Avi Loeb

So we encourage volunteers to go through some of the images that because this will be the ground truth that we can train machine learning software

to figure out if, you know, because machine learning or artificial intelligence can go over much larger volumes of data that we get every day.

We are monitoring millions of objects per year.

And so once we train the AI, it would do a lot of work, but in order to train it, we need to know what the ground truth is.

And for that, we ask volunteers to look at the images and identify different types of objects.

Have you found anything interesting yet?

Well, I told my research team that if they see any anomalous object, they can call me at the middle of the night.

And so far they haven't.

Any plans for additional observatories?

Yeah, so we have one in Massachusetts, another one in Pennsylvania, in addition to the one in Las Vegas.

And we are basically limited by donations, by the funding that we get.

We just, over the past week, received a very generous donation from the Templeton Foundation, which... So the public can support this financially if we want to?

Yes.

Yeah, and we have a foundation that is a 501c that we don't have to pay taxes for the donations or we don't need to pay overhead through Harvard University.

In principle, the donations go to our observatories to build new ones or to put better instruments.

But there are other ambitions to the Galileo project, for example, going after interstellar meteors.

These are objects colliding with Earth that came from outside the solar system.

And just a few weeks ago, we discovered a new one.

And that is what I mentioned before that the interstellar meteor from 2014 that we went after in the expedition to the Pacific Ocean that I asked my student six years ago to look through the NASA catalog and find any object that is moving too fast to be bound to the sun so that it's interstellar in origin.

And it took him a week to come back and say, I found this one, it looks really interesting.