A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
For those out of the loop, Jill Tarter is a SETI legend, who has dedicated her life's work to a principled search for extraterrestrial life, of exactly the kind that Avi has claimed to have been neglected by the scientific community (to obviously self-aggrandising effect). The arrogance here is just astounding. This man is a toxic and hypocritical bully, and this bad behaviour should not be rewarded even if he were correct (which, as the article describes, appears unlikely).
Somehow, I imagine he didn't treat his grad students much better.
At the end of the day, individual faculty members and department standards make a huge difference.
Mostly because faculty is too busy trying to make tenure or climb the political pole to dean to audit their colleagues.
* I have family in academia, so started to grok where this was going at this point.
These kinds of things need to be heard more often so others can feel confident they aren’t alone in having ethics and have confidence in pushing back.
I’m saying this in part bc sometimes people outside of academia feel like “being department chair” means the person is super prestigious or well respected within the department or outside of it. Generally that’s not actually the case. It’s a bit of a demotion in terms of what academics care about. (Frequently it comes with a raise bc you need to offer a substantial carrot to get people to even take the position.)
With that being said, it takes balls to come up with such claims, and you need people arguing passionately against the mainstream opinion in any subject to properly judge what is the truth.
A cautious position that is afraid to lay out the entire arguments and claims just won't do. And I don't even believe what he says - but I do believe that it is important for devil's advocates to fully embrace their position instead of chickening and trying to be cautious with evidence. (up to the point where the evidence really does contradict their position).
And I fully believe him when he says he's bullied, and the other subtext I see in her question is that she envies him of his courage. Of having the balls to stand up for the subject that despite 40 years, she still has self doubts about.
He doesn't seem nice or polite. But honestly, I can totally get why he's pissed off. She did not have the balls or courage to fight for her position with all that it takes, and instead of being glad someone else has the courage she was lacking, she attacks him.
And even tho I don't believe him, I think having people with courage to stand up and argue against the consensus is incredibly important. Just like you need lawyers on both sides in litigation, it's not enough to just collect evidence. She did not advocate for her position for 40 years. She did collect evidence but that's not enough.
> I think having people with courage to stand up and argue against the consensus is incredibly important.
I agree it would be nice if Loeb tried that. So far he hasn't made any arguments, just bloviated.
And what "consensus" do you imagine Loeb is your champion against? Tarter is a pioneer carving out a new discipline, not the latest head of some ancient SETI cartel started by Aristotle. Any "consensus" is tentative at best. To hear Loeb speak, you would think it were he who started searching for techno-signatures forty years ago--with Tarter in a dominatrix outfit and a whip waylaying him at every step.
He yelled over her, refused to let her speak, misrepresented her arguments, and tarred a diverse research community with a broad brush. Nobody made him show his own ass on Zoom. That was his choice.
By contrast Tarter was polite, gracious, and statesman-like. She defended her colleagues clearly and let the clown dig his own grave. Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. If I were one of the researchers she were defending, I would be proud to have her up there representing me, and certainly glad I wasn't the one who was asked to find time in my research schedule to act as some narcissist's punching bag for an hour so he can build his social media viewership.
Loeb is just another science grifter who pumps up bad ideas with hot air in order to make some post-truth money off rubes who watch Joe Rogan--where making wild and evidence-free claims made with a flourish of performative masculinity beat decades of careful research.
AFAIK he did make some arguments about both oumuamua and those other interstellar objects. His claims aren't "evidence free". He has insufficient evidence and I'm not convinced, but without people willing to pursue evidence out of their comfort zone, science can't make discoveries.
Despite 40 years of research, Tarter risked nothing. She never put her reputation on the line. Neither did her colleagues. You can't get funding for something you yourself aren't willing to take risks on. Their cautiousness and lack of confidence and aversion to taking personal career risks reflects on their own confidence in the subject, and any person that would've considered funding them reads those signals and acts accordingly.
He's the first to have taken a personal risk, and taking a personal risk is the only way to convince others to follow you with monetary risk. "performative masculinity", also known as having balls and self-confidence and taking personal risks, is a precondition to getting others to follow you because you can only lead by example. Women can do it just like men - but it is usually a masculine trait.
If you're a feminist and you still don't get how men are more successful in some areas, you could cry about masculinity, but maybe you should learn from them that what it takes is taking personal risks and leading by example, and getting over your personal risk-aversion. And if you can't grow some balls and get over your personal risk aversion, at least have the decency to appreciate those taking personal risks to further a common cause. How the hell is Loeb her enemy in your twisted mind?!
For every man you see at the top, there are 10 men at the bottom whose personal risk failed. Most likely, Loeb will be one of them. I'm actually going to bet on that. While Tarter will continue with her comfortable job with mediocre funding, or maybe bigger funding thanks to Loeb. He'll be the one with a ruined career, not Tarter. So easy to cry "toxic masculinity" when he's in the spotlight, lets see whether Tarter will wish to swap places in 10 years after he's failed. Then tell me with complete honesty which action was the harder one to do.
That's exactly toxic feminism. Pure envy towards the men taking the risks that you couldn't muster the courage to take. Next time, take the risk yourself or be grateful to those that have the courage to take risks that benefit you. Women can be just as brave, look at Greta Thunberg. I don't believe her either by the way (you can look my post history about climate change), but she did have more effect than many "evidence-builders" and she also took a greater risk, and I appreciate that.
Maybe one day we'll live in an AI supported paradise and you won't need to take risks.
Until we get there, it's going to be men's shitty role to take risks. I appreciate everyone who takes risk, men are just programmed for it.
And they need this dumb incentive carrot at the end. They need to see those few men at the top who made it to want to take their risk. You shouldn't hate them for it.
You have one sperm out of millions reaching the egg, while the egg's risk is that nothing will come. Until our society devolves into the women artificially inseminating themselves while being supported by robots in paradise, the real risk to society is that men stop taking risks. The least you can do is have some compassion for the fools.
Speaking as a former physicist (but not astrophysicist), at least to us practicing physicists, someone being well credentialed hardly lends any credence to their more out there theories. I know multiple renowned professors in high energy and/or cosmology, including at least one in my department (Princeton Physics), who have been pursuing more wacky theories late in their careers that others in respective fields ignore for the most part. In fact, being well credentialed probably makes it easier to gravitate toward the fringe, since there’s no more normal career objective to pursue. No comment on this specific case.
Still humorously sore about needing experimental confirmation to win a Nobel though! (As I would be if I were him)
People can be incredibly smart and still pursue crackpot ideas.
The thing to note is that if you are not ready to risk being lost into a crackpot idea, than you are not ready to have a suffecintly transformative idea.
0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...
If you go back through news articles from 2017, 2019 and 2021 you will find that some "academy to the stars" claimed to have retrieved parts of crashed UAPs. There's some woo about how holding it near people had strange effects on them. They put it under a microscope and found some layered lead-bismuth alloy that had no known use on earth. And they found something that resembled frog skin.
So you have crashed UAPs, reverse engineering and non-human biologics. They even tried selling the reverse engineered tech back the Government through I think Bigelow aerospace. So that's who is behind the current UAP push.
There's also some folklore circulating about pilots having their brains literally scrambled by these UAPs.
Loeb at least sees through all this and speaks out against it. But all he seems to have is some spherules of metal from the bottom of the ocean which I'd say he has little to no evidence even came from space, let alone from a crashed UAP.
Unfortunately, if you look far enough into these things, you just find a trail of cash, extracted one way or another from a scientifically illiterate general public.
I'm not sure what the answer is. Yes, we need to look, which means spending money. But we need to make sure it isn't going into the pockets of pseudoscientists and people who use "classification" to cover up their (non-reputable) sources.
Among this darkness stands a beacon of light. The New York Times, reputed for it infallible thoroughness, providing accurate reporting on all subjects. From the Iraq war to pre-2023 reporting on Sam Bankman-Fried, their flawless track-record shows that they can be trusted to shield truth from independent journalism.
>“Two-thirds of the American public believes there is extraterrestrial life, more than the 56 percent that believes in the God of the Bible,” Loeb told me. Dismissing their questions as unworthy of consideration, he argues, is not a good way to earn back the trust of an American public that has become skeptical of science and scientists.
I think we should open new university departments that go one step further and study "why do aliens love the USA so much?". Most alien activity, either recorded by the public, the media or the government, happens in the USA. This is a major question that deserves the same level of scrutiny, if not more, than questions such as "do aliens exist".
Professor Dave Barry explained the reason sometime ago:
https://web.archive.org/web/20131103013600/http://www.ufoera...
Do you read the news in any language other than English? Is it then surprising that all the UFO sightings you hear about are written in English by English speakers?
If you actually had any interest in answering the question, which you obviously don't, you would have looked for information in other languages and you would have found plenty.
That's kind of a weird take... I'm not American at all.
I can't speak for all European countries, but in most it's kind of a basic anti-american cliché that they are so dumb that they believe in the grey alien coming with its anal probes. Most of the material about UFOs is directly translated.
There's some homegrown UFO, like the French 'Raël' [0], but I believe it's way more fringe in non-English speaking countries. Trying to find data I stumbled upon [1], which would be fairly consistent with the result of a meme propagated through culture.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABl
[1] https://www.kaggle.com/code/shikhar96/geographical-distribut...
The dataset you pointed at is a perfect example of what I'm saying: NUFORC is an American nonprofit.
[1] https://avi-loeb.medium.com/starting-the-analysis-of-spherul...
[2] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/01/25/131-...
Or if we classify every intriguing observation "in the interest of national security". That's why I'm curious about what may come out of this year's NDAA bill with its "UAP Disclosure Act" amendment [0,1].
[0] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sch...
[1] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...
In my opinion the root of the problem is that the people who have the best equipment to detect incursions in the skies are military forces, particularly the US, and their policy for decades has been to classify, dismiss and ridicule. Are they sometimes doing that to hide secret tech? Seems very likely. Are they sometimes doing it to hide something else? We don't really have a way to know.
So what makes highly-cleared people in the Intelligence Community and the DoD to make these outrageous claims? I'm talking about people like David Grusch, Karl Nell, Chris Mellon or Luis Elizondo. I don't really know, it is hard to find a parsimonious explanation.
What I don't want to do is jump to conclusions one way or another. If you look at their resumes, the people making these claims either are or have recently been in positions where it's very plausible that they would have access to this sort of information. So, let's investigate and figure out what makes them say these things. Some of them have testified in secure facilities, providing data such as the location of these alleged craft, so it would make sense to follow up and see what's in there. If there's nothing, all the better.
If there is new advanced tech, it would likely be US in origin just given the amount of money the US has spent over the last 70 years for defense. It certainly makes sense that we would compartmentalize advanced tech knowledge and it makes sense that we might test it on ourselves to gauge/control reaction to the tech rather than risk it falling into another government’s hands.
And yes, of course our government would lie about it. Why wouldn’t they?
Another counterargument you often hear is the decades-long historical record from pilots (both civilian and military), including reports of "Foo fighters" during WW2 from both sides of the conflict.
It is a muddy subject.
My understanding is that Grusch has not testified that he had direct knowledge/eyewitness/evidence to alien tech, but instead “has been told of…” from people who have. Nell simply vouches for Grusch’s integrity and adds no direct evidence right?
That said, despite all the latest publicity we don’t really know anymore now than we did before. Still zero actual evidence and honestly nothing that hasn’t already been out there for decades: “blue beret” crash retrieval units, Colonel Corso, Lazar, Jesse Marcel. All we have that is different is a person willing to testify to congress that he heard some rumors and a congress willing to hear it.
If 20% of national gdp is not enough to find them it means we are not searching hard enough and we will keep increasing the funding until we catch those pesky elephants. /s
You are using same logic.
Also. You are advanced race capable of (at least) interstellar travel. You mastered engineering, physics and biology to survive traveling to distant solar system, however your spacecrafts keep crashing in atmosphere of Earth. And those that dont crash just fly around aimlessly spooking native monkeys.
Pinnacle of civilization!
> If 20% of national gdp is not enough to find them it means we are not searching hard enough and we will keep increasing the funding until we catch those pesky elephants. /s
> You are using same logic.
What you are doing is called a strawman argument. You spin the other person's words into whichever caricature you find easiest to dismiss, and make fun of them. Instead of, you know, actually trying to understand what the other person may be saying and treating them with some respect and curiosity.
If you have something constructive to say, I will be happy to continue this conversation. For now, this will do.
>What you are doing is called a strawman argument
As a matter of fact you created a strawman - a UFO. And now you demand that others have to prove you wrong. Or take it seriously. you are also using Pascal Wager - in case UFOs/aliens exists we need to act as if they are real.
>If you have something constructive to say
I do believe the second part of my reply was constructive. The part that ask serious question (the part you omitted from your response).
It is literally a strawman argument.
> As a matter of fact you created a strawman - a UFO. And now you demand that others have to prove you wrong.
I have done neither of those two things.
> I do believe the second part of my reply was constructive. The part that ask serious question (the part you omitted from your response).
You can't ridicule somebody, put words in their mouth, and then expect to have a meaningful conversation with them. You could have approached this conversation in good faith from the beginning and have a sincere exchange of ideas.
But just for the sake of turning the other cheek, here's an honest reply.
> Also. You are advanced race capable of (at least) interstellar travel. You mastered engineering, physics and biology to survive traveling to distant solar system, however your spacecrafts keep crashing in atmosphere of Earth. And those that dont crash just fly around aimlessly spooking native monkeys.
If there were monkeys living in Mars they would also ask themselves: if Earthlings are an advanced race capable of (at least) interplanetary travel, if they have mastered engineering, physics and biology to survive traveling to distant planets, however your spacecrafts keep crashing in the atmosphere of Mars. And those that don't crash just roll around aimlessly spooking native monkeys.
This is what an analogy looks like. I did not stretch your words into a caricature. I tried to understand your argument in good faith and presented an alternative. I did not ridicule you or your ideas. I showed respect and curiosity.
Now, let's continue.
If there are crafts in Earth created by a non-human intelligence, how do we know where they came from? Why jump to the conclusion that they must come from a different star?
Next, why assume that if they did come from another star then their craft must be infallible? Our current technology would blow the minds of anybody living a thousand years ago -- but is it flawless? Does your car never break down? Do airplanes never crash?
After that is the question of: if there are retrieved craft, did they crash by themselves? Or were they shot down? A stone thrown at a modern helicopter can crash it, why would it be impossible for an air-to-air missile to down a UFO? Were any of the UFOs intentionally left intact to be retrieved?
None of the ideas you presented are new. Anybody with an interest in UFOs has asked themselves the same questions, and many others that probably haven't even occurred to you yet. Yet many of us remain curious and open-minded, because while mundane explanations can be found, the more you look into the subject the more evidence you discover and the more questions it brings.
We are not imbeciles. It is not possible to learn something new if we start from the assumption that there can't possibly be anything there for us to learn in the first place.
It's highly amusing to me that even that story is incorrect:
"After studying the reports, Hynek offered a provisional hypothesis for some of the sightings: a few of about 100 witnesses had mistaken swamp gas for something more spectacular. At the press conference where he made his announcement, Hynek repeatedly and strenuously stated that swamp gas was a plausible explanation for only a portion of the Michigan UFO reports, and certainly not for UFO reports in general. But much to his chagrin, Hynek's qualifications of his hypothesis were largely overlooked, and the term swamp gas was repeated ad infinitum in relation to UFO reports. The explanation was subject to national derision."
There wasn't really a material argument against his controversial hypotheses about interstellar objects. I counted an ad hominem (45 minutes of analysis of his awkward public persona), an argument from ignorance ('Omuamua is out of view so it's not possible to collect evidence for the lightsail hypothesis) and an appeal to the authority of the broader astronomical community.
He is going out and looking for evidence about IM1, and is seeking cross-validation from other labs, in a very transparent way. He's making lots of possibly inappropriately optimistic public speculations in the meantime, but I haven't seen him make any actual claims that aren't justified, which seems like the defining feature of a crackpot.
"The World's leading Alien Hunter"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Mack#Psychology_of_ali... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/magazine/john-mack.html
We're a tiny nanosecond blip of electromagnetic noise that might, with difficulty, be received at Alpha Centauri.
If simple life develops in many places, intelligent life is still vanishingly rare over galactic timescales. In our own little ephemeral lightning flash I highly doubt there's anything within our galaxy.
Non Terrestrial Intelligences (NTIs, to borrow from The Abyss movie) might be interested in places where life gets more complex than a few RNA fragments. I just can't see why they'd want samples more frequently than every few million years or so.
Certainly we'd have come and been long gone before any probe made a flyby.
* It is possible to create von Neumann probes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft
* The odds of intelligent life occurring around a star is less than one in 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (the number of stars)
Then, in all odds, they should be here already. And why move on, when von Neumann probes are "free" in that they have zero marginal cost?
We're probably just not very interesting.
> We're probably just not very interesting.
Yet we humans continue to explore our solar system and find all sorts of things intriguing, from exo-geology to weather patterns in other planets, to the life cycle of the most insignificant beetle.
I think it is far too early to be making assumptions about what could motivate a hypothetical alien probe to explore this planet.
Doubtful, our ability just to contemplate the question makes us very interesting.
In the one place in the universe where we know without a doubt that life exists—tens of millions of different sorts critters had to come into being, then fail or succeed as a species and evolve, only for a single species to manage to emerge to the point where it could actually ponder the notion of “hey! what if there is other intelligent life out there…and why haven’t they contacted us yet?” Also throw in the fact that it took nearly a full third of the age of the universe for our species to get to that point and it seems pretty likely that intelligence to our level is very rare.
So yes, a billion different sorts of amoebas might be meh, but a species capable of sending a package into interstellar space—that might pique something’s interest (assuming there is something out there whose interest could be piqued)
The existence of similar anomalies on Earth regarding intelligent life suggests the possibility of similar phenomena elsewhere, and dismissing such inquiries with "crackpot" accusations doesn't make sense to me.