James Davenport

It's massive, powerful camera attached to an eight and a half meter telescope, right?

So an enormous piece of glass, one of the sort of 10 biggest pieces of glass ever built.

It's incredibly powerful.

And what you get for all that is a sample of more than 10 billion stars.

The best samples of stars so far are 1 to 2 billion.

We're going to push that up to 10, maybe 15 or 20 billion stars in our galaxy.

That's a total transformational shift.

It's going to be something that really is a tide that raises all the sort of astronomical boats.

We're going to see the binary stars and the supernova.

We're going to double the known number of asteroids and comets in the solar system.

In the first year.

Good.

Because success doesn't depend on finding something, right?

The search itself is like the journey is the thing that we're after.

It may take, and this is what I tell my students, it may take a thousand years to know the answer to this question.

We've only just begun looking.

1960 was not that long ago.

And even if we do all of our work and we get it up to a swimming pool as compared to the ocean, that's only one swimming pool against a very big ocean of possible parameter space that we're looking.

It is going to take a long time to put this story together and to be sure that we have found something or that we haven't, that we're alone or that we're not.

That's okay.