Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

If we change, if we have an ontological shock, if we realize that there is a neighbor that has been visiting us, the question is what to do about it and how to proceed, how to move forward.

And the entire space age is a recognition that the Earth is not the center of the universe.

It will definitely bring humanity to a better place if we know what is in our cosmic neighborhood.

And my sense is it will give us a sense of modesty because we will realize that we are not at the top of the food chain, cosmologically speaking.

Well, I think we should not overestimate how incompetent members of government could be.

So even with the investment of a trillion dollars a year in the defense budget, it's quite possible that data is being collected, but it's not analyzed properly.

We're not taking advantage of the latest AI algorithms to analyze the data.

The threshold for detecting objects is not set correctly.

How else would you explain the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down?

That was a giant object.

Okay.

It was surprising.

And I'm willing to bet that for every giant Chinese spy balloon, there should have been many, many hundreds of thousands of smaller objects from China hovering over the US that were not recognized.

So saying that, oh, the budget is huge.

There are lots of brilliant people within the Pentagon.

I mean, that's true, but they may not be using the correct approach to detecting these objects and we get a wake up call.

How do we get the wake up call in the form of this Chinese spy balloon?

That's an example, but also in the form of orbs that may end up being drones of a very unusual technology that we are not aware of.

So the way to make progress is not by assuming that the government is fully competent and knows everything.

But instead, you know, trying to figure out things that government cannot because, you know, a government is not a scientific organization.