A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
nbcboston.com
nbcboston.com
Lede is an american thing. Parent could have been a british or canadian neighbour with their british colourful spelling.
Huh.
(Lead makes you dumb)
"lead" in this context is pronounced led not leed
On the other hand, English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, so both spellings might as well be equally correct.
On the third hand, they're both wrong if we want to get old school about it; no sense in catering to a bunch of French invaders when we have the perfectly good words "blee" and "hue".
>When compared to steel in a strength-to-weight ratio, titanium is far superior, as it is as strong as steel but 45% lighter. In fact, titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all known metals.
There's a reason cherry picked titanium. :)
Edit: "Based on the speed of the meteor and how much of the object burned upon entry, Loeb determined that it must be made of a material that is tougher than iron."
Yup.
It seems like they must still be assuming it's largely made of Iron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferromagnetism#Ferromagnetic_m...
But with proper equipment you can detect non magnetic conductive materials. Not sure what's it called, but if you pass a magnet near eg. copper the magnetic force from the magnet will induce electricity on copper which in turn with also produce a slight magnetic field. There are many good YouTube videos on this topic and they're quite cool! (https://youtu.be/u7Rg0TcHQ4Y)
If they want mass extraction after that, then potentially a form a dredging could be used (vacuum and filter could work to leave the sand and silt on the bottom).
"There's a chance its not iron but something new!"
"What chance is that?"
"Its inverse to the chance we told our funders, who gave us millions to collect it with a magnet, that it was iron."
"So its pretty guaranteed its iron"
"Yup".
"Aren't your funders concerned you are saying it could be something different than iron?"
"You see the name of the university and a few corporations on the ship? Would you be talking to us if we were just getting a run of the mill iron metorite?"
If it's an extra hard iron alloy it would be more interesting because they can analyze it and perhaps reproduce the composition and perhaps the heat process that created the meteorite.
But the "tougher than iron" part? Based just on how much material was lost during atmospheric entry, as reported by sensors not really designed for that purpose? That's a tough pill to swallow. It would be really interesting to hear more about how much this asteroid differed from others measured by the same equipment.
Although to make it less woo-woo flying saucer-ish, I might have said:
"Harvard Professor Believes Meteor That Crashed Into Ocean Was Alien Metal"
If we're not going to just assume aliens 'non-terrestrial' might be more accurate.
Nothing will convince me this isn't true, and NO, I will not read the article before commenting.
The usage of “that” as opposed to “who” is the key there in English taught before the 2000s. Now of course, the usage of the pronoun who is dead, and that is used everywhere because people are objects in English now.
It sounds more like a coded message for someone then it does a real article, but maybe I have been watching to many science-fiction movies lately..
1. a catalog of government sensor data on meteorite strikes was discovered
2. based on the data, those strikes that could have originate outside of the solar system were gathered
3. one hit in particular appears to be harder than iron based on its speed and loss
Then:
> Despite the government releasing limited data due to national security concerns - he had discovered something groundbreaking. A paper he wrote with his student laid out what he believed to be true. But three years after writing his findings, a major development confirmed what he knew all along.
Great, let's find that paper and see what's up. Wait, where's the link? No matter, just tell me the journal and I'll find it. Nope. Ah, that's right, this is the popular media where such things simply aren't done.
It turns out the key here is to use "Abraham" not "Avi" in the search. The latter returns crapola and the former yields your link a few hits down.
Don't worry about lack of pictures (there actually are some figures), I'm pretty good at this English thing. Turns out the object was quite small:
> Given the impact speed of the meteor, ∼ 44.8 km s−1, and the total impact energy, 4.6 × 1018 ergs, the meteor mass was approximately 4.6 × 105 g. Assuming bulk density values of 1.7 g/cm3 and 0.9 g/cm3 for Type II and Type IIIa objects respectively, we obtain a radius, R, of 0.4m – 0.5m for a spherical geometry (Ceplecha 1988; Palotai et al. 2018).
The small size of the object was something the article didn't address.
The payload:
" Based on the CNEOS catalog of bolide events, we identify the ∼0.45m meteor detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC as originating from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with 99.999\% confidence. The U.S. Department of Defense has since verified that "the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory... Its high LSR speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy." "
I can't make sense of these sentences. And the spelling mistakes are helping either.
"Today [Galileo Galilei] would have been canceled on social media."
For what exactly? And his this guy not seen the quality of social media commentary? The bar is loooow. Spectacular but unfounded claims are a mundanity and it's worrying that he's mixing these culture warrior talking points with science.
"Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere."
Unfounded spectacular claims just like this. The object is interstellar maybe, but where has he shown evidence of a technological origin? This is pretty important. How is it just left unchallenged?
It's a weird article. The video looks like a shot from The Thunderbirds and it reads like something from a local station affiliate run twice through translation software.
Saying unpopular things that society deemed harmful? Not necessarily defending the guy I didn't read everything he said, but that's what comes to mind
To be pedantic, nearly all of the material that we are made of came from other stars, manufactured in their nuclear fusion and supernovae. I think what they mean is a macroscopic object that was formed in another star system, which they've inferred from its incoming trajectory.
It's because it's coming from Avi Loeb, the guy who suggested Oumuamua might be a Rama-style spacecraft. I don't think he's dead set on alien hypotheses, but he wants them to at least be taken seriously as possibilities.
I haven't listened to the whole thing, but he seems to think that aliens visiting our solar system is likely enough that it makes sense to look for. He falls short of the confident certainty I usually expect from cranks though, he's talking about investigating possibilities. I think he's eccentric, but I wouldn't call him a crank.
Loeb is connecting dots and hypothesizing that there is a connection between that phenomena and extrasolar objects. It's not a completely unreasonable theory and I think it's worth examination.
We do not know this to be true. We know the government has told us these things have been cataloged and observed. We barely know anything outside of (dis?)information that’s been slowly drip fed through small congressional committees and a bizarrely eccentric cadre of former DIA agents who have spent the last five years cultivating a personality cult and a subculture weirdly reminiscent of Q-Anon.
“The government is lying” is certainly not an exotic explanation for an unexplained phenomenon reported by a group of intelligence officers from the military-industrial complex.
That's not to say these are aliens, there are certainly other possible explanations however none of them are very good and they don't dismiss the possibility that these are non human intelligent beings.
[0] https://www.gov.br/en/government-of-brazil/latest-news/2022/...
[1] https://www.newsweek.com/chilean-navy-id-mysterious-aircraft...
[2] https://cnes.fr/en/web/CNES-en/5866-geipan-uap-investigation... https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29755919
[3] https://documents2.theblackvault.com/documents/cia/ufos/C055...
Yeah no kidding. There's a huge ocean of difference between "We saw something in the sky and don't know what it was" and "We saw space aliens."
Governments are mostly saying the former while alien enthusiasts seem to hear the latter.
Maybe Avi says that he worked his way to this position to be able to tackle interesting and off-the-path subjects, but somehow his work doesn't feel like it has the same integrity as expected from the chair of a leading institution. Or maybe that he goes to tv news channels preferentially over arxiv publishing. And maybe it's just something that happens to professors with age (like one's parents) -- they start going down the weird ideas rabbit hole.
I think he's achieved professional recognition, paid his dues playing the game of academia (very successfully), and is now pursuing things that he finds most exciting. The man has co-authored a thousand papers, literally, so I doubt he'd get much marginal excitement from hypothetical paper #1001, i.e., another instance of fitting a curve through noisy data to build support for an obscure model that very few researchers care about.
He has also pointed out that it's an invitation to ridicule in academic circles to talk openly about UFOs. He doesn't care though (why would he?), and that for sure is triggering folks who take themselves very seriously.
I think it is great that some professionals actually do this, if everyone's a cynic it would just be sad.
I don't think anyone in the field is triggered by some guy pursuing his interest in aliens and UFO.
What they get triggered about, is that guy using his relatively large platform to say that anyone not agreeing with him is part of the establishment or otherwise useless, or to say that there is no other possible explanation to a certain phenomenon than aliens, or to be insulting to another colleague during an online talk.
When did this happen? In the podcasts and interviews I heard, Loeb was often provocative towards the establishment, but I never saw him make negative comments about an individual.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/02/16/watc...
[2]: https://twitter.com/whereisyvette/status/1360771406661881857...
If anything, I would say the annoyance is that for the department head of Harvard to be spending his time (and seeking fame) on topics like this, instead of using his position to 1) further "real" research, 2) address problems in the field, 3) in general, make more of the role he has, is something of an insult to people trying all their lives to reach such achievement.
If the public is interested in the origin of life, contemplating aliens or distant stars seem about as interesting, especially in regards to the Fermi paradox.
> Today he would have been canceled on social media.
Avi Loeb has definitely not spent a whole lot of time on Social Media!
Seriously though, this doesn't make much sense to me. Finding shipwrecks even when you know they exist and what general area they should be in is hard enough. This sort of search is a huge money sink, the ships, towed sonars, etc all cost a ton of money to operate.
My estimate is something less than $0.01.
For example, if odds of success are one in 10k for a discovery worth $1T then it works out.
Should be "sensors" (used correctly a few sentences later). Is this a text-to-speech thing, or written by a non-native speaker, or just appalling editing?
> Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere.
Difficulty to having parse.
A list: the blackhole initiative, breakthrough starshot, the Galileo project, and now this
Wouldn't this only work for iron fragments of a meteor? If the theory is that it's made of something else, then I don't think this would be helpful.
But in regards to feasibility of such a project, I feel that 10km range is a major understatement. Think of the effort it took to find fragments of Malaysia Flight 370, even with a pretty narrow path. And that search was the most expensive search operation in history at $155MM [1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370#:....
If it got past the government censors it has to be super pure and clean. So not an alloy; it must be previously unimagined material!
But no: I already knew about the pieces of debris.
He has had such an amazing career and has done such great work that it physically pains me to see him slide into Nobel disease this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease He has always been fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but he was such a reasoned person who proposed great techno signatures like looking for pollution as a means to detect industrial-age civilizations.
It’s like watching a giant stumble and hurt himself on purpose. And it gets worse when non-technical people come up to me and ask, “have you heard of Avi Loeb?” Instead of being a beacon for enlightenment, he has gone down the path of spreading conspiratorial ignorance. It is painful to watch such a great career fall this way.
And no, based on my conversations with my professional astronomer friends, no one inside the field takes him seriously anymore. They don’t laugh at him either, they just don’t take him seriously. It’s probably why he doesn’t seem to have a more prominent role with the JWST. Interesting projects don’t want to associate with him anymore. It’s sad.
There are missions all the time to recover remains of meteoroids that didn't burn up. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/antarctic-meteorit...
But people don't exactly go running around saying that they're trying to find Thor's spaceship from that time O'Neill, Carter and Teal'c blew it up. (sorry huge Stargate fan) Even if he finds nothing, will the conspiratorial people believe that? Or, will they believe that The Powers That Be hid the Top Secret Alien Technology from the enterprising scientist?
He's adding fuel to the conspiratorial fire.
You do make a good point about conspiracy types, but I don't think it's necessarily his responsibility to educate everyone out of that. The best way to let the air out of that particular balloon is to send a small rover to the moon and land it near the original Apollo site, and then just drive it around beaming back pictures of stuff on the moon and attractive hi-res pics of Earth on a daily basis.
Does it break any new scientific ground? Nope. Will it do wonders for public awareness of/engagement with science? Hell yes.
A simpler example again than a rover would just be installing a camera on the Moon that points back at Earth and beaming a high-res whole planet image in real time. The lack of imagination in existing space projects is just deplorable. If you want a bigger science budget, a planetary selfie stick will pay off in spades. Flat earth people will dry up and blow away after a year of people being able to look at the planet they live on and see weather patterns, wildfires etc.
I don't believe it, the odds against it are astronomical, but derelict spacecraft are a popular sci-fi trope.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
I have a feeling the professor will be able to raise the funds he needs for his expedition.
“It’s not a philosophical question whether we live in an environment where objects are floating around that are representing extraterrestrial technologies. We just need to use our telescopes and find out. […] Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere, I would not seek approval from anyone else. I don’t need likes on twitter. I just want to know what it is.”
He doesn’t seem to be saying “it’s aliens”, but rather “If it’s aliens, I want to know — it’s not a matter of faith, if we find evidence of it, it’ll be true”. His use of “Once I realized” is confusing, but I believe he’s speaking in the hypothetical that aliens are confirmed.
There is, of course, a massive leap from “an object from outside the solar system hit Earth and was very strong” to “because this object was very strong it might have been made by aliens”. I also don’t see any reason why the fragments they’re looking for should be magnetic.
I mean it makes a certain type of probabilistic sense, and in multiple ways. If you fund this there's a better-than-lottery chance that you'll at least be part of something big, whether alien tech is in there or not...
BTW I'm planning to check out his podcast appearances, so here's a link for others who are interested. https://www.listennotes.com/top-podcasts/avi-loeb/
However, if anyone out there likes this kind of science fiction, I must highly recommend the 2019 series "Project Blue Book" starring the superb Aidan Gillen (GoT fame) playing the character of J. Allen Hynek.
Unfortunately, this amazing series was canceled after only two seasons, likely due to poor timing, since it was showing during the chaos and uncertainty at the height of the pandemic. But every episode is well written and the acting, for the most part, is really good. Check it out.
One of the things I like most about the Project Blue Book series, is how they try to recreate the 1950s-1960s aesthetic, somewhat following in the footsteps of what "Mad Men" sought to achieve in terms of recreating a bygone era.
Debris has disappeared from the firmament. You can't find it anywhere.
They are syndicating Space: 1999, but not Debris.
Kinda tells you something, there...
But, unlike their favorite Facebook group's grainy phone videos, this sounds fairly real. Drag the thing up and put it under a spectrograph, and if we haven't seen the stuff in it before, figure out what that means.
EDIT: I know this is not HN kosher and I don't normally do this, but why am I being down voted? This is one of the most inoffensive comments I've ever posted. Not angry, just completely baffled
I sincerely hope this becomes a trend.
I found the sentence starting with this phrase hard to read.