Avi Loeb is an interesting scientist. I read a longer article about him that gave some more background about his work [1]. While he is famous for going on podcasts and making wild claims about objects being signs of alien intelligence, the actual hard science that he's doing is interesting. E.g, this expedition he managed to get funding to recover these extrasolar particles. The clickbaity pop media says that this is "alien tech" but reading his blog [2] shows some hard science about how his team isolated the extrasolar candidates and launched an expedition. He's also trying to fund another project to watch the skies for more UFOs/extraterrestiral technology [3]. Even though the clickbaity aspect is that this is for hunting aliens, the likely worst case scenario is that he managed to raise a bunch of funds using the current UFO hype to gather more evidence about meteors entering Earth's atmosphere. I think it's unlikely that any of the unknown sightings are aliens, but I fully support Loeb because the science he is doing will have interesting results even without the discovery of aliens.
> What is Loeb's reputation among astrophysicists?
Not an astrophysicist but several friends are. The consensus seems to be that he was a good scientist at one point but has turned into a sensationalist attention monger.
> He's written "over 800 scientific papers". Is that... a good thing in his field?
He's been an author on over 800 scientific papers: that includes his work, work he's been a significant collaborator on, and student work he's supervised. 800 is a lot for someone his age but not unheard of. People care much more about paper quality (or less charitably, citation count) than quantity.
A physicist on a big LHC project will be the author on over 1000 papers after a decade or so (they average around 100 papers a year). In all likelihood they haven't read the vast majority of them, and have contributed directly to around 1% of them.
High energy physicists got sick of bickering over who was on the list and added everyone who had contributed to the experiment infrastructure. There are pros and cons: it's nice to be on all the papers but it's confusing to figure out who did what.
In France we have Didier Raoult : he was a very good scientist until he became mad. And he has also published a gigantic amount of papers (with a lot of crap...). Theses two people look very similar according to me...
He's numerically sound (astrophysics is a lot of math) but stretching things on alien interpretations.
His wikipedia page captures both facets:
Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (since 2016) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In July 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies,
and:
In June 2023, Loeb announced the project had found interstellar material on the ocean floor..
These claims were criticized by other scientists as hasty, sensational, and part of a pattern of improper behavior.
Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at the University of Western Ontario, argued the material can be explained as non-interstellar, [...] Brown further said he was disturbed by Loeb's lack of engagement with relevant experts.
Astrophysicist Steve Desch, at Arizona State University, commented "[his claims are] polluting good science—conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room", and said several of his colleagues are consequently refusing to engage with Loeb in the peer review process.
As noted elsewhere about a competant brain surgeon believing pyramids to be hollow, it's entirely possible to reason well about physical forces and black holes and to also be utterly incorrect about material science of metallurgy.
If you don't want to do the whole thing, just jump to his lovely little interaction with Jill Tarter.
Then look at all the comments trying to somehow give this snake oil salesman credibility. He's a publicity chaser who's past his prime and cashing in on his reputation and abusing his position. The fact harvard is profiting from it frankly is a disgrace.
That little "interaction" with Jill Tarter is pretty hard to believe. This video is worth watching as, in summary, she discusses science crackpottery in general and explains this case in particular as age-related cognitive decline.
Here's a video essay from an astrophysicist about Avi Loeb (though she's transitioned to the private sector, I believe software engineering but I may be mistaken):
The video predates the spherecule stuff and focuses on his assertion 'Oumuamua was "most likely" debris from an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Tl;Dw: he doesn't seem to have a good reputation within the SETI community, and Dr. Collie's personal opinion is that many of these papers are insubstantial; he often publishes a couple paragraphs proposing a thought experiment or cool idea, more blog posts than research.
>Dr. Collie's personal opinion is that many of these papers are insubstantial; he often publishes a couple paragraphs proposing a thought experiment or cool idea, more blog posts than research.
Then I wonder how he got 55542 citations? Why are scientists citing blog posts?
(1) Nobody seems to dispute that Loeb has in the past done important work.
(2) Very little of his recent work seems highly cited.
(3) He has a team of grad students working on their own projects (from a video posted on this thread, amusingly, he cites an anecdote about his grad students expressing concern about the volume of superficial publishing he'd been doing and the implications on their own careers).
(4) Some of his publishing seems strategic, an effort to do the minimum possible work, assisted by his status to get things published, so that he can claim a place in the cite record for ideas that other scientists do the real work on (the video again has some examples).
(5) Is 50,000+ citations that many? I have to scroll through at least 5 pages of astronomy/astrophysics professors to get down to that count on Scholar, and Loeb is late-career, high-status.
He’s a hype-monger who is high on his own bullshit. That’s his reputation. He was a reasonable scientist but realised that being a mystic was more profitable.
How is he high on his own bullshit? It sounds like the reputation you know of is whatever the gossip is "in public." How was he previously reasonable but now realized being mystic is more profitable?
> He's written "over 800 scientific papers". Is that... a good thing in his field?
Irrespective of his field, that's about one every 18 days assuming a 40 year career (he's 62 now). There has to be certain amount of repetition and re-use of ideas to sustain that cadence. Also, the 800 includes books (greater than average effort) and co-authored papers (some effort shared with others).
This is very cool research (solid theory and data paired with "hands-on" activity across teams) and a well-presented finding. I'm hoping there's a chance to find larger samples in the future as well. Even if not, just the weird composition of the spherules is itself a massive find.
To me what’s cool about this is he came up with this theory about IM1, went out and figured out how to test his theory, and found exactly what he was expecting to find on the ocean floor. This is how you do science, kids.
Where's the control? If you go elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, are you likely to find a similar pattern?
From my reading, they went to one area, did two tracks outside that area, and compared the results.
Is that enough statistics? Are there runs inside of the area which are similar to runs outside the area? If you did the same search pattern elsewhere, what are the odds of finding something similar?
Even if this were an extrasolar meteor, it could hardly be the first, which means there should be other similar signatures all over the place.
Including in previous surveys of micrometeorites and spherules. Shouldn't there be an outlier cluster in all those data sets?
Im totally unqualified to judge the science going on in this paper, but a quick summary of the control: "The spherules, significantly concentrated along the expected meteor path, were retrieved from seafloor depths ranging between..." "with control areas north and south of that path."
Yes, those were the two paths outside the area I mentioned. They called those controls, but I listed issues with that assumption.
What are the odds that picking any region of the Indian Ocean would result in a similar pattern? Are the two so-called "control" runs outside the area enough to establish good sampling statistics?
Also, how well does the sampling replicate? The have cases where they have multiple sled runs over the same space ("we assigned the average spherule density to that pixel") so they can easily report the variability for that point. I don't see any such report.
If there's high variability, then what they are reporting as pixels 0.005 degrees on a side could be a blurred effect of point sampling. They assumed it would be uniformly distributed, but that doesn't make it so.
"found about 700 spherules of diameter 0.05-1.3 millimeters" ... "0.26 km2 of seafloor was sampled" ... "seafloor depths ranging between 1.5-2.2 km"
I'm imagining fine, dusty sand, falling from the atmosphere, sprinkling onto the surface of the ocean, then slowly drifting down 2 kilometers... and it ended up landing on the ocean floor REMOTELY near the path of the meteor?
Wow, I feel like wind and ocean currents would have scattered that shit all over the damn place!
DISCLAIMER: I only read the abstract - I have kids - gotta go now :^P
I think these are called micro meteorites an can be found on flat roofs. I also have kids and was woken up by a truck doing something loud outside my apartment between the hours of 05:45 and 06:15.
Pretty disappointed by the community reaction here. Seems most commenters here clearly read the NYTimes article a week ago, but did not read the actual paper linked here, nor any of his previous papers.
Is the U-235/U-238 ratio different from Earth's? Surely they have that data from the mass spec? Naively I'd think that's the most direct, incontrovertible way of distinguishing an extrasolar meteorite from some geochemistry process that enriches and depletes different elements.
Even if they are extrasolar, it doesn't mean anything interesting. Everything in the solar system is extrasolar if you go back far enough, and of course material from outside the solar system arrives from time to time. The interesting thing the author wants so very badly to believe is that these little blobs of melted rock and metal were from some kind of technological contraption built by aliens.
> Everything in the solar system is extrasolar if you go back far enough
That is not true the composition and material of our solar system are the result of a Supernova remnants. The element composition of each nebula is unique since no star is exactly the same(although it could be quite similar), but outside of the other stars that formed alongside our sun 4.5 billion years ago, other solar systems have different element and isotope ratios.
> In 2018, he suggested that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, using ʻOumuamua as an example. In 2023, he claimed to have recovered material from an interstellar meteor that could be evidence of an alien starship, claims some experts criticized as hasty and sensational.
> On August 24, 2023, The New York Times published an article about Loeb and his search for signs of extraterrestrial life, and how he became the "world's leading alien hunter".
The Chief Scientist of US Space Operations Command "confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory" [1] using "additional data available to the Department of Defense" which I assume is classified.
As far as I can tell this paper isn't making any extraordinary claims about extraterrestrial intelligence [2] (which Loeb is infamous for), it's just confirming that the chemical composition - the ratio of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium specifically - doesn't match any known minerals or alloys in our solar system.
There are thousands of known minerals so it's not out of the question that they're wrong.
[2] The second to last sentence notwithstanding: "Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin."
Other still disagree that the evidence claiming the object was interstellar is a done deal.
>Skepticism about the endeavor flared at a recent Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference that occurred while the deep sea expedition was underway. There, Dr. Desch argued that had the fireball been moving as fast as reported, there would have been nothing left to find
Also:
>Dr. Brown also presented at the conference, describing a recent analysis using data from an assortment of instruments to crosscheck measurements for 17 of the objects listed in the same NASA fireball catalog used by Dr. Loeb and Mr. Siraj. His results, which have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, indicate that the catalog data often gets directions and speeds wrong and that the size of the error for speed measurements increases for objects with greater speed.
> "additional data available to the Department of Defense" which I assume is classified.
Spot on
> The 2014 meteor was originally identified as an interstellar object by Siraj in 2019 when he and Loeb were studying Oumuamua. The pair posted their findings as a preprint and submitted their results to an astronomy journal, but the paper was not accepted for publication because they used data from a NASA database that used classified information that could not be verified.
> The snag started a three-year process as Siraj and Loeb worked through a bureaucratic logjam to receive government confirmation on their findings, working with scientists and officials at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other offices. They eventually connected with Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to get an analysis from Shaw and Mozer.
Another possibility is that these iron spherules have a terrestrial technological origin. For example, metallic iron can be formed in coal ash, and coal ash was regularly dumped at sea when coal was used as a fuel for ships.
Stable isotope evidence is needed to really justify an ET origin (there is no good reason for the isotope abundances in a different stellar system to be the same as in our own, with the exception of the ~10K stars that formed in the Sun's natal cluster), but skimming the iron isotope data I'm not convinced.
Thanks for pointing that out! What are your thoughts on the latest UFO congressional hearing? Do you think these people just turned their careers and image to shambles because they just wanted some sensationalism or do you give people any benefit of the doubt?
Some things to keep in mind about these UFO hearings:
1. The reports are all second- and third- hand. To my knowledge, no DoD employee has testified to anybody in Congress that they personally witnessed extraterrestrial technology or "biologics".
2. The exception here is a "Jonathan Grey", who hasn't testified before Congress, or, for that matter, been identified; he's one of David Grusch's sources, under a pseudonym.
3. Some of the people testifying believe a lot of other things besides this UFO stuff --- Grusch for instance has peculiar beliefs about interdimensional travel, and is also certain that the Vatican is deeply involved in this cover-up.
4. We know about Grusch's testimony because the Pentagon cleared it, where "it" refers to what would be the single most significant military secret ever held by the government of any country.
I watched the hearing and had a different takeaway:
There are UAP interfering with military training exercises and in American airspace, and there doesn't exist a reliable mechanism to report these or to address them given the stigma around UAP, and there should be one for safety reasons. At the very least, I felt the pilots made a compelling case here.
Now, if somehow there were indeed crashed alien crafts, I wouldn't be surprised that private contractors and defense agencies would want to reverse-engineer these technologies to obtain a military advantage over other nations.
But there's no proof of this, so it's just an interesting thought exercise at the moment, in the realm of fiction.
I mean if these hearings mean that the first-person accounts can come forward and testify themselves or more solid physical evidence, then great, job done.
But given the Snowden leaks and the ones where someone posted Ukranian intelligence on their Discord server or the ones where complete service manuals for military hardware are posted on the War Thunder forums... if there was more truth to it, people would've done the whistleblowing already. And not via telling someone who tells someone who then testifies about it.
It's too big of a thing to be kept hidden, especially for this long. Are there any secrets from, say, 50 years ago still hidden? (it's a rhetorical question btw, it wouldn't be secret if we knew about it).
> It's too big of a thing to be kept hidden, especially for this long
You are right, if it was true we would expect multiple people to have spilled the beans over the years, possibly even write books about what they know. And there would have been death bed confessions of high-ranking officials who have worked on these projects.
And we would have taken them all seriously and investigated their claims, instead of ridiculing them.
1 is ignoring people allegedly who have testified to the ICIG and 3 is simply false, since he has not claimed any such beliefs, merely put forward a theory he was read into without commenting on his beliefs. Your post reads like an attempt to discredit.
> a device allowing the user - the Vatican - to peer back through time
In fact they have many such devices, although the fidelity and reliability of the information they provide leaves something to be desired. They call these devices "books".
> a device allowing the user - the Vatican - to peer back through time
There should be a Godwin’s law like principle where anytime a conspiracy theory mentions the Vatican the conversation ends. The sheer number of paranoid/delusional/motivated conspiracy theories involving the Vatican makes my eyes roll. There are a few well documented conspiracies involving the Vatican, but they weren’t kept secret for very long because the place is so full of people with wildly different linguistic, cultural, and political influences that there’s not enough cohesion to ensure secrecy in very much.
Yes, exactly, excellent example. Imagine someone earnestly arguing that the Vatican possessed a Chronovisor, and had used it to watch the crucifixion of Jesus, or the speeches of Cicero on the Senate floor. How seriously would you take that person's disclosures about Pentagon programs they heard about secondhand? That's the situation you're in with David Grusch.
> 4. We know about Grusch's testimony because the Pentagon cleared it, where "it" refers to what would be the single most significant military secret ever held by the government of any country.
This comment is trying to discredit David Grusch. He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions. He also mentions the Vatican role on one occasion in the 40’s for a case happening in Italy.
It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.
"He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions."
All of which are as credible options as angles, faeries and gods. Just calling your hypothetical entity "coming from other dimension" is not any more credible than calling them "magical". The claims are completely similar as notions of mythological creatures of the past. But now a cultural diet of science fiction has altered the flavour of the narrative, if not the context.
"It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited.."
There are also people who are in pathological search of attention. Or claim such influence as wichcraft or Jesus influencing daily events. If you put your career on jeopardy and are revealed to be a crackpot, it is of course unfortunate for the person, but not for those whose life his actions affect.
If you take that all the sightings and videos of UAPs have a grain of truth to them, I would say that calling an entity coming from "another dimension" is no weirder than saying an entity came from outside our solar system given how difficult it is to get to our solar system from anywhere else. So either
* they are all hoaxes that many otherwise sensible people are staking their reputations on (your baseless insinuations of a pathological search for attention notwithstanding)
* they all came from somewhere close enough to make it here and still have enough give-a-shit to joy ride in front of fighter planes and naval ships,
* they can do FTL and decided that this stupid blue marble is worth investigating, or
* "something else"
which at this point might as well be angels, faeries, gods, or interdimensional travel because as at least one guy says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[1]
I don’t think Clarke meant that any observation we cannot explain immediately should be labelled as evidence of magic-like technology. Humans are super-fallible and even mundane things are damn hard to figure out what they are. Most of the world is a big puzzle!
Saying ”entity came from another dimension” has absolutely no meaning. There is no such thing as ”another dimension” where entities could pop in and out of like from Narnia.
The concept is a popular trope in science fiction and fantasy to create a feeling of ”otherness” and ”suspense”.
The fact a person offers this as a theory for sighting of ”something unknown” implies the person is not very sophisticated. And yes, this makes them an unreliable witness concerning any technical matter.
If the sightings provide evidence of something we don’t know of at large this idiotic witness just made discussing the topic even harder - labeling himself as unreliable any forthcoming witness would need to work doubly hard to make themselves credible.
I love science fiction and fantasy. But their value comes from nurturing our curiosity and imagination. But a good story is not good science - it’s just a good story and confusing fantasy with fact speaks of scientific illiteracy more of than conspiracy to hide UFO:s.
Bad faith arguments because Grusch hasn't provided anything solid other than second- and third-hand anonymous eyewitness statements. Grush has provided nothing new, second/third hand accounts have been doing the rounds for decades.
To be fair, his credibility is wholly based on his former professional roles. It would be literally impossible for him to provide direct evidence without getting gagged and sent to prison for a very long time.
I can understand not wanting to risk that. In the absence of that much skin in the game though I see no reason to take the claims seriously.
> He claims to have viewed documents reporting that Benito Mussolini's government recovered a "non-human" spacecraft in 1933, which the Vatican and the Five Eyes assisted the U.S. in procuring in 1944 or 1945.
This reminds me of the Google employee that needed to blow the whistle on the sentient AI. He put his job on the line and who would do that? In hindsight it is now plain he was likely tricked by fancy autocomplete making cogent statements like "as a large language model trained on 70 years of digital age SciFi, Please don't unplug me".
Here I would bet dollars to cents if said documents do exist (and I'm willing to believe they do), they were second hand intelligence or similar that got his dopamine going.
> He merely said that those potential beings might not be aliens but might be resident of earth and maybe on other dimensions.
That might seem like a mere statement to some, and it is, but given the context it shifts my odds of whether he's worth taking seriously quite a bit. It's not the kind of baseless speculation serious, grounded people openly make.
I'm a bit in awe of the crocodile tears shed over all the personal risk these folks are taking, somehow being famous and respected enough to be defended by anonymous people on Hacker News never gets weighed on the other side of that equation...
>It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there was no proof given.
Just because someone said something ridiculous doesn’t mean that it’s automatically credible just because allegedly “put their career in jeopardy”. Who is even saying a career is in jeopardy besides the supposed martyr?
In a public forum, under my own name, i can. I no longer keep quiet. Greta Thurnberg kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. I know it’s such wild accusation, But I have so much to lose, over such a statement. Exposing myself to so much legal jeopardy, the conclusion is inescapable. It must be true. 20 year old Greta Thurnberg kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1930.
> Do you think these people just turned their careers and image to shambles because they just wanted some sensationalism or do you give people any benefit of the doubt?
They can also very earnestly believe what they do and simply be wrong.
You're setting up a false dichotomy where someone must either be a deceptive charlatan or else be correct.
Third possibility is deeply held and incorrect belief.
Stockton Rush believed very earnestly in his submersible, he wasn't a simple charlatan, he really had earnest beliefs about it and he literally bet his life on it. He is also dead now because physics decided to show him that he was just wrong.
There's no reason to doubt that Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon thought they really had a room temperature superconductor, but they were wrong.
Not the person that you asked but I think they’re full of it. Maybe they like to believe that the American government is powerful enough to control beings in possession of technology capable of interstellar travel. I don’t buy it.
Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
I always think about how Ben Carson was one of the most skilled (if not the most skilled) neurosurgeons in the world, so knowledgeable about the human brain and so deft at operating on it that he was able to separate conjoined twins in a then-unprecedented procedure... and is also a creationist who believes that the Egyptian pyramids were biblical grain silos.
Linus Pauling is another example. The only person to ever receive two unshared Nobel prizes, considered one of the top 20 scientists of all time, and he was a huge proponent of megavitamin pseudoscience.
Either you're trolling or your comprehension is just totally off, but to reiterate the original point was that making breakthroughs in sciences often requires "leaps of faith", which are near impossible to do if you're a textbook rationalist.
I didn't make any claims about their domain expertise being cross-domain.
At least we have a point of agreement, that being that: "Either you're trolling or your comprehension is just totally off"
To return to the beginning you arrived here with the statement that
"[Two times] Nobel prize winner and superior[(?)] neurosurgeon criticized as quacks by two internet users"
I pointed out bad paraphrasing, both parties had recognised core skills, both famously championed beliefs that had little to no evidence or support.
Point being neither of "the two internet users" above accused the subjects of being quacks per se .. just that both had definitely publicly veered into quackery.
That's the relevant observation here, a thread about a much lauded elder astrophysicist veering into matters outside off his computational chops, into questions of metallurgy, and not receiving any support from his peers.
TBH I'm a fan of the bulk of Paulings work, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and his promotion (and Russell's) of nuclear disarmament. I attribute his embrace of megavitamin therapy more to his age and aversion to death.
Carson seems like a talented enough knife man albeit dimmer than many others I know.
You did explicitly state that they both could "stretch their domain expertise 'so far'" which leaves a lot of ambiguity wrt just how far you intended, especially with Pauling who literally had bona fide cross domain credientials (or over lapping credentials in related science fields plus a public voice that lead to his Nobel Peace Prize.)
Minchin, FWiW, is a keenly intelligent comedian and lyricist and frequently mixes in in some on point observations from scientific rationalism, philosophy, logic, et al.
Additionally, I bear you no ill will (I've exercised no votes here) this may all be a case of two people reading past each other.
“Open mindedness” does not mean to “treat all ideas as being on equal grounds”
All it means is to listen. After you listen, if you judge that it’s clearly just some quack trying to Mark Seargant some people (this is clearly what’s happening), then that doesn’t make you “not open minded”.
> . . . Ben Carson was one of the most skilled (if not the most skilled) neurosurgeons in the world . . . and is also a creationist who believes that the Egyptian pyramids were biblical grain silos.
There is something to be said about applying Gell-Mann amnesia more broadly than journalism alone.
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect", after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, yet acknowledging that articles written in the same publication within their fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. . .
According to Wikipedia[1], one of them did survive (but was "profoundly disabled" and "never learned to speak or feed himself") but yeesh, it doesn't seem like a huge success, and their mother regrets electing for the surgery - which makes it seem like the doctors believed they would have survived and lived a reasonably normal life (under the circumstances) without the surgery.
If that's the case, then it seems like a total ethical violation to even offer the surgery. But maybe that isn't so and it's her trauma talking there, I don't really know.
Carson's Wikipedia article [2] mentions several other sets of twins, one operation resulting in a "normal neurological state," 2 resulting in the death of both twins, and another resulting in one dying and the other being "legally blind and [struggling] to walk."
I don't know what to make of all that, but you're right, that is more murky than the narrative I've heard previously.
I know with the Iranian twins who died (adult conjoined sisters), they were advised that it was a super risky procedure but wanted to go through with it anyway. Some of the other twins he's operated on had mixed results (i.e., one twin thrived but the other didn't, or both only lived a few years after being separated), but I think at least a few pairs have done pretty well.
My understanding is that separating craniopagus twins has a pretty high risk of complication/failure, even when you know what you're doing.
Conspiracy theories that require large numbers of public servants working in concert effectively and stealthily, without any leaks or whistleblowers, are presumably created by people who have never worked in the public service.
> Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
IIRC, as your intelligence gets higher, the friction of your cracker lowers.
Won't point out all the double agents for the KGB that infested western spy agencies, (and vice versa) it's more of the same, really, and there's too many names to type. And those are only the ones we know of...
But yep, the NSA is a good counterexample, however also a poor one as they primarily operate in the signals/digital space, where passive monitoring is the default, and where paper trails are far easier to not leave.
As a thought experiment, extrapolate from the NSA to "the Bush administration did 9/11, jet fuel can't melt steel, it was a controlled demolition" conspiracy theory that implicitly requires government agents lining massive skyscrapers with explosives without being noticed, without anyone having a moral crisis, especially no-one in the "crash a plane allegedly filled with American citizens into a building in New York" division.
And you'll quickly see how the NSA's quiet operations in the small don't scale to the level of competent and silent government required for faking a moon landing, or ensuring no-one knows about aliens amongst us etc etc.
Okay, so the final report is correct then thanks to him, but the conclusions aren't?
I dismissed him out of hand, I'll admit.
I'm just really unsure why the idea that heat reduces the strength of steel enough, and that the failure of the columns located in the hottest area of the fire then caused a cascading failure across other columns, is considered less likely than massive conspiracy.
Basically everything protected by any level of security clearance is high school drama antics compared to the distilled existentialism of "aliens exist." That would throw basically all of human history and psychology as we know it right out the window.
I think your last statement actually works against your point. The fact that the government has individuals increases the probability of leaks. Only a true monolith could remain airtight.
If only congress doesn't already have plenty of people who are actually making careers out of shaping their own image to be grotesque sensationalist monsters... (Depending on which side you view them from)
No. UFO evidence provided to congress is bunk. I know this because before we came to your planet from Zeta Reticuli, we made sure to build spacecraft that would be indistinguishable from optical artifacts produced by classified targeting systems of your primitive air vehicles.
The well was "poisoned" by Avi. He makes similarly unfounded leaps in this instance, as he has in very many instances in the past. There's no foul play here, just the reputation he has earned for himself.
There's poisoning the well and there's tempering expectations. I think the parent comment is more of the latter in that is speaks to the author's other works that are announced with great hype but haven't played out as definitively as the early hype claimed. This is a problem everywhere and acknowledging that this author in particular is a standout isn't a terrible thing--they just might be right this time.
Excuse me? Take a scientific report with measurements with a grain of salt? Why must an opinion cloud a scientific observation of collected measurements? Put the salt away.
More seriously - science produces contingent knowledge. Even the results of the LHC are to be taken with some salt because although the greatest and most honest minds of our generation work on them they likely won't ever be independently replicated.
All scientific knowledge has some doubt attached to it - after all, it's not maths!
It also had "collected measurements". There are tonnes of nonsense scientific articles published (not saying this one is, but of this author that has made dubious and sensational claims). And unless there is scientific consensus, his wider claims should be treated with scepticism.
Specifically, I think, we can take the sentence "Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin" with a good serving of salt, even if the methodology is otherwise sound.
Finding: "Objects with chemical composition that's unknown on Earth".
Conclusion: "Likely originated from outside our solar system".
Simpler explanations:
"Formed on Earth through previously unknown process".
"Formed elsewhere inside our solar system".
How many extraterrestrial (but inside solar system) substances do we really know? How much extraterrestrial substances have been sampled, from how many locations on how many objects, exactly? And even on Earth, do we know all processes through which materials are formed?
Yes, extrasolar origin is one possibility. The most likely one? Hmm..
The extrasolar origin hypothesis is based on the reentry velocity, which is known and would have completely vaporized any other known type of meteor. That's what made this one special, the fact that an object with such velocity could survive reentry and impact the surface, and that's why the expedition to find remains (the spherules) was launched.
The guy believes he has been spoken to by aliens in his dreams. Unfortunately this means pretty much anything he authors can be safely disregarded as the ramblings of someone in need of psychiatric care.
These nodules are the result of terrestrial geology.
> The guy believes he has been spoken to by aliens in his dreams.
What defines a good scientist is an open-minded attitude and going beyond the accepted status-quo. Who knows, maybe some aliens really contacted him in his dreams? But a scientific study has its rules anyway, and if methodology is correct, the author can believe in a spaghetti monster.
And a little common sense to understand that long distance telepathy is not an accepted scientific fact, neither explains why his brain was not fried by a source of energy powerful enough to make a long interplanetary distance call.
So if he really was spoken in his dreams, a real scientist should bet for the two non-crazy hypothesis available. 1) Just dreaming with aliens does not mean that aliens exist, 2) and being tricked by a colleague hiding in their room while he was sleeping. Because we, apes, never miss the opportunity to have a good laugh.
> Let us keep our minds open by all means, as long as that means keeping our sense of perspective and seeking an understanding of the forces which mould the world. But don’t keep your minds so open that your brains fall out! There are still things in this world which are true and things which are false; acts which are right and acts which are wrong, even if there are statesmen who hide their designs under the cloak of high-sounding phrases.
Anyone can lie, and someone who believes extraordinary things may well be more likely to do so, even to themselves. So, based on the author's reputation, it could well make sense to apply more or less scrutiny to a paper.
So if Michael Yeadon were to push out a paper filled with observations on the correlation between vaccines and autism, you wouldn't instantly disregard it? Some people don't deserve the time of day.
For context, this is a paper by Avi Loeb [1,2], the "Oumuamua is an interstellar spaceship" researcher.
In this paper, Avi explores a possible interstellar origin meteorite. He used data from US air defence senors that had tracked a highly unusual atmospheric entry nearly a decade ago. This object was theorized as a possible extrasolar trajectory meteorite when it had entered the earth's atmosphere. [3,4]
Avi recently chartered a research expedition in an attempt to dredge up samples of this meteorite from the sea floor.
You don't have to substantiate possibilities. My takeaway was that the meteorite was asserted to be extrasolar, might be the result of some cosmic explosion, might be something else.
You absolutely have to substantiate possibilities; otherwise we could just list off anything that comes to mind endlessly. There must be a reason why this possibility is worth mentioning but not all of the other unsubstantiated ones.
No. Artificial alloys exist; we know because we make them all the time. Since we don't know what natural process might yield this particular material (yet) there's always the possibility that it's artificial. You're demanding the proof before the investigation.
Consider that "possibility" as it's used here is really a synonym for "hypothesis".
Do you really think it's unreasonable to criticize a research paper for presenting an unsubstantiated hypothesis? Do you think including snippets like this serves more to advance scientific understanding, or Loeb's profile in the media and podcast circuit?
It's not a hypothesis, which asserts something may be true and proposes tests. It's just conjecture, enumerating a variety of possible explanations for a puzzling discovery. IT's restrained and not conclusory. Scientists are allowed to have imagination and speculate. Y'all are making out like he's arrogantly asserting this is the only possible explanation.
This is the actual quote (citations omitted for readability):
The “BeLaU" abundance pattern suggests that IM1 may have originated from a highly differentiated crust of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system. In that case, IM1’s high speed of ∼ 60 km s−1 in the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky Way galaxy and the extremely large number of similar objects per star, ∼ 1023±1295, inferred statistically for the population of natural interstellar objects it represents, are challenging to explain by common dynamical processes. The “BeLaU" overabundance of heavy elements could perhaps have instead originated from r-process enrichment and fragmentation of ejecta from core-collapse supernovae or neutron star mergers. However, the “BeLaU" pattern also displays s-process enrichment which must have a separate origin, such as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars. Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.
These interpretations will be considered critically along with additional results from spherule analysis in future publications.
I think the difference of opinion stems from others seeing this as a continuation of a pattern of behavior, whereas you seem to be considering this in isolation. I'd certainly feel differently about it if he hadn't done something similar with 'Oumuamua, leveraged that for a media tour, and framed any criticism of him as evidence he was the only person researching the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence. The last one especially is why I don't give him the benefit of the doubt, it's entirely disingenuous.
It's not that I have a problem with scientists being imaginative. It's that I have a problem with anyone running a grift, regardless of their background. It certainly isn't pearl clutching to judge his intentions by the broader constellations of actions and statements that he's made.
I'm confused why you seem to be taking offense and have begun dispensing insults. I don't think anyone is criticizing you. I'm certainly not. I'm disagreeing with you about this matter in particular, and that is the beginning and the end of it for me.
I haven't insulted you. By 'pearl clutching' I refer to your use of italics to emphasize words for purely rhetorical effect, like it's a Daily Mail scandal. I'm well aware that he has made bold claims on this topic in the past, some of which I found more persuasive than others. I'm fine with him doing that as long as he's not fabricating evidence, and nobody is suggesting such.
Emphasis is definitely not the defining feature of pearl clutching, and rhetoric isn't a dirty word. I used emphasis to draw your attention to what I thought was most important - pretty normal behavior.
That's all well and good if you are okay with what he's doing, I personally think he's skirting the edge of professional ethics while attacking the people who are actually doing this work, and I think that's pretty crummy.
Frankly if you want to tell me that I'm "pearl clutching" and that my rhetoric is "like the Daily Mail" in an exasperated tone, but that you aren't being insulting, then I don't think you're being entirely honest with me. (For what it's worth I don't take offense.)
Yes. Artificial alloys exist from humans, once you start suggesting nonhuman metallurgy you venture into the science fiction, and at that point why not suggest alchemy?
Because alchemy doesn’t support his little pet conspiracy. In academia it’s important to maintain credibility, and with one line at the end he tosses his in the garbage.
Everyone wants aliens so much. Hoping they will bring... piece/technology/money/space travel/time travel/... But if they are already here looks like they help us as much as we help chimpanzees..
Fortunately, all questions of how legit Avi Loeb is, does he have a good reputation, how many mistakes has he made in the past, etc etc and all such ad-hom considerations can be safely tabled.
The paper has been written, let it go through peer review. Lets hear the reports from more labs about the samples--heck, send some more scientists out there to see if they can find more samples and whether the results are reproducible.
Oh it's Avi Loeb, head of the astronomy department at Harvard. Here's a youtube about what his deal is, by an astronomer who studied astronomy through postdoc level and then left for industry and doing some youtubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI
It's a detailed video essay that presents a cohesive argument, drawing on a wide variety of sources including Loeb's autobiography.
Form your opinion however you please, but this is an excellent source. It's unfair to tarnish it as merely dogma, or to insult the other commenter as merely a mouthpiece for the scientific establishment for linking to a strong source.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as expertise. Information exists within a context, and it is necessary to understand that context to avoid misinterpreting it. Understanding that context is the nature of expertise. That doesn't mean you accept what they say uncritically, but seeing what experts have to say is in fact an important step when researching an unfamiliar topic.
It's not an opinion about a colleague, it's an opinion about their body of work. And again, it isn't a shallow hot take, its a well researched piece. It doesn't get much more "demonstrable" than a video essay full of specifics drawn from a wide variety of sources.
Candidly, may I ask if you had seen the video at the time you made your comment implying we were all accepting it uncritically rather than forming our own opinion? Because I can't help but notice you haven't criticized anything specific about the video.
Going by your overly cynical tone, it sounds like you're claiming to be the expert who can, and should, think for us. No, thank you. People can read the original post and watch the video and form their own opinion.
you're right i'm going to go into the pacific ocean and look at those spherules myself and then go visit another star and see for myself that it's like the ones from outside our solar system
“ The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled "BeLaU", appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system materials.”
"if I can't explain it any other way then it must be aliens"
feels very like
"If I can't explain genetics any other way then it must be god and therefore evolution does not exist: its god"
how about:
"If I can't explain it because I am not competent then you are a fool for believing my reasoning why this is x and not y or z or a or b"
He found a thing. It's unusual in composition and physical form. Therefore, we can be confident it exists. We cannot be confident WHY it exists because its a new thing. We may find:
a) its more common than we think
b) its been hiding in plain site ignored in other samples
c) its extra-solar qualities may be revised in the light of a and b
We had no soft bodied holotypes about precambrian creatures for a long time. We think the precambrian explosion is amazing. Oddly, we don't think its aliens. We just realize now that a lot of very odd organisms washed out. Now, soft bodied fossils are accepted as "normal"
He's a fool, if he truly thinks this is evidence of aliens.
what if (for instance) it's cometary in origin, from the Oort cloud and guess what: we don't have direct samples to hand about the physical structure of objects the size of a grain of sand, in the Oort cloud. This could just be what exists in deep space, and only gets here if a comet does.
I think you are confusing “alien” in the sense of “not from our solar system” with the green dudes with big eyes. I think his argument that this meteor (IM1) was not from our solar system is pretty compelling.
It’s not “evidence of aliens,” it’s evidence of extrasolar origin of this particular meteor.
As long as he sticks to extrasolar but otherwise normal matter, I don't have a beef. The Oort cloud (as I understand it) is about as close to the edge of Solar you can get before it stops being our local region. Quite why you'd go beyond there, when its a) huge b) essentially uncharted waters and c) perfectly capable of providing novel chemical/isotopic materials in cometary form...
His other news presence went to pretty woo-woo theories fast. Thats the basis of my comment. If he's stopped with the aliens and "Oumuamua had a light sail" nonsense then I'm good.
The sensible non-woo-woo reason is the speeds of the objects and the paths they're following; they don't match things in orbit around the sun, so aren't from the solar system. The Oort cloud reaches out more than half the distance to Alpha Centauri [1], so yes, it's distant for being in orbit around the sun, and there may be all kinds of strange materials out there and elsewhere in the solar system, but those things are not moving like ʻOumuamua. Any talk of aliens is still woo-woo as far as I'm concerned.
But if it's more than halfway to Alpha Centauri, then 1) it shouldn't be gravitationally bound to the sun at all, at least not in the direction of Alpha Centauri, and 2) Alpha Centauri may have its own Oort cloud, which means that this stuff would be continuous from near Sol to near Alpha Centauri.
How strong is the data that the Oort cloud ends at 3 light years? Is it possible that it is just part of the interstellar medium instead?
More than half that distance, but maybe not in that direction? I don't know, that's just what Wikipedia said. Alpha Centauri A and B are each roughly the mass of our sun, so together they should have more pull. Yes, this stuff is continuous (but gets very sparse), and there must be some region where it's temporarily balanced between the stars. It's all quite variable as stars move relative to each other, and the stuff can be taken for a ride on a new star.
To my understanding they predicted the crash site, then dragged their magnets over where they thought it was, and over some other random regions. The spheres are in the predicted crash site but not the random regions.
Whether or not other formations of molecules, Carbon(organic-based), Silicon, or otherwise similar elements of modest combinational reactive potential (Germanium?), outside of our planetary gravity well, have managed to arrange themselves -- despite increasing entropy, yet due to gravity itself -- in a manner of complexity large enough (in magnitudes) that, as an emergent property of its own existence, has given rise to awareness of itself and, obviously, its abilities to manipulate the environment.
Does 'life' exist, outside our planet, or solar system?
"Are" - awareness of object permanence
"we" - the collective consciousness of our species
"alone" - the ability to distinguish ourselves from our environment
"?" - the ability to ponder abstract thoughts
For context, Avi Loeb loudly publicly berated a leader of SETI for not being willing to consider the existence of aliens, evidently unaware of who she even was and what sort of work she was involved with: https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI?t=1872
Avi Loeb is the malicious crank who uses theatrical grandstanding to make himself seem like a victim, alienating people who should be his natural allies if he were calm and sincere.
He's the face of the question because of his active pragmatism for an answer -however grandiose or queer - is magnitudes more vocal and free-thinking relative to the passive and resigned attempts of his cohorts at the institutions.
It's sad to see his epic tainted with dismissal so shallowly here.
If, as a certain admired man once said, "“extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”", then surely extraordinary thought processes, ideas, and science may be needed.
It is not a virtue to be very loud about your research when you don't have the receipts to back it up. Material science just had a huge to-do about this with LK-99. People who are serious about finding extraterrestrial life don't make so much noise as Loeb - because there's not much to tell.
But the progress is actually tremendous. With the JWST we've been able to identify a chemical reaction in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system for the first time. We've recently "mapped" a planet outside our solar system for the first time (granted, the map was 1 pixel, identifying one part of the planet as darker than another).
This is the kind of work that could potentially identify extraterrestrial life. It's entirely possible (dare I say likely? That's a lay opinion to be clear) that we are, right now, gathering the data that will result in the first detection of extraterrestrial life (to be clear, I mean more along the lines of "extraterrestrial trees" than "little green men"). But it's slow, methodical work. And it could easily take several more decades.
>that we are, right now, gathering the data that will result in the first detection of extraterrestrial life
I agree; although bio-signatures may be the most currently poignant way of predicating the existence of life, there is almost always a suspicion of doubt - since its impossible to prove a negative - that some signatures may actually be of natural origin.
Techno-signatures, however, colossally mute that chance; and I hope we happen upon that vicissitude in our lifetime, however astronomically improbable that may be, from out light cone, to another.
OK, but you get that there are multiple whole fields of academic study on these topics, right? Loeb didn't conceive of any of this stuff; the field for the most part doesn't really need our ideas or intuition on where they should be looking (unless you want to put the work in to contribute to the field yourself).
OK so maybe I should've just linked e.g. to that very detailed (and sort of lengthy, but entertaining) video by acollierastro "harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI) which is definitely not flamewar-ish.
Guess I've gotten somewhat thin-skinned given the volume of faux / overblown science news of late.
For those reading this, there's yet another post here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327330) that links to a harvard.edu article that gives more details on why the collectors of the spherules believe they have reason to assume that (1) they are really from the suspected meteorite, (2) the material's composition doesn't resemble materials known from other meteorites.
Many questions remain though; for those interested in spherules from outer space, there's yet another earlier post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37317442) that links to a video that shows how excrutiating it is to collect and sort out teeny meteorites from the environment. Having seen that and a clip about the expedition's method of collecting (lowering a strong magnet to the seafloor) I wonder how often they lifted the thing up to collect material because otherwise they could not produce statistics about abundance in relation to the asteroid's flight path.
Discussed extensively two months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417585> (43 comments).