Avi Loeb

There are billions of them probably.

Now, my colleagues, those...

Scientists who think traditionally, they say, well, you know, microbes came to Earth very early.

Therefore, they must be everywhere.

So let's define our highest priority, searching for microbes on other houses in our cosmic street.

And I say, good, you can do that from the vantage point of your home.

You can look through the window and search for microbes in your neighbor's yards, but you would need to put $10 billion to develop a big enough instrument that would be able to detect the chemical fingerprints of microbes on exoplanets.

And think about the possibility that there was actually, there is a resident in one of those houses.

That resident might show up in your front door

at some point, or you might see an object that arrives to your backyard or your mailbox from that resident.

A black swan event.

Or you might see some construction project from a distance.

That might be easier to detect than microbes, so we should hedge our bets.

We should invest billions of dollars on both fronts at the moment.

The scientific community is willing to allocate more than $10 billion to searching for microbes, but no recommendation is made to allocate any federal funding to the search for intelligence.

And I say that that is an oversight.

We need to bring materials back.

It's called sample return, and NASA has plans.

We need to bring a sample back to Earth so that in our laboratories we can do isotope analysis and make sure that whatever material

we see on the rocks there that do look as if they were made by microbes because we know that Mars had an atmosphere like the Earth.