Comment by Jtsummers
2 days ago
> For Harvard astronomer and study co-author Abraham Loeb
I can't see how anyone associated with Harvard isn't embarrassed to be connected to this guy. He's been making claims like this, without real evidence, for years now.
The most generous take I can muster is that he's discovered evidence of stupidity amongst the wealthy on this world and that they'll throw money at him if he says, "I'm saying it's aliens." The least generous is that he's become an outright crank.
> The most generous take I can muster is that he's discovered evidence of stupidity amongst the wealthy on this world and that they'll throw money at him if he says, "I'm saying it's aliens." The least generous is that he's become an outright crank.
One way to tell the difference is to offer him a bet.
Cranks/scammers can not in general be trusted to honor bets, that tends to be a waste of time.
I haven't dug into this exact claim, but I had a quick look an article that quoted the paper that he wrote about this - and his words were along the lines of "I don't believe this to be true, but if it were true, these would be the things we'd observe, these would be the consequences, etc."
It's an academic exercise, he doesn't actually believe these things are what the media quotes him as saying.
He goes on podcasts quite frequently and talks about all of this stuff - he's one of the most frequent guests on Event Horizon where this is his bread and butter sort of conversation.
If he doesn't believe this sort of thing, well, he certainly had me fooled after having spent hours listening to him talk about it all.
I've listened to Avi Loeb on Mindscald and he was quite clear that he's taking the possibility seriously as any scientist should take any possibility seriously. He did strike me as a crackpot, but just as somebody who thought that this field has been stigmatized and ridiculed for a long time and somebody has to have the courage to remove the stigma and take this field back in the hands of real science.
I only listened to that one podcast and it was at the time of oumuanua I don't know if in the meantime he veered completely on the crackpot side.
1 reply →
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/preliminary-anomalies-of-3i-atla...
> The simplest hypothesis is that 3I/ATLAS is a comet and we are missing the spectral features of its gaseous coma because of its large distance from Earth. However, in case future data .....
I can't find the post unfortunately.
If you actually read his post on the topic, he very clearly states:
"Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin."
He's doing what scientists are supposed to be doing. He's proposing hypotheses that match the current data. Then science can continue gathering more data to try to disprove the various hypotheses that currently exist, to try to reduce it down to the one that fits best.
If you refuse to entertain hypotheses that match the data, even if they're unlikely to be the true hypothesis, you are not doing science.
It's the same pattern for the other times he's been in the headlines. He never says "X is aliens". He always clearly states that his various alien hypotheses are incredibly unlikely. You've gotten suckered into an incorrect view of reality by sensationalist headlines.
This is not what scientists are supposed to be doing. This is the academic version of click baiting or the version of the TV show where everything was made by ancient aliens.
It's fine to have a few fringe theories under the table and take a look from time to time, but before publishing them is important to get enough evidence. Otherwise it removes the credibility of science for important topics.
[Anyway, the important thing is not that a guy/gal with a white coat said it, it's understanding that the claim has enough support. You don't trust science, you analyze the evidence.]