Epoch Times - The Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Avi Loeb
Aired: 2026-03-13
Duration: 03:28


=== Government Agitation on Aliens (02:54) ===

[00:00:00]  Professor Loeb, there are all sorts of types of messaging that are coming out from our government.
[00:00:07]  We have Representative Ana Paulina Luna basically agitating to get disclosures.
[00:00:13]  We've had hearings.
[00:00:14]  We've had both President Trump and President Obama talk about extraterrestrial life in this cage away.
[00:00:22]  I believe President Obama even said he believes that it exists.
[00:00:26]  So why this caginess?
[00:00:28]  You make it sound like we don't really know.
[00:00:31]  Well, we don't know because we don't have conclusive evidence that was presented to us.
[00:00:37]  And there are two ways of getting to this evidence.
[00:00:41]  It's either in the hands of government because the US government was monitoring the sky and the oceans for many decades.
[00:00:49]  And in the process of doing that, the defense budget is huge.
[00:00:53]  It's close to a trillion dollars for 2026.
[00:00:55]  The process of collecting a lot of data, they may have noticed unusual phenomena that are quite rare.
[00:01:02]  And so that's one way for us to get at the truth about the physical reality, about our neighborhood.
[00:01:08]  The second is, of course, to do the scientific work needed, invest funds and research effort in trying to find evidence for extraterrestrials.
[00:01:19]  And you know, in 1950, the physicist Enrico Fermi was having lunch at Los Alamos.
[00:01:26]  He was part of the Manhattan Project and stayed there later.
[00:01:30]  And they were discussing extraterrestrials back then.
[00:01:34]  That's 76 years ago.
[00:01:36]  And he was commenting, well, they are likely to exist, but where is everybody?
[00:01:43]  And if I were next to him, I would put my arm around his shoulder and say, Enrico, that is a question that every lonely person asks.
[00:01:51]  And what you tell a lonely person is don't be so presumptuous.
[00:01:54]  You're not that attractive.
[00:01:56]  Your partner will not come to you.
[00:01:58]  You should be proactive and search for the partner.
[00:02:01]  And Enrico didn't really build a telescope.
[00:02:04]  He didn't look for the evidence.
[00:02:06]  You know, space and time are vast in astronomical terms.
[00:02:10]  We are talking about the size of the Milky Way is tens of thousands of light years.
[00:02:15]  And the age of the Milky Way is roughly 10 billion years.
[00:02:18]  So you can't just ask sitting at lunch, why aren't they next to me?
[00:02:24]  You have to search for them.
[00:02:27]  And we haven't done that extensively.
[00:02:31]  Right now, the astronomy community decided as its highest priority to search for microbes.
[00:02:37]  And they're willing to pay of the order of $10 billion or more in the next two decades in order to build a space observatory that would give us a hint about the chemical fingerprints of microbes on other planets.

=== Aim High for Intelligent Beings (00:34) ===

[00:02:54]  My point is when you go on a date, you better aim high, not low.
[00:03:00]  And therefore, I would be much happier if instead of meeting a microbe as my dating partner, I would meet a more intelligent being because then there is a chance of learning from that being and becoming better.
[00:03:16]  And so I say let's invest similar level of funding in the search for technological civilizations because we can potentially benefit much more.
[00:03:26]  It will change the future of humanity.