Chris Cuomo (3:34)

Professor Loeb, good to have you, as always.

Professor Avi Loeb (3:37)

My pleasure.

Chris Cuomo (3:38)

Why are people so interested in you these days? What's on everybody's mind?

Professor Avi Loeb (3:42)

Well, it's not about me. It's about a visitor that we have from interstellar space called 3I, ATLAS, the third interstellar object discovered by a telescope, a survey telescope half a meter in diameter in Chile called atlas. And some people think that the. It's a nickname referring to an object called ATLAS that has three eyes. But that's not the case.

Chris Cuomo (4:05)

So what is this comet, and why should we be especially curious about it?

Professor Avi Loeb (4:10)

It's the third visitor from outside the solar system, and it has some anomalies. For example, its mass is at least a million times bigger than the first visitor we had. And, you know, if there is a limited reservoir of material, you would expect a million small objects to arrive before you see a giant one. And in fact, there isn't enough material, rocky material, in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock to our immediate neighborhood once per decade. The survey was a decade long, and I did a calculation as soon as the object was discovered and realized that an object the size of a city, somewhere between 5 and 20 km, as we estimate for this object, is just extremely rare. So that's the first anomaly. And then I said, well, maybe it arrived at our neighborhood because it was targeting it. And lo and behold, it actually is traveling along the plane of the planets around the sun. So the planets orbit in a plane. It's called the ecliptic. And it came within 5 degrees of that plane. And the chance of that happening at random is 1 in 500.

Professor Avi Loeb (5:24)

So why is it that we are so lucky? There is a chance of one in a thousand that it would arrive within a decade, based on my calculations. So that's a 0.1% probability. And then a chance of 1 in 500 that it will be in that plane. And just these two factors already tell you it's extremely rare. And then on top of that, it sheds some nickel without much iron, which is very unusual for a comet because the only place where we find nickel without iron is in the industrial production of nickel alloys for aerospace applications. And so the fundamental question is, is it technological in origin? Was it designed by some intelligence? And of course, the way to figure it out is by collecting clues, evidence, and that's the work of a detective. You know, that is usually, except when you are dealing with academia, the situation is different because there are experts, comet experts. And I'm asked, why are they so dismissive of anything other than a comet? And I say, well, you know, they behave just like AI systems that we train. We train them on data sets. And these experts were trained on data sets that include only comets. So for them, anything in the sky must be a comet, even if it's a spacecraft. They would say, you know, it's a comet of a type that we've never seen before, but it's still a comet. Because there was an example of that. OUMUAMUA was the first interstellar object discovered in 2017, didn't have any signatures of a comet. There was no gas, no dust around it, no cometary tail, yet it had some non gravitational acceleration. So I said, well, maybe it's technological. And they said, no, it's a dark comet, meaning it's a comet where you cannot see the signatures of a comet. And you know, I say, how do you know? It's very strange. And actually, on January 2 this year, there was an object near Earth that was cataloged by the Minor Planet center, and they declared it as a near Earth asteroid. And then a day later they realized, oh, wait a minute, it moves along the trajectory of the Tesla Roadster car that was launched by SpaceX. And so it's not a rock. They said, we will take it out of our catalog because it's actually a car. And the only reason they knew it's not a rock but a car is because they knew that SpaceX launched as an object. But suppose Elon Musk was not the most accomplished space entrepreneur since the Big Bang. You know, that's completely possible in my view. Suppose there was some other exoplanet on which there was a company called SpaceX that launched a different car, and we don't know what the parameters of that car is, and we will see it in our sky. The same comet experts would say, you know, it's a comet or it's an asteroid. So you can't really trust the experts. You know, My point is the foundation of science is based on the humility to learn, not on the arrogance of expertise.

Chris Cuomo (8:31)

Say that again.

Professor Avi Loeb (8:33)

The foundation of science is the humility to learn, not the arrogance of expertise. And I see science as the privilege of Maintaining your childhood curiosity. I haven't changed much since the time I was a kid. And my colleagues are making two mistakes. One, they lecture to the public what the public should know. And that's why the public sees science as an occupation of the elite, because it feels like a teacher in a classroom telling the students what they need to know. And very often, that teacher doesn't know what they're speaking about.

Professor Avi Loeb (9:13)

Things that were declared by science one way end up being a different way. And the reason for that is simple, because it's work in progress. It's a learning experience. We can make mistakes, but it's part of the human experience of making mistakes and learning. So the mistake that my colleagues are making is they pretend to know the answer. They pretend to know that this is a comet, and they tell the public that it includes the NASA administrator, the acting administrator, Sean Duffy. It includes an influencer or commentator named Brian Cox in the UK telling, it's a comet, definitely comet. None of these people is doing any scientific research. They haven't written a single scientific paper. They haven't looked at the evidence. They haven't analyzed it. They just say what they think it is. And that's a big mistake, because the public doesn't appreciate that. The public appreciates the approach I'm taking, which is involving the public in the process of learning.

Chris Cuomo (10:10)

Right.

Professor Avi Loeb (10:10)

You know, we see some evidence, we're making conjectures, we are testing them. So I get a lot of messages. I got one this morning from a mother that said that her daughter now wants to become a scientist, thanks to listening to me on podcasts or. So that's one thing that my colleagues are missing, how to engage the public correctly in not pretending to be experts, but instead showing that it's work in progress. It's a learning experience that everyone can be excited about, and the public is excited. You know, my essays are read by 100,000 readers, each and every one of them that I put on medium.com then the second mistake that they're making, you know, when we deal with a galaxy at the edge of the universe, it has no implications if it's billions of light years away. No implications to our daily life, to society, no political implication, no religious implication. However, when we deal with a visitor to our backyard, an interstellar object, you know, there is a potential threat to humanity. There is a potential implication to our religious beliefs, our philosophical beliefs. It holds the potential for a huge impact on our future. And because of that, even if we assign a small probability that it might be a technological gadget the implications are huge, and therefore we must take it seriously. You know, the intelligence agencies, governments know that when there is a risk of a terrorist attack, you might say, oh, the probability is just 1%. We don't need to. So scientists would say 99%. I'm confident that it will not happen. Therefore, I will dismiss and ridicule any discussion about the 1% probability that it's something else. However, we know from very respectful public servants that this is not the right approach. What you need to do because of the large implications, you have to take it seriously. And there is a lot of money in the intelligence agencies dealing with Black swan events. These are events that have low probability, but you must consider them seriously because of the implications. The Israeli intelligence agencies made a huge mistake about October 7th because they had the data. There were anomalies in the data, but they dismissed them because they had the theory that Hamas will never attack. And you see the devastating consequences of that. So when dealing with a visitor to.

Chris Cuomo (12:38)

Our backyard, there is a chance this.

Professor Avi Loeb (12:40)

Visitor will come through our front door. Therefore, we must take it seriously. We must collect as much data as possible to clear up the nature of the visitor. That's my second point. And again, since common sense is not common in academia, there are a number of zealots that are attacking me that this should not be even brought up. There was an edit. I wrote the first paper on Three Eye Atlas, and in it I said, the object is too massive for it to be delivered over a decade to our neighborhood. Therefore, maybe it was targeting. That was the concluding sentence. One sentence. The editor said, your paper will not be published unless you remove that sentence. And then this editor went publicly to the New York Post and said, it's nonsense on stilts to consider the possibility that Three Eye Atlas is technological. He said that this is a British guy that is the editor. And he used this power to suppress a single sentence at the end of a paper. And as much as I am a rebel, what I did in response to that is write a full paper just about that possibility, because this is not the way to handle science.

Chris Cuomo (13:56)

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Chris Cuomo (16:45)

Avi I agree with a lot of what you said, certainly about the proprietary nature of Science and the arrogance of science. Now of course, as with everything else in our society, they're all pendular formations because everything so binary because it's based off of our binary political system. And now science has been politicized ever since COVID I would argue that it started even before that with reproductive rights. And people think they knew things about biology because it suited their religious or political opinion. But we are where we are now, which is nobody believes anything unless it suits what they believe. Which is why there's an opportunity to get us back to the empiricism of process and how you go through it. And when you look at the comet, you got two possibilities. One is it's a big ass rock and I hope it doesn't hit us. And I'd like to know what the chance is that 10 years from now you and I are going to be disappeared, as we say now in our new censored vocabulary on digital media. And what is the real chance that it isn't a rock. It was built. So the first question is, is it.

Professor Avi Loeb (17:53)

Going to hit us.

Professor Avi Loeb (17:56)

According to its current path? No. But if it will maneuver, it might hit us.

Chris Cuomo (18:01)

So what's the chance that it is a thing? That it's not? It is obviously a thing, but that it has an intelligence to it, that it was made? That it isn't just at the mercy of the forces of the universe.

Professor Avi Loeb (18:15)

Right? That's an excellent question. And I defined a scale back in July when it was discovered. Defined a scale where 0 means it's a natural object. Nothing to worry about because we can forecast the trajectory. It's no threat to Earth. 10 means that it's definitely technological and it could be a potential threat to humanity. And then I gave this object a four on that scale. It's called the lobe scale. And since then we got more data. But what we are now entering a new month. That where we will get the best data ever. And let me explain. It passed near the sun on October 29th. That's when it absorbed a lot of sunlight, 770 watts per square meter when it was closest to the sun. And we saw it getting very bright, at least an order of magnitude brighter than it was before. We saw it deviating from the path that it was supposed to follow. So there is some non gravitational force. To answer your question, something is acting on it. Is it propulsion or is it just cometary evaporation? These are the two possibilities. In the case of a comet, you have pockets of ice that get sublimated when they are illuminated. By sunlight. And you get jets of material coming off the surface that push the object in the opposite direction, some recoil.

Chris Cuomo (19:39)

So we have to decide, is it.

Professor Avi Loeb (19:41)

Thrusters, technological thrusters, pushing it, or just the pockets of ice that get evaporated by sunlight? And we actually got some images in recent days which are tantalizing because what you see are more than seven jets coming from the object, Highly tightly collimated jets. By the way, it doesn't look like a cometary tail that is fuzzy and beautiful. It's seven jets, like hair, that stand up and then they extend to large distances in the direction of the sun, out to a million kilometers, in the opposite direction, out to 3 million kilometers. And I did a simple calculation. You know, those jets going in the direction of the sun, they're facing the solar wind. There is a wind coming from the sun. They are not being deflected. And that means that they carry a significant amount of mass. And I calculated they should carry altogether of order, a few billion tons of material. Now then you say, okay, well, that means that so much mass of ice, if it's a natural comet, was evaporated. Is that possible? Well, you need a huge amount of surface to accommodate that, at least of an object 20 km in diameter, you know, bigger than Manhattan Island. And it's bigger than the size estimated for three atlas, based on the Hubble Space Telescope data, for example.

Chris Cuomo (21:09)

What's it called, by the way?

Professor Avi Loeb (21:11)

3I. Atlas is the name.

Chris Cuomo (21:13)

Why 3i? Because it's the third.

Professor Avi Loeb (21:15)

It's the third I for interstellar and ATLAS for the telescope in Chile that discovered it half a meter in diameter.

Chris Cuomo (21:23)

What's the chance that you could build something that is the size of a city?

Professor Avi Loeb (21:28)

An excellent question, because so far, the biggest rocket that we built is Starship.

Professor Avi Loeb (21:35)

SpaceX is studying it, and that's less than 100 meters, including the fuel, you know, the rocket fuel. This thing appears to be the size of a city, you know, 5 to 20 kilometers in diameter. We don't have the technology to imagine even the launch of a spacecraft that big. But Arthur C. Clarke imagined it in his science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama, where a cylindrical spacecraft tens of kilometers in size arrives. Now, this might be the size needed if you want to carry passengers. You know, one thing we have not done is imagine building a space platform that will carry humans to long journeys. We are dreaming about going to Mars, but that's just a desert. It's another rock. You know, it's not a good idea to live a habitable planet like the Earth and Go to a desert, a rock that doesn't have much of an atmosphere, doesn't have liquid water, you know, it's really harsh condition. Why would anyone want to go to that place? It's much better to design a spacecraft, a platform that can support life as we know it and will allow people to travel large distances and can go anywhere.

Chris Cuomo (22:47)

How sure are you, Avi, that at some point we will figure out that Earth isn't the only place that was able to evolve to a place to support carbon based life?

Professor Avi Loeb (23:02)

Well, I think it's arrogant to imagine that we are the only ones, okay, because we see 100 billion stars and a substantial fraction of them, you know, tens of percent potentially.

Professor Avi Loeb (23:14)

Have Earth size planets, roughly the same separation from their host star. And you know, if you just draw.

Professor Avi Loeb (23:25)

Luck out of, you know, a billion runs of, you know, it's very likely that there were things like us long before we came to exist, because most of the stars are billions of years older than the sun. So I would say we should adopt the default assumption that things like us existed and that the most accomplished siblings, most civilizations died. You know, if you ask where is everybody? The same question applies to humans. Where, you know, there were 117 billion humans on this Earth. Where is everybody? Most of them are dead. Okay, so there were civilizations that died throughout cosmic history. We were not around to witness their pain. And we don't mourn them. Nobody would mourn us, by the way. Just take it. Nobody necessarily comes to visit the solar system because of us, because we just came to exist over the, you know, the, the human species just existed over the past few million years, you know, which is one part in 10,000 of the age of the Milky Way galaxy. It's nothing. But the point is that it's very likely that there were things like us. And the most accomplished siblings were able to live monuments, you know, legacies that fly in between the stars. These are spacecraft. And that's the only way by which the history of the Milky Way will remember us only if we leave this planet. Because in a billion years it will be consumed by the sun. The sun will expand and eventually, well, it will brighten up, make the Earth a desert within a billion years. And then 7.6 billion years from now, it will engulf the Earth and the Earth will sink to the core of the Sun. Nothing will be left. The moon will be sucked, you know, it will crash on Earth. Before that, everything we are familiar with, all the monuments we live on, this Earth will not survive in the long term.

Chris Cuomo (25:16)

So you're saying I should rent? Really? I mean buying then is not a good long term strategy.

Professor Avi Loeb (25:21)

Well, most of the real estate, if you are worried about real estate, most of the real estate is beyond Earth. You know, there are 10 to the power 21 planets like the Earth in the observable volume of the universe. And in the Milky Way galaxy there are of all the tens of billions of them. So I would invest in real estate somewhere else and maybe on a spacecraft.

Chris Cuomo (25:44)

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Chris Cuomo (28:45)

So, Avi, let me ask you something. What is for all the possibilities? Okay. And I believe in exactly what you've said, even though I don't have anywhere near the intellectual construct to motivate this belief, which is I can't accept the arrogance that this is the only place where there's life. I mean, I wish I could be tethered to something simple that takes critical thought out of my belief structure, like the Bible, you know, or, you know, some religion or something where this is all I believe is what they tell me. I share your belief that it's too arrogant to believe no one else has figured it out, but that's a possibility. What do you believe? The chance is that there has been outside extraterrestrial intelligence that has visited and found its way, or there is discernible proof of here on Earth.

Chris Cuomo (29:39)

I think we should check if there is evidence for that. You see, only over the past eight years, we discovered objects from outside the solar system. We didn't know about how much traffic.

Professor Avi Loeb (29:51)

There is before that.

Chris Cuomo (29:53)

And we have to examine each and every object to check if it's a rock or a tennis ball that was thrown by neighbor. So my approach is practical. You know, you can call it down to earth. My approach is when we go on a blind date, we shouldn't imagine what.

Professor Avi Loeb (30:08)

The dating partner is.

Chris Cuomo (30:11)

We should just observe the other side. That's my advice also to young people who go on blind dates. I met my wife on a blind date, but you have to watch the other side because it might be friendly. But, you know, sometimes your dating partner.

Professor Avi Loeb (30:27)

Is a serial killer.

Chris Cuomo (30:29)

And, you know, and so we should just observe it. And in the case of 3i Atlas in the next few weeks, we have a great opportunity to observe it because these jets that I was mentioning, they could come from pockets of ice, but they could come from thrusters. And in that case, if it's technological thrusters, the speed of the jet material should be much larger by orders of magnitude than you expect from the surface of a comet. And moreover, you know, we would see that the object maintain its integrity if it's a spacecraft. However, a comet may break up. You know, maybe it already broke up. We don't know. So it's all about the data that we will collect in the coming weeks when it gets closer to Earth and we can figure out its nature. But my main advocacy is to remain curious and to pay attention to the data, not to stories being told by people who regard themselves as authority. You know, that's ridiculous in the modern times, for influencers that do not even write a scientific paper on this subject to claim that they should tell the public what the answer is, and moreover.

Professor Avi Loeb (31:42)

That they should protect science against practitioners.

Chris Cuomo (31:45)

Like myself who are engaging in the trenches, you know, and those commentators, you know, they are just like commentators on a soccer match.

Chris Cuomo (31:56)

They describe the match. I'm playing in the field.

Professor Avi Loeb (32:01)

The main difference is I can score a goal. They cannot.

Chris Cuomo (32:06)

I agree. But welcome to the new digital universe, which we are all too aware of, where expertise is seen as a weakness, because we have decided to democratize media and in doing so, have just dumbed it down so that now you can have a guy who looks like me, a comedian most of the time, talking to Avi Loeb and being like, yeah, I don't know, Avi, I see it a little different. I think you have. And you're like, you see it different? What the. What do you know about how it's different compared to what I know?

Professor Avi Loeb (32:39)

Point, Chris. But I do think.

Chris Cuomo (32:40)

I do think the public gets it, because I, you know, I get hundreds of emails every day, and many of.

Professor Avi Loeb (32:47)

Them include comments from parents. Just a few hours ago, I got.

Chris Cuomo (32:52)

A mother from New York City that wrote to me and said, my daughter.

Professor Avi Loeb (32:55)

Now wants to become a scientist.

Chris Cuomo (32:57)

I'm a hearing. And, you know, that is the biggest.

Professor Avi Loeb (33:00)

Compliment I can get.

Chris Cuomo (33:01)

It should be that young kids are.

Professor Avi Loeb (33:03)

Attracted to science and that people see it as inspiring, as exciting, as relevant to their life. There is no better advocacy, I think.

Chris Cuomo (33:14)

If, you know, if cern, the collider.

Professor Avi Loeb (33:17)

At CERN would discover a new particle.

Chris Cuomo (33:19)

I don't think that kid, that the daughter would say, I want to become a scientist necessarily. She feels that, you know, the search.

Professor Avi Loeb (33:28)

For aliens is relevant to her life, that it's inspiring and that we can.

Chris Cuomo (33:32)

Do it now that we have the.

Professor Avi Loeb (33:34)

Technology to discover interstellar objects or to look for technological signatures elsewhere.

Chris Cuomo (33:40)

Listen, I love it. And it frustrates me on several levels, not just the. Not Knowing, but of what could be known and isn't revealed. And that does not take me down the road of conspiracy, but it helps me understand them, especially in this area, about why they are so appetizing. But I thought we were going to learn, not that they're little green men in the basement of the Pentagon, but that there is information of Special Forces operations and what's been collected and what we know about the drones and who's doing what. And we have learned nothing, Avi. They have promised, and then Trump promised, and then Biden came in and said, yeah, we can do that. And then Trump came back and said, now this time I'm really doing it. And forget about Epstein. We can't even learn about Epstein, let alone about UAPs. All they did was change the acronym. How frustrating is that to you?

Professor Avi Loeb (34:37)

I don't hold the government responsible for telling us what lies outside the solar system.

Chris Cuomo (34:42)

They should focus on national security. My complaint is if they have any.

Professor Avi Loeb (34:46)

Data that they cannot understand, that they.

Chris Cuomo (34:49)

Know is not related to adversarial nations.

Professor Avi Loeb (34:52)

Okay, because they're seeing, witnessing some performance of objects that cannot be mimicked by the technologies we possess, then they should let scientists like myself help them, because it's not their jurisdiction to figure out what lies outside the solar system. So I would very much hope that if they have anything like that, they would share it with me. They haven't done so. And as a result, I define my own research project.

Chris Cuomo (35:18)

So I'm leading the Galileo project.

Professor Avi Loeb (35:20)

We built three observatories. The latest one, as I mentioned on.

Chris Cuomo (35:24)

Joe Rogan experience, is in Las Vegas.

Professor Avi Loeb (35:28)

On top of Sphere, the entertainment center there. The owner, Jim Dolan, came with Jane Rosenthal to my home and asked me to establish a Galileo project observatory there. We went a few months ago to the top of the Sphere, put it there, and we are monitoring the entire sky, in this case over Las Vegas. But we have two other observatories. We will see millions of objects over the next year, analyze them with machine learning software, try to figure out if.

Chris Cuomo (35:56)

There are any outliers, because if there.

Professor Avi Loeb (35:59)

Are, then we can analyze them in the scientific way and inform everyone. It will not be a secret. It will not be classified. I think partly the reason that these things are classified within government is not so much that the intelligence agencies want to protect the capabilities they have.

Professor Avi Loeb (36:19)

So that's a bureaucratic reason for doing that. But it's partly because when they are not fulfilling their job, they don't want other people to know about that. So their job, they get A trillion dollars a year in the defense budget for 2026. Yet they cannot figure out what flies in our sky. That's embarrassing. And if other people would know what they can't figure out, that would imply that they' doing their job. So they're hiding it behind the veil of secrecy, and that's not appropriate. But it's difficult to change government. And I take a different approach and say I don't need them. I'll try to figure it out scientifically. And my point is that without putting the resources for the search, you will never find anything. And of course, once we have the first encounter with alien technology, if we detect an interstellar object that is actually technological for sure, and nobody disputes that, then everything will change, because all humans on this planet will say, well, we need to allocate a fraction of the military budgets worldwide to this problem, to this potential threat to Earth. And that would mean a trillion dollars a year going into space exploration. So we will build an alert system that would alert earthlings for any incoming alien technology.

Professor Avi Loeb (37:42)

It would be a huge move forward. But we need to have the first encounter, and that is undisputable. The question is whether we will survive it. That's another question. And I don't know the answers to these questions, but for me, it's really important to find out if we have a neighbor out there that is more accomplished than we are.

Chris Cuomo (38:06)

How do you square this paradox? If you're talking about the sun and the measurement and the age and the this and the that, you go through all the formulas and the calculations and the astronomy of it, and people are wowed. That's why Avi Loeb is a Harvard professor. Look at all the wood in his background, in the books. This is. This is why we need Avi Loebs. And then you start talking about extraterrestrial presence and intelligence, and all of a sudden you're a kook. And that's why I needed the government to start disclosing things, to at least prove they've spent spent hundreds of millions of dollars finding things that have come, capturing things, learning about things that they don't understand. And unless it's just a boondoggle and they want to waste the time of multiple government agencies and our special forces. There are things that go beyond we can't tell you because then China will know we know. And I don't like that people like you, who deserve the respect of your curiosity and your expertise get swept up in this crazy sauce that the federal government knows isn't crazy.

Chris Cuomo (39:17)

I'M not complaining about that. And I don't like to think of myself as a victim. You know.

Chris Cuomo (39:23)

I don't sense that.

Chris Cuomo (39:24)

That's because you're Israeli, Avi. You guys are never victims, only volunteers.

Chris Cuomo (39:32)

The way I think about it is, you know, I served in the military, and I. I was in the paratroopers for three months. And one phrase that I still remember is that sometimes you have to put your body on the barbed wire in order to allow your friends to go over it and proceed. And that's the way. I mean, as much as I have pain in some of those critics that attack me or say bad things, I feel it's necessary to enable open research on this question, which the public finds fascinating, and the public supports science. So we should definitely have that conversation and use the scientific method to find.

Professor Avi Loeb (40:13)

More about our place in the universe.

Chris Cuomo (40:18)

The Age of Disclosure. This film that's out now, documentary now, whatever you want to call it. I've had multiple people who were on it on, and I give them respect of their pedigree, but when I hear them speak this chasm that only exists on this topic, if you want to talk about fixing healthcare or Russia interference or anything else, you'll have this binary swing on it, right? But there are ideas that are operative on both sides, not this, that they will say, look, I know I worked in the government. I can't tell you anything. But I'm telling you, it's not as simple as. There's nothing else other than what we've.

Chris Cuomo (41:03)

Made, of course, because it has an emotional component to it, it affects our ego. It has, according to some people, religious implications. So this is a very serious matter and an important matter, but we should address it. We should study it scientifically. And I should say there are many people who are inspired by the approach I'm taking. You know, just two days from now, we will unveil a set of two bronze sculptures produced by the most accomplished sculptor in the US Greg Wyatt, and 51 watercolors that he made donated to my office. And my office is now becoming a museum. And just a few weeks ago, you know, after the day after I was with Joe Rogan, I went to a NASCAR car race in California, Bakersfield, where one of the races put my image in Three eye atlas on the hood of his car. So what I'm telling you is there is huge resonance of the public with this subject. A lot of young kids are telling their parents, we want to become scientists when they hear about it. And I feel that the tide is Changing the other way. And it would bring science to the forefront. It would make science exciting. It would make the public appreciate science. If we are only honest in telling the public that it's work in progress. We make mistakes along the way, but.

Professor Avi Loeb (42:27)

We can figure out the truth by.

Chris Cuomo (42:29)

Collecting more data, more evidence, and we need money for that, and we need effort for that. So the way the scientific community approached it is zeroing in the money, putting.

Professor Avi Loeb (42:39)

All the money, more than $10 billion.

Chris Cuomo (42:41)

On the search for microbes over the next two decades.

Professor Avi Loeb (42:44)

Building a space telescope that would be.

Chris Cuomo (42:46)

Dedicated to finding the chemical fingerprints of microbes. My colleagues are obsessed with microbes. And I say, sure, that's an interest approach to look for life elsewhere, but frankly, I don't find microbes very inspiring. I would much rather find a higher intelligence in interstellar space because I don't often find it on university campuses. And so, in my view, that was.

Chris Cuomo (43:11)

A nice little one you slipped in there, Avi. I want you to know I caught that.

Chris Cuomo (43:15)

I would appreciate putting billions of dollars in the search for microbes as well as in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. We should hedge our bets because it's easier to detect a neighbor, a resident, in one of the houses on our cosmic street than it is to detect microbes in these houses from a distance. And because that resident might visit your front door, might throw a tennis ball that you will find in your backyard, or you might see a construction project from a distance.

Professor Avi Loeb (43:44)

So all of these are technological signatures that we can can search for if.

Chris Cuomo (43:48)

You only have allocated the funds for that. And I say the public fund science.

Professor Avi Loeb (43:53)

The public wants to know how come the scientists are the gatekeepers that block.

Chris Cuomo (43:57)

The public from pursuing the questions that the public cares about. This is really strange. Then you have the component of the government that may have some information because they were serving the sky and the ground for national security purposes, and they by chance.

Chris Cuomo (44:14)

Saw things that astronomers are not aware of. Okay, so that's a separate battle to get the government to admit what they may have, what they may know. And I visited the old Domain Anomaly.

Professor Avi Loeb (44:24)

Resolution Office just before I visited Congress.

Chris Cuomo (44:27)

And I asked them, did you look everywhere within government? And they said, yeah, we had access to everything. Did you find anything? No, nothing. Looks really unusual.

Professor Avi Loeb (44:37)

That's in the Pentagon. Except some FBI agents told them stories.

Chris Cuomo (44:42)

And so that's what they tell me. And then you have other people who say, the government has in its possession some amazing things. So I don't know who to believe. And someone should then establish A way of getting the information out to scientists like myself, because it would be really.

Professor Avi Loeb (45:01)

Unfortunate if we were not aware of our neighbors, despite the fact that the government is aware of our neighbors.

Chris Cuomo (45:07)

Yeah. It's about, what do you want? Do you want to learn or do you want to control? Avi Loeb, I appreciate talking to you all the time, every time, and I look forward to doing it again. Professor, thank you for reminding us of that beautiful idea that you need to focus on the humility of curiosity and not the arrogance of assuming expertise. That is a great idea.

Chris Cuomo (45:35)

Yeah, exactly. And. And the way to maintain that is to not to become the adult in.

Professor Avi Loeb (45:42)

The room, but stay the child that you were born as.

Chris Cuomo (45:45)

And, you know, I maintain my characteristics. When I was a child, I was curious and. And was very much invested in studying nature. That's what I am right now. And it's amazing that I get paid to do that, but I feel an obligation to convey the excitement to the public.

Professor Avi Loeb (46:04)

And I'm glad there.

Chris Cuomo (46:05)

There are young kids out there.

Chris Cuomo (46:06)

That scientist, Professor Loeb, keep him honest up there in Harvard, and we'll talk to you next time.

Chris Cuomo (46:12)

Thank you.

Chris Cuomo (46:19)

Here's what I like about Avi. He's too smart and too pedigreed to dismiss as a kook. And here's what's kooky about saying any of this is kooky. Not only his beautiful line, we gotta have humility if you want to be curious. And if you're arrogant, you're about believing and forcing what you think you already know. That is so insightful to what's happening. Not just with UAPs, not just with our understanding of our universe, but forget about what's a gazillion miles away. It's right in front of our face that all we're about these days is forcing beliefs on people instead of actually being curious about what we don't know. And boy, oh, boy, that category is getting broader all the time. So thank you so much for joining me. Chris Cuomo here at the Chris Cuomo Project, checking me out at News Nation. 8p and 11p every weekday night. I know a lot of the media laugh at this. That's because they're arrogant and they think they know everything. And I'm curious like a child, so I will keep covering this. I appreciate you here. I appreciate you on all the social media platforms where I'm offering you different things more and more. And.

Professor Avi Loeb (47:29)

What? What? What? Oh.

Chris Cuomo (47:30)

Oh, this. This is the best looking design I've ever seen. Okay. And I can say that Because I didn't come up with it. Critical thinker. I love the small type. It's not yelling it in your face. But once you look at it and you figure out what it is, it tells you everything you need to know. And we're selling these so that we can crowdsource the money and give them away. They're very high quality T shirts. They're Made in America. Made in America. Who's doing that these days? Free agent. Why do these go together? Because this we got to get back to. You got to get away from the parties and their insistence on controlling us. And we got to control ourselves. How? Be a free agent. Not right. Left obsessed with reasonable and independent. A critical thinker who makes their own decisions. Not parroting other people's decisions and insisting that all believe as you do. Be curious. Be open. Start bending those exclamation points into question marks. That's why I'm selling these. All right. Check it out.

Professor Avi Loeb (48:30)

Out.

Chris Cuomo (48:30)

Get your Critical Thinker shirt. I'm going to have another one that says I am different. Because who wants to be like everything we're seeing going on right now? You want to be different. Different is good these days. Okay. And free agent gear. New coming out. Made in America. All for us. Crowdsourcing the money and giving it to causes we can all feel good about. All right. Let's get it after it.

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