?

So that's another thing you can search for.

You can look for, you know, the traditional way was looking for radio signal, which is just like waiting for a phone call.

You know, nobody may call you when you're listening.

So that didn't prove productive for 60.

other than the wow signal then in addition to that i wrote i wrote a paper saying look we are planning to invest 10 billion dollars in searching for the chemical fingerprints of microbes in atmospheres of exoplanets that's what the astronomy community defined in the 2020 decadal survey is the highest priority and it's called the habitable world observatory

And I said, okay, well, it's nice to search for those chemical fingerprints of microbes, but we can also search for the chemical fingerprints of industrial pollution.

In the Earth's atmosphere, we pollute the atmosphere with all kinds of molecules that nature would have never made.

CFCs, for example.

And we can search for those.

Again, the mainstream is...

You know, they might make a footnote saying, oh, that is also possible.