ROLF: If you find an extraterrestrial piece of equipment and it has a button on it, would you press it?
AVI: No, I want to first understand what the function of this button is — by taking it to the laboratory. It’s sort of like with humans: you don’t want to press any buttons of a human before you come to know that human.
ROLF: And then what?
AVI: Most likely it will teach us something we don’t know. Because our science and technology are extremely premature. Quantum mechanics was discovered a century ago. We still don’t fully understand it, and it’s a fundamental facet of our reality. We don’t have a theory that unifies quantum mechanics and gravity. We know very little.