Professor Avi Loeb (Host)

In such a scenario where you imagine synthetic biology and not just robots with AI made of silicon chips as the technological visitors to a planet, it's quite possible that we will see designed

visitors that are biological, but they were not a result of sort of a random process from a soup of chemicals on a planet.

They were designed to fulfill some tasks.

And therefore we should be open-minded.

to the possibility that we will find in crash sites such things, not just robots with AI, you know, the way that old science fiction movies were about.

So yeah, I'm open to that possibility for the reasons that I just mentioned, because I think that will be our bigger advance relative to AI

And we might use those systems for interstellar travel if we send astronauts to space because they would be designed to survive for long journeys.

We can use synthetic biology to design their bodies to be much more resilient to the harsh conditions of space.

And therefore we could expect visitors of that nature as well.

And the only way to find out if such visitors arrived, and they didn't need to arrive just now, by the way, probably they were around for a long while.

I mean, we tend to think that if we will spot something, it's just very recent, but probably they have been around for a long time.

It's just that we started noticing unusual things.

once we develop the technological skills to do that.

So I'm open-minded to that as well as to just hardware, like technological hardware.

Either way, we should not have any prejudice as to what we might find.

We should be open-minded and look for unusual objects.

That's all.

Well, OK, so there are two ways to look at it.

It's actually a blessing to be given just unclassified data for two reasons.

One, you are not signing any NDA about not releasing it so you can share with the public.