The Uncensored Guide to ‘Oumuamua, Aliens, and That Harvard Astronomer
forbes.com
forbes.com
This is an attack piece that targets Avi Loeb's character. It's disturbing that the author of the piece is himself an astrophycisist and I have to wonder, if Avi Loeb is calling upon the court of public opinion, what else is this piece, published in Forbes rather than a science venue, doing exactly?
Science is a debate. For there to be a debate, there have to be differing opinions. And for there to be differing opinions, there has to be the freedom of scientists to express their opinions. Even poorly supported opinions like Avi Loeb's. What hurts science is bombastic invocations of "the large amounts of research done by other professionals who specialize in this particular field" - as an attempt to stiffle an opionion the author is not fond of with an appeal to authority.
>>Hundreds of scientists have pointed this out to Penrose — repeatedly and consistently over a period of more than 10 years — who continues to ignore the field and plow ahead with his contentions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/01/28/the-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/10/08/no-r...
But if anybody is wrong and oumuamua was in fact an alien device looking for us (intelligent life), almost certainly it has found us. What happens next is entirely out of human hands, unless we can realize that event.
Maybe is nothing more than some kind of probe or long range satellite, but it could be a scout ship, or an early warning sensor, and we're just in course to meet the rest of the hardware from where oumuamua came from.
Is really rational just plainly deny the chance of that rock being pure luck of not having found a big fleet of some interestellar things and having to figure out if they are friendly or not as they approach the planet?
Probably the space force and the whole stuff many countries are sending to all the solar system since 2018 are just a coincidence, or may be other people is also worried about what happens next if oumuamua was not just a weird rock.
We would not have been able to detect this object two decades ago. So the "event" is that our observation capabilities have grown past some threshold, not that anything has changed in our solar system. Whether rocks or alien probes, these types of objects must always have been passing through our solar system with some regularity. We'll get a a chance to study others soon enough.
Edit: this video by Scott Manley helps to get a sense of how our ability to detect asteroids has grown over time: https://youtu.be/BKKg4lZ_o-Y
I think is agenda is to get the community looking for these things more often, perhaps out of some disappointment that if it had been an actual probe (a la "Rendezvous with Rama"), we'd already have missed it.
Whether it's worth bending the science to fit this narrative is of course, questionable.
Loeb must also fight against widespread public assumptions about the hunt for life, specifically that people think SETI is a giant organization always scanning the sky. The public thinks the scientific community is actually putting in a solid effort to look for aliens. They aren't. We as a society spend more on candycrush than the entire SETI project. Want a definitive answer on whether the next Oumuamua is a light sail? Cough up the money so the scientists can buy the telescope time.
So you devise an experiment to measure oxygen absorption that uses a probe's existing mass spectrometer. Your experiment doesn't cut into the probe's mass budget so it basically is just a scheduling issue. If your experiment is bumped from the mission schedule there's not compromising the probe or total mission. You've got a pretty good chance of getting that experiment on the docket.
This is contrary to a nutrient experiment that eats into the probe's mass budget and mission time. If the sensors are dedicated to the experiment that's less mass for other sensors. Even if you got approved if you can't built the experiment to be reliable and survivable it won't get approved.
Similar is true for trying to measure CFCs on exoplanets. There's a handful of instruments that can even get spectra from exoplanets and even then only from transiting ones and even then only has giants so far. Even if we could detect CFCs in terrestrial planet atmospheres, CFCs do not stay in the atmosphere very long so you'd only detect them (from a technological civilization) for a very short window of time. The odds of finding them are vanishingly low with current instruments. No one is going to return your e-mails if you propose observations of CFCs because it's a snipe hunt wasting valuable and limited instrument time. If you're a serious researcher you'd know this already and wouldn't waste people's time. Methane is a general purpose biomarker and is something far more likely to be found. Since you've got a limited stars you can even gather information from the time is better spent on the more likely observation.
That's what they said about hot jupiters. Exoplanets could have been detected decades earlier had there not been a consistent bias against the idea of large objects orbiting so near host stars, a bias based on a single data point (our solar system).
Hot Jupiters and CFCs are very different things. Hot Jupiters were puzzling but something that could be readily detected by existing instruments. Once discovered solar system development models were improved.
CFCs in a planet's atmosphere is something current instruments can't detect. Even if they could the number of observational candidates is limited. The only way we could detect CFCs is if some civilization was actively producing them at the time that light left the planet. So even if there's millions of CFC producing civilizations in the galaxy the odds of detecting those CFCs in candidate systems is extremely low. Even if those civilizations produced CFCs for millennia the odds are against ever seeing them. So it's pretty wasteful to use valuable telescope time for that rather than something that has a higher probability of giving some results.
It's not about solar system chauvinism or biases. There's not infinite amounts of science money or science time. No one is writing off unlikely events, it's just breathless searches for those unlikely events has a huge opportunity cost. And talking about biases, assuming technological civilizations will produce CFCs is a very Earth/Human biased assumption. CFCs were/are produced on Earth for market reasons that don't necessarily apply in any circumstances except those that worked out on Earth.
Ya, but if people were allowed to look for hot jupiters in the 70s/80s they would have found the first exoplanet far sooner.
I think the other poster might be alluding to a chicken-and-egg situation: could a stronger theoretical basis for the existence of 'Hot Jupiters' have driven development toward the goal of their detection 20 years earlier?
So until Hot Jupiters were discovered they were not predicted. No one even thought to look for them. No one was thinking about Hot Jupiter detectors that just didn't get funding.
Had billions of dollars flowed into astronomy instead of particle accelerators exoplanets (of all types) might have been discovered earlier. Then again they may not have. It's a pointless "what if".
We have spent tons of money on particle accelerators to no clear benefit, either to science or to society. If a similar amount of money had gone to SETI, many of the above objections would have been addressed and resolved, with the advantage that science is being done which the average person paying for it is likely to a) understand what is being asked and b) be interested in the answer.
Particle accelerators have exploratory experiments like hunting the Higgs boson with LHC but they run lots of other experiments as well. There's also lots of particle accelerators (of varying capability) around so if you devise an experiment needing one you likely have several options unless you literally need the LHC.
With large telescopes there's far fewer available and the sky is pretty big. Radio SETI is a long shot search and optical SETI even more so. It's not that they lack merit but getting funding for telescope time is a lot harder when the chance of any positive finding is very remote. A lot of SETI funding actually piggybacks on other research using the same telescopes.
The chances of SETI finding positive results isn't necessarily from a lack of things to find but from physical limitations. Our best radio telescopes could only detect Earth's more powerful radio emissions from a few light years away. Broadcasts like TV and radio wouldn't be detectable outside the solar system. The inverse square law is a stone cold bitch for interstellar communication. SETI's best hope of finding signals are ones intentional ones.
Even with billions of dollars SETI would have similar chances of detecting an ETI as without. It's a needle in a haystack search with warehouse sized haystacks. More money doesn't necessarily get it done much faster or better. There's a limited number of sites for large radio telescopes and they have limited fields of view and stars are only in that FOV for a limited time. More money might let you search the warehouse sized haystack a few times faster but it's still a vast search space.
https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l6xl3d/askscien...
I do get the sense that for whatever reason there is a bias against explicitly looking for life. I don't think there's a big conspiracy explanation. I personally think it's what I call the "boring universe brigade," the skeptic ideology that came to dominate science starting in the 1970s that treats fascination as a contrarian indicator. "If it really fascinates people it's probably bullshit."
If there's anything beyond that bias it's probably a fear of triggering fundamentalists.
Edit:
Here's one bit of evidence for possible near surface water at a landing site:
The one thing that you really can't get funding for is SETI, but that's not the fault of astronomers. That's the fault of congresspeople who ridiculed the search for "little green men" in the 1990s and barred NASA from funding it. Almost all astronomy funding comes from governments, so a government ban on funding a particular line of research means that that research basically won't happen.
I'm sure there are good arguments to distinguish why searching harder in the directions Avi wants things to go is different from searching for ghosts. It would be nice have heard them.
Space stuff exists because it's a jobs program in the South. The search for life starts crossing lines because it raises awkward questions that challenge politically meaningful people.
End of the day, you don't bite the hand that feeds.
That was also my impression. A lot of scientists (rightfully) make fun of the dogmatic view that it must have been an alien probe, but fail to realize their view -- that it must have been _anything but_ an alien probe -- is just as dogmatic.
Same, he even went on Planetary Radio on January 27th and said something to the effect of "show me a plausible model that shows this wasn't some sort of craft using a solar sail to accelerate out of the system, I'm happy to be proven wrong".
https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0127-2021-avi-loeb...
Loeb was recently a guest on the Lex Fridman podcast where he talked about Oumuamua amongst other things. [0] I found his view on the subject fascinating and his perspective on science refreshing.
BUT the data about Oumuamua is really really tiny. The science of interstellar objects is nascent. Other than to say "If it is a natural object it is super-strange" I am not sure what else there is to say.
In the interview he was articulating theories about it being a cosmic "buoy." So I am anticipating a couple chapters of solid science followed by a lot of speculation, even if it is highly informed speculation.
Two excerpts from the review: "While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb’s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. ... While it’s tantalizing to imagine that ‘Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet."
I think the beneficial outcome of all of this is that we can identify what to look for next time, and hopefully get funding to do that.
I also wonder if, as our tracking tech gets better, it would be relatively cheap to land a bunch of sensors on these and have them go on a ride somewhere in space for much cheaper than launching our own and trying to accelerate it to that velocity, even considering the costs of interception.
Unless your payload is advanced enough to use the mass of the object for something (fuel, radiation shielding, construction materials, etc.) there is not much benefit in landing on an interstellar object if you just want to launch an interstellar probe.
Maybe actually if you wanted to send a really long range message it could help to put it on an interstellar asteroid - much more likely someone would notice a huge mountain flying through their system than a piano sized piece of metal, even if both hold the same message.
Yes on trajectory, but no on same trajectory, with same mass. Of course, this might be a moot point, because other than hiding from some radiation and micro-scoping impacts, as well as leaching resources (which we aren't really advanced enough to do), there is no benefit.
I'm imagining some Vehicle Assembly Building-sized cloud of aerogel with a paperclip-size payload at the center.
I have no idea if Loeb is right or not. I think for Bayesian reasons (prior is Borisov) he is probably wrong, but there is so little data and Oumuamua is certainly super weird. But this author is a total hack, making arguments from authority and mainstream-ness. If a scientist stops making relevant arguments and instead starts talking about the "consensus" of the "scientific community", run the opposite direction
We just have to keep watching, more thoroughly and with better equipment.
Evidence indicates: extremely hard. People are extremely uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. In a variety of circumstances, ranging from the storms another commenter mentioned to your favorite political issue, people will happily make stuff up and believe it rather than accept uncertainty. From a certain perspective it's hard to fault this instinct, since true certainty is almost never possible but we still have to make decisions in finite timeframes. If you're careful, you can probably catch yourself doing the same thing.
This is actually Avi's argument for considering the probe hypothesis. He's not trying to prove it was a probe, he's making a case for investing resources into experiments that could detect probes and industrialized alien civilizations, as opposed to detecting new classes of comets.
SETI has literally been living off financial scraps for decades. If a couple of billionaires hadn't funded efforts with very generous personal donations there would be almost no SETI at all.
And if SETI had been funded properly - which would still be a drop in the ocean compared to other government spending, nationally and internationally - we'd have more observations to draw on from other sources.
This is all quite strange considering how much of a game changer and scientific motivator evidence of ETI would be.
All conspiracy theories aside, there is an argument to be made that something with the potential to completely undo the status quo would, in a less-than-ideal world, have a hard time finding funding from those at the top of the totem pole of power.
Well not only a motivator in an inspirational sense but if we can actually get our hands on ET debris who knows what technical leaps we might achieve by attempting to reverse engineer it/parts of it.
Now? Not so much. Looking at who our "representatives" are - failed football coaches, regular conspiracy nuts - there's no way in hell that this "knowledge" would remain locked away for years, decades. Not with clowns like these in charge.
From my perspective I want aliens to exist, if for no other reason than to resolve the Fermi paradox: one less unknown. Existence if true is easier to prove than non-existence if true.
As a mystery object we might finally get someone to develop a mission based on a science objective once some of the technology has been sufficiently developed.
In other words the military clearly does have early eyes on all sorts of situations - and their action or inaction on that info is a separate consideration.
But at the same time why shouldn't we continue trying to understand what oumuamua is based on everything we know?
Sure, but one should not make big decisions on so few data points. The data shows it as accelerating. Ok. I'm still not willing to say "alien civilizations exist and are using light sails" based on a handful of observations of a single object. One should hold off such monumental determinations until one has profound data available. So once any discussion moves from "it was accelerating" to "aliens are real", many serious scientists will just walk away. They will come back once there is a more appropriate data set for such discussions.
So when the question is posed "What is a responsible scientist to do in this situation?" I think the answer is clearly, accept it as an "out-there" but currently not disprovable hypothesis, and if you feel strongly that it's incorrect, dedicate effort and time to showing with evidence (at least quantifiable empirical evidence) that this is the case, ideally in a published and peer-reviewed paper.
Mindscape podcast (Sean Carroll) is really good.
Of course we have limited observations of this object. But that doesn't prove anything. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
But here's where the desperation comes in: false equivalence. Like we have limited observations so you can't prove it ISN'T an artifact of alien life. Like the outcomes of it being artificial and natural in origin are treated as equal.
It just seems like the worst application and misunderstanding of the anthropic principle ever.
No evidence that it's artificial doesn't mean it's natural. It just means there's no evidence of it being artificial. But absent any evidence, natural origin is the most likely explanation.
The next question is whether or not there is some other logical path that defines logical gravity assists to visit as many stars as possible - nothing like that has been put forward either.
Afaik, it's coming from so far away that we have no idea what star it previously visited.
It poses a serious existential threat to us. We are a tiny target, but we have been able to observe these objects for a very short period of time. Unlike regular solar satellites, they are only visible for a very short period of time. Like comets, if one hit us it would end life on the planet. They don’t need to be massive with how fast they are. We can estimate how many comets are out there with orbital mechanics models, but what about objects originating from outside the solar system? We could one day not wake up because we couldn’t even see one of these coming before it hit us.
We can estimate the frequency and size of impacts, regardless of the origin of the impacting body, from observing craters on the Earth, moon and other planets. Those show that the "end of life" impacts are pretty rare - the conclusion that also follows from the fact that we're having this discussion here.
I thought it was 250 million years, though maybe I'm misunderstanding you. [1]
[1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/space/how-long-does-it-take-the....
'Oumuamua is more of a 'city-killer' risk at its size than a comet such as Halley's, which would be more of the sort of range of size that could seriously screw up our day.
We have a pretty good idea of the asteroids and comets in stable orbits around the sun. We know with certainty we’re not going to be hit with a planet killer asteroid in the next hundred years because we track all of them.
This is one reason that I'm such a big fan of robot probes vs. human space flight. If your space program is about flinging tiny cameras into the remotest reaches of the solar system, it's easier to pursue the occasional alien asteroid on short notice than if you're all about getting a can of primates to the next planet over.
https://i4is.org/what-we-do/technical/project-lyra/
https://www.wired.com/story/should-earthlings-chase-oumuamua...
I'm curious to know SETI project (or something else) was able to capture any data from the skies as well? The skies are monitored and maybe there is some data, somewhere, as an interesting area for us to all explore.
Sean Carroll recently interviewed him and if you listen to that, I think you will come away with a very different idea of who Loeb is and what he is saying.
This, along with strange shape made the object interesting for ET speculation.