Avi Loeb

Therefore, as scientists, we have the obligation to attend to the public's interests, right?

If there is a question that is of great interest to the public, we should attend to it.

And why should we invest $10 billion in the search for microbes while allocating zero funding federally?

to the search for technological signatures.

That makes no sense given that it's coming from taxpayers' funds.

Because you mentioned string theory and if we talk about dark matter, dark energy.

We don't know what it is.

We invested billions of dollars.

Most people think that we know what that is and that it exists.

We call it dark matter just because we don't know what it is.

It's dark.

We can't see it.

We give it a name.

And there were billions of dollars invested in searching for dark matter.

For example, the CERN Large Hadron Collider at the cost of $10 billion was aiming to discover a new symmetry of nature called supersymmetry.

And if that were the case, there would be particles associated with this symmetry that could be the dark matter, but didn't find that symmetry, didn't find dark matter.

We still don't know what it is.

We invested billions of dollars over decades.

And unless we invest billions of dollars for the next few decades in searching for technological signatures, we cannot even be on the same, on par with the other unknowns about the universe.

And by the way, what I say is often science funds the search for the known unknowns.