Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding | Hacker News Reader

Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He’s Not Kidding

scientificamerican.com

49 pointsgscho17 comments

I have no doubt that someday we will build something to catch up to Oumuamua and determine the truth. The only question is when.

I like the spirit of Oumuamua's wager - treat it as if it is alien tech, even if it probably won't be. The journey to find out will push us in a desirable direction.

I'd rather be part of a society that tries to catch a weird asteroid on the off chance it's something truly amazing, than part of a society that doesn't care.

Even if can catch up to it, how will we find out where it is? Even with a high degree of accuracy in predicting its orbit, it's likely going to be a massive search radius for us at this point.

I find the idea plausible that theories regarding extraterrestrial life are unfairly dismissed within the profession. And it would be such a tragedy to miss out on real evidence of alien life just because, institutionally, scientists are not allowed to consider it.

But can we put any stock into Avi's opinion on it, given that committing to the 'Oumuamua solar sail idea has been very lucrative for him, in the way of media attention, book deals, podcast appearances etc.? It is a little ironic to talk about other scientist's egos while promoting your own book.

Avi Loeb does what ever it takes to keep doing what he loves. I hope to see more scientist like Avi because we need to consider more wild radical ideas. When aliens have no place in proper science, wtf are we studying?

Not to go too Gil Scott Heron on you, but there are _many_ underfunded/underworked scientific initiaitives that are more important than trying to send a probe to contact aliens.

At least GPS satelites actually serve some purpose.

Discovering alien tech in an interstellar vessel would be an unprecedented technological breakthrough bigger than anything we could be making now. Bigger than GPS for sure. It doesn't even has to be more advanced than ours.

We can maybe judge the quality and accuracy of the reporting from the remark, "the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip".

'Oumuamua didn't speed up at all. It slowed down. Just, infinitesimally less than it seems like it ought to have.

It seems like it's non-trivial to calculate the trajectory of even an inactive object we built ourself, to an arbitrary precision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly

The key points were that he believes the scientific community is scared to discuss more SETI related research for fear of redicule and job impacts. It sounds like he thinks it is impacting the science too as someone will gladly create a proposal to look for liquid water outside our solar system, but scientists are too worried about getting shunned to look for the molecules in industrial pollution (arguably a better use of time assuming that the hunt for water was a proxy for what they really wanted to do) on those planets instead. I think looking for water on exoplanets is still pretty relevant though and is useful to know even if you believe ET doesn't exist, so I don't really understand his argument here to be honest. I agree with what he's saying regarding string theory and other related fields that are very hard to run experiments on. In his eyes, they're more outlandish than SETI research as they can be made to fit a lot of different models. He is not against that kind of research, but is arguing that if you're okay with string theory, you should be okay with SETI.

I still feel like he's being a little brash in assuming Oumuamua is an alien vessel. I think it's possible, but likely there is another possibility that we haven't thought of.

Whenever I hear someone say something like “scientists aren’t researching X because they’re scared!” my response is generally “Have you even Googled to see if such studies exist?” Sometimes these statements hold up to 30 seconds of Googling, often they don’t.

And even if they do, perhaps studies have been done searching for spectra of industrial byproduct, but the results were “we couldn’t find anything in the survey data we looked at” and the researchers had a hard time publishing it. Or perhaps there’s a conclusion somewhere in the literature about imaging providing a reason why detecting such spectra with our current tech is unreliable and we need to wait 5-10 years.

Cuz like, come on! What scientist doesn’t want to find aliens?! Anyone who discovered the slightest dispositive proof of ET intelligent life would be on a one-way train to the Nobel prize, global adoration and fame, a lifetime salary on the lecture circuit, a named element on the periodic table and everyday people knowing their name for centuries. The incentives are totally there.

I get what you're saying for sure. And obviously some scientists are searching for aliens (literally the definition of SETI), but I assume Loeb knows what he's talking about (program chair of astronomy and astrophysics at Harvard) and that he means that although SOME do it, that most are too scared, so that field of research is stifled.

You have to distinguish between SETI (listening in for communications by intelligent civilizations) and more general searches for signs of life in the universe.

SETI doesn't get much funding, because Congress blocked it in the 1990s. Career-wise, this is also an incredibly risky subject to pursue as a researcher, because the most likely result is nothing.

On the other hand, other research into life in the universe is booming. The search for "biosignatures" in exoplanet atmospheres is a major subject in astronomy. One of the main goals is NASA's Mars rovers is to look for evidence of past habitability.

It would be great if SETI got more funding, but it's not as if there's no research into extraterrestrial life. There's a huge amount of research that isn't as flashy as SETI: atmospheric chemistry of exoplanets, the geology of Mars, etc.

I think you need to take what Loeb is saying with a very large grain of salt. There's a fair amount of annoyance and disgust within the astronomical community at his misrepresentation of what other astronomers have or have not been doing, particularly given that he's only been interested in this for a handful of years, versus the decades others have devoted to it.

There's a large degree of self-congratulation and self-promotion in what Loeb is saying, and denigration of what others have been doing. The idea that this field of research is "stifled" because people are "scared" is basically bullshit.

Where are the scientists looking at all the credible UFO sightings? Nowhere, because scientists are just like everyone else, they don't actually want to discover any thing new or change anything, they want to reconfirm what they think they already know, which for the most part means maintaining the status quo. The number of scientists or astronomers who laugh off thousands of credible first hand reports of people seeing unexplainable things in the sky...they're not interested unless it fits into an already accepted framework. The idea that there "isn't any evidence" for non earth based UFOs visiting earth is plain wrong. What you conclude from the evidence is, of course, up for debate, but I've never seen a main stream astronomer say they've even looked at this evidence. Like this article suggests, I think this represents a real crisis in science. How timid and scared we must be to not even talk about this in real terms, we imagine star trek and laugh. "why don't they arrive on the white House lawn"? "why do they always appear to some redneck blah blah". I think all the astronauts and pilots who are listed amoungst ufo reporters would disagree with the second statement and as for the white House lawn... we humans send space ships to other planets, they study then and send back data. If aliens are here then they will be studying us and attempting not to disturb. They would want to introduce us to the idea of extra terrestrial life slowly as they would have gone through this innocence as well and would know what damage radical change can do. If that sounds ridiculous to you I suggest you're not thinking realistically about aliens, you are living in the star trek universe. I ask which is more realistic?

> If that sounds ridiculous to you I suggest you're not thinking realistically about aliens, you are living in the star trek universe.

How can anyone think realistically about aliens in any way whatsoever? There's absolutely zero evidence of extraterrestrial life, let alone intelligence. Anyone can think whatever they please about aliens and that would be as real as what you think. We have zero clue about alien physiology, psychology, science, culture, technology, etc.

> I ask which is more realistic?

All of them. None. We can't know. It's a question about an unobserved phenomenon.

There is actually a lot that can be gleaned from the lack of observable evidence to the contrary.

We have a hard data point in ourselves. We know life is possible. The only question is how common is it. Right now the evidence says "Rare".

Now the task is to figure out why it's rare instead of common, and exactly how rare it really is.

This means gathering data, forming theories, making predictions, and comparing expectations to new data.

This seems like perfectly reasonable science to me.

The same reaction as always. Yes, fine, all the radar logs and pilot testimony and cameras on planes and astronuaght accounts and UK government files are zero evidence. I don't understand how anyone who isn't wilfully ignorant can dismiss all of this out of hand.

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