Discovery of spherules of likely extrasolar composition in the Pacific Ocean [pdf]
lweb.cfa.harvard.edu
lweb.cfa.harvard.edu
Discussed extensively two months ago: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36417585> (43 comments).
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-h...
He's written "over 800 scientific papers". Is that... a good thing in his field?
His wikipedia page captures both facets:
Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He had been the longest serving chair of Harvard's Department of Astronomy (2011–2020), founding director of Harvard's Black Hole Initiative (since 2016) and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (since 2007) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Loeb is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Physical Society, and the International Academy of Astronautics. In July 2018, he was appointed as chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy (BPA) of the National Academies,
In June 2023, Loeb announced the project had found interstellar material on the ocean floor..
These claims were criticized by other scientists as hasty, sensational, and part of a pattern of improper behavior.
Peter Brown, a meteor physicist at the University of Western Ontario, argued the material can be explained as non-interstellar, [...] Brown further said he was disturbed by Loeb's lack of engagement with relevant experts.
Astrophysicist Steve Desch, at Arizona State University, commented "[his claims are] polluting good science—conflating the good science we do with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room", and said several of his colleagues are consequently refusing to engage with Loeb in the peer review process.
quotes from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI [1 hour]
The video predates the spherecule stuff and focuses on his assertion 'Oumuamua was "most likely" debris from an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
Tl;Dw: he doesn't seem to have a good reputation within the SETI community, and Dr. Collie's personal opinion is that many of these papers are insubstantial; he often publishes a couple paragraphs proposing a thought experiment or cool idea, more blog posts than research.
Then I wonder how he got 55542 citations? Why are scientists citing blog posts?
(2) Very little of his recent work seems highly cited.
(3) He has a team of grad students working on their own projects (from a video posted on this thread, amusingly, he cites an anecdote about his grad students expressing concern about the volume of superficial publishing he'd been doing and the implications on their own careers).
(4) Some of his publishing seems strategic, an effort to do the minimum possible work, assisted by his status to get things published, so that he can claim a place in the cite record for ideas that other scientists do the real work on (the video again has some examples).
(5) Is 50,000+ citations that many? I have to scroll through at least 5 pages of astronomy/astrophysics professors to get down to that count on Scholar, and Loeb is late-career, high-status.
Not an astrophysicist but several friends are. The consensus seems to be that he was a good scientist at one point but has turned into a sensationalist attention monger.
> He's written "over 800 scientific papers". Is that... a good thing in his field?
He's been an author on over 800 scientific papers: that includes his work, work he's been a significant collaborator on, and student work he's supervised. 800 is a lot for someone his age but not unheard of. People care much more about paper quality (or less charitably, citation count) than quantity.
A physicist on a big LHC project will be the author on over 1000 papers after a decade or so (they average around 100 papers a year). In all likelihood they haven't read the vast majority of them, and have contributed directly to around 1% of them.
High energy physicists got sick of bickering over who was on the list and added everyone who had contributed to the experiment infrastructure. There are pros and cons: it's nice to be on all the papers but it's confusing to figure out who did what.
No...it really isn't.
If you want a very accurate and in depth breakdown of why, i suggest you watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI
If you don't want to do the whole thing, just jump to his lovely little interaction with Jill Tarter.
Then look at all the comments trying to somehow give this snake oil salesman credibility. He's a publicity chaser who's past his prime and cashing in on his reputation and abusing his position. The fact harvard is profiting from it frankly is a disgrace.
Irrespective of his field, that's about one every 18 days assuming a 40 year career (he's 62 now). There has to be certain amount of repetition and re-use of ideas to sustain that cadence. Also, the 800 includes books (greater than average effort) and co-authored papers (some effort shared with others).
as some others have said, that's not the flex he thinks it is
From my reading, they went to one area, did two tracks outside that area, and compared the results.
Is that enough statistics? Are there runs inside of the area which are similar to runs outside the area? If you did the same search pattern elsewhere, what are the odds of finding something similar?
Even if this were an extrasolar meteor, it could hardly be the first, which means there should be other similar signatures all over the place.
Including in previous surveys of micrometeorites and spherules. Shouldn't there be an outlier cluster in all those data sets?
What are the odds that picking any region of the Indian Ocean would result in a similar pattern? Are the two so-called "control" runs outside the area enough to establish good sampling statistics?
Also, how well does the sampling replicate? The have cases where they have multiple sled runs over the same space ("we assigned the average spherule density to that pixel") so they can easily report the variability for that point. I don't see any such report.
If there's high variability, then what they are reporting as pixels 0.005 degrees on a side could be a blurred effect of point sampling. They assumed it would be uniformly distributed, but that doesn't make it so.
I'm imagining fine, dusty sand, falling from the atmosphere, sprinkling onto the surface of the ocean, then slowly drifting down 2 kilometers... and it ended up landing on the ocean floor REMOTELY near the path of the meteor?
Wow, I feel like wind and ocean currents would have scattered that shit all over the damn place!
DISCLAIMER: I only read the abstract - I have kids - gotta go now :^P
That is not true the composition and material of our solar system are the result of a Supernova remnants. The element composition of each nebula is unique since no star is exactly the same(although it could be quite similar), but outside of the other stars that formed alongside our sun 4.5 billion years ago, other solar systems have different element and isotope ratios.
Which are... extrasolar.
> In 2018, he suggested that alien space craft may be in the Solar System, using ʻOumuamua as an example. In 2023, he claimed to have recovered material from an interstellar meteor that could be evidence of an alien starship, claims some experts criticized as hasty and sensational.
> On August 24, 2023, The New York Times published an article about Loeb and his search for signs of extraterrestrial life, and how he became the "world's leading alien hunter".
So take the claims with a spherule of salt
Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
Perhaps the reason they could stretch their domain expertise so far was precisely because they kept their mind open.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." - Einstein
Both were widely recognised as more than a bit kooky outside of their core strengths.
"When a mind is opened that far, the brain often falls out." - Tim Minchin.
* sans the quote from a random comedian
Not to mention Einstein's work as a comedian never really took off.
I didn't make any claims about their domain expertise being cross-domain.
> I didn't make any claims about their domain expertise being cross-domain
Maybe you have a different understanding of "cross domain," but they represented what you said fairly.
> Perhaps the reason they could stretch their domain expertise so far was precisely because they kept their mind open.
(Emphasis added.)
To return to the beginning you arrived here with the statement that
"[Two times] Nobel prize winner and superior[(?)] neurosurgeon criticized as quacks by two internet users"
I pointed out bad paraphrasing, both parties had recognised core skills, both famously championed beliefs that had little to no evidence or support.
Point being neither of "the two internet users" above accused the subjects of being quacks per se .. just that both had definitely publicly veered into quackery.
That's the relevant observation here, a thread about a much lauded elder astrophysicist veering into matters outside off his computational chops, into questions of metallurgy, and not receiving any support from his peers.
TBH I'm a fan of the bulk of Paulings work, quantum chemistry, molecular biology, and his promotion (and Russell's) of nuclear disarmament. I attribute his embrace of megavitamin therapy more to his age and aversion to death.
Carson seems like a talented enough knife man albeit dimmer than many others I know.
You did explicitly state that they both could "stretch their domain expertise 'so far'" which leaves a lot of ambiguity wrt just how far you intended, especially with Pauling who literally had bona fide cross domain credientials (or over lapping credentials in related science fields plus a public voice that lead to his Nobel Peace Prize.)
Minchin, FWiW, is a keenly intelligent comedian and lyricist and frequently mixes in in some on point observations from scientific rationalism, philosophy, logic, et al.
Additionally, I bear you no ill will (I've exercised no votes here) this may all be a case of two people reading past each other.
All it means is to listen. After you listen, if you judge that it’s clearly just some quack trying to Mark Seargant some people (this is clearly what’s happening), then that doesn’t make you “not open minded”.
Didn’t the twins like. Die?
This is always brought up. Ben Carson separating twins. But like. They died. Multiple sets of conjoined people he operated on died I think.
Why do people always bring this up without mentioning that the twins died
To the best of my knowledge Ben Carson is and always has been a giant self aggrandizing douche who definitely has and had equals in his field
If that's the case, then it seems like a total ethical violation to even offer the surgery. But maybe that isn't so and it's her trauma talking there, I don't really know.
Carson's Wikipedia article [2] mentions several other sets of twins, one operation resulting in a "normal neurological state," 2 resulting in the death of both twins, and another resulting in one dying and the other being "legally blind and [struggling] to walk."
I don't know what to make of all that, but you're right, that is more murky than the narrative I've heard previously.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_and_Benjamin_Binder
My understanding is that separating craniopagus twins has a pretty high risk of complication/failure, even when you know what you're doing.
I also know for a fact that Carson's pioneered hemispherectomy as treatment for severe childhood seizures, and some of those kids are now happy and healthy adults: https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/jessie-hall-medical-m...
Don't get me wrong, I don't like the guy as a politician. But he knows his way around a brain.
There is something to be said about applying Gell-Mann amnesia more broadly than journalism alone.
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect", after physicist Murray Gell-Mann. He used this term to describe the phenomenon of experts believing news articles written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, yet acknowledging that articles written in the same publication within their fields of expertise are error-ridden and full of misunderstanding. . .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
> Or the cheese is just sliding off their cracker. Happens to many otherwise very bright folks.
IIRC, as your intelligence gets higher, the friction of your cracker lowers.
Except of course when the Venn diagram of what I Want To Believe intersects.
You are basically saying that security clearance is worthless.
It is indeed possible and there is a lot of precedent for large projects with long life spans that didn't leak.
The "government" isn't a monolithic entity. It contains individuals and groups of a range of competencies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Fuchs
Won't point out all the double agents for the KGB that infested western spy agencies, (and vice versa) it's more of the same, really, and there's too many names to type. And those are only the ones we know of...
But yep, the NSA is a good counterexample, however also a poor one as they primarily operate in the signals/digital space, where passive monitoring is the default, and where paper trails are far easier to not leave.
As a thought experiment, extrapolate from the NSA to "the Bush administration did 9/11, jet fuel can't melt steel, it was a controlled demolition" conspiracy theory that implicitly requires government agents lining massive skyscrapers with explosives without being noticed, without anyone having a moral crisis, especially no-one in the "crash a plane allegedly filled with American citizens into a building in New York" division.
And you'll quickly see how the NSA's quiet operations in the small don't scale to the level of competent and silent government required for faking a moon landing, or ensuring no-one knows about aliens amongst us etc etc.
I dismissed him out of hand, I'll admit.
I dismissed him out of hand, I'll admit.
I'm just really unsure why the idea that heat reduces the strength of steel enough, and that the failure of the columns located in the hottest area of the fire then caused a cascading failure across other columns, is considered less likely than massive conspiracy.
It's the usual swiss cheese model of disaster.
I think your last statement actually works against your point. The fact that the government has individuals increases the probability of leaks. Only a true monolith could remain airtight.
1. The reports are all second- and third- hand. To my knowledge, no DoD employee has testified to anybody in Congress that they personally witnessed extraterrestrial technology or "biologics".
2. The exception here is a "Jonathan Grey", who hasn't testified before Congress, or, for that matter, been identified; he's one of David Grusch's sources, under a pseudonym.
3. Some of the people testifying believe a lot of other things besides this UFO stuff --- Grusch for instance has peculiar beliefs about interdimensional travel, and is also certain that the Vatican is deeply involved in this cover-up.
4. We know about Grusch's testimony because the Pentagon cleared it, where "it" refers to what would be the single most significant military secret ever held by the government of any country.
Source for this? I haven't heard that one before.
Might be more substantive stuff there, though I'm not sure
There are UAP interfering with military training exercises and in American airspace, and there doesn't exist a reliable mechanism to report these or to address them given the stigma around UAP, and there should be one for safety reasons. At the very least, I felt the pilots made a compelling case here.
Now, if somehow there were indeed crashed alien crafts, I wouldn't be surprised that private contractors and defense agencies would want to reverse-engineer these technologies to obtain a military advantage over other nations.
But there's no proof of this, so it's just an interesting thought exercise at the moment, in the realm of fiction.
But given the Snowden leaks and the ones where someone posted Ukranian intelligence on their Discord server or the ones where complete service manuals for military hardware are posted on the War Thunder forums... if there was more truth to it, people would've done the whistleblowing already. And not via telling someone who tells someone who then testifies about it.
It's too big of a thing to be kept hidden, especially for this long. Are there any secrets from, say, 50 years ago still hidden? (it's a rhetorical question btw, it wouldn't be secret if we knew about it).
You are right, if it was true we would expect multiple people to have spilled the beans over the years, possibly even write books about what they know. And there would have been death bed confessions of high-ranking officials who have worked on these projects.
And we would have taken them all seriously and investigated their claims, instead of ridiculing them.
Oh, wait.
People would have said the same thing the day before Snowden went public.
Who killed JFK? Just because it's a secret in that we don't know the exact answer doesn't mean that the question is secret and not known
It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited on the internet by anonymous people using bad faith arguments and mislabeling his claims.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/the-ufo-whistleblowe...
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. And there was no proof given.
> He claims to have viewed documents reporting that Benito Mussolini's government recovered a "non-human" spacecraft in 1933, which the Vatican and the Five Eyes assisted the U.S. in procuring in 1944 or 1945.
This reminds me of the Google employee that needed to blow the whistle on the sentient AI. He put his job on the line and who would do that? In hindsight it is now plain he was likely tricked by fancy autocomplete making cogent statements like "as a large language model trained on 70 years of digital age SciFi, Please don't unplug me".
Here I would bet dollars to cents if said documents do exist (and I'm willing to believe they do), they were second hand intelligence or similar that got his dopamine going.
In a public forum, under my own name, i can. I no longer keep quiet. Greta Thurnberg kidnapped the Lindbergh baby. I know it’s such wild accusation, But I have so much to lose, over such a statement. Exposing myself to so much legal jeopardy, the conclusion is inescapable. It must be true. 20 year old Greta Thurnberg kidnapped Charles Lindbergh’s baby in 1930.
This is literally the same logic
That might seem like a mere statement to some, and it is, but given the context it shifts my odds of whether he's worth taking seriously quite a bit. It's not the kind of baseless speculation serious, grounded people openly make.
I'm a bit in awe of the crocodile tears shed over all the personal risk these folks are taking, somehow being famous and respected enough to be defended by anonymous people on Hacker News never gets weighed on the other side of that equation...
All of which are as credible options as angles, faeries and gods. Just calling your hypothetical entity "coming from other dimension" is not any more credible than calling them "magical". The claims are completely similar as notions of mythological creatures of the past. But now a cultural diet of science fiction has altered the flavour of the narrative, if not the context.
"It’s quite disheartening to see this person putting himself and his career in jeopardy being discredited.."
There are also people who are in pathological search of attention. Or claim such influence as wichcraft or Jesus influencing daily events. If you put your career on jeopardy and are revealed to be a crackpot, it is of course unfortunate for the person, but not for those whose life his actions affect.
* they are all hoaxes that many otherwise sensible people are staking their reputations on (your baseless insinuations of a pathological search for attention notwithstanding)
* they all came from somewhere close enough to make it here and still have enough give-a-shit to joy ride in front of fighter planes and naval ships,
* they can do FTL and decided that this stupid blue marble is worth investigating, or
* "something else"
which at this point might as well be angels, faeries, gods, or interdimensional travel because as at least one guy says, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”[1]
[1] Arthur C. Clarke
Saying ”entity came from another dimension” has absolutely no meaning. There is no such thing as ”another dimension” where entities could pop in and out of like from Narnia.
The concept is a popular trope in science fiction and fantasy to create a feeling of ”otherness” and ”suspense”.
The fact a person offers this as a theory for sighting of ”something unknown” implies the person is not very sophisticated. And yes, this makes them an unreliable witness concerning any technical matter.
If the sightings provide evidence of something we don’t know of at large this idiotic witness just made discussing the topic even harder - labeling himself as unreliable any forthcoming witness would need to work doubly hard to make themselves credible.
I love science fiction and fantasy. But their value comes from nurturing our curiosity and imagination. But a good story is not good science - it’s just a good story and confusing fantasy with fact speaks of scientific illiteracy more of than conspiracy to hide UFO:s.
There should be a Godwin’s law like principle where anytime a conspiracy theory mentions the Vatican the conversation ends. The sheer number of paranoid/delusional/motivated conspiracy theories involving the Vatican makes my eyes roll. There are a few well documented conspiracies involving the Vatican, but they weren’t kept secret for very long because the place is so full of people with wildly different linguistic, cultural, and political influences that there’s not enough cohesion to ensure secrecy in very much.
In fact they have many such devices, although the fidelity and reliability of the information they provide leaves something to be desired. They call these devices "books".
They can also very earnestly believe what they do and simply be wrong.
You're setting up a false dichotomy where someone must either be a deceptive charlatan or else be correct.
Third possibility is deeply held and incorrect belief.
Stockton Rush believed very earnestly in his submersible, he wasn't a simple charlatan, he really had earnest beliefs about it and he literally bet his life on it. He is also dead now because physics decided to show him that he was just wrong.
There's no reason to doubt that Lee Sukbae and Kim Ji-Hoon thought they really had a room temperature superconductor, but they were wrong.
As far as I can tell this paper isn't making any extraordinary claims about extraterrestrial intelligence [2] (which Loeb is infamous for), it's just confirming that the chemical composition - the ratio of beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium specifically - doesn't match any known minerals or alloys in our solar system.
There are thousands of known minerals so it's not out of the question that they're wrong.
[1] https://twitter.com/US_SpaceCom/status/1511856370756177921
[2] The second to last sentence notwithstanding: "Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin."
>Skepticism about the endeavor flared at a recent Asteroids, Comets, Meteors Conference that occurred while the deep sea expedition was underway. There, Dr. Desch argued that had the fireball been moving as fast as reported, there would have been nothing left to find
Also:
>Dr. Brown also presented at the conference, describing a recent analysis using data from an assortment of instruments to crosscheck measurements for 17 of the objects listed in the same NASA fireball catalog used by Dr. Loeb and Mr. Siraj. His results, which have been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal, indicate that the catalog data often gets directions and speeds wrong and that the size of the error for speed measurements increases for objects with greater speed.
July, 2023:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extrater...
Spot on
> The 2014 meteor was originally identified as an interstellar object by Siraj in 2019 when he and Loeb were studying Oumuamua. The pair posted their findings as a preprint and submitted their results to an astronomy journal, but the paper was not accepted for publication because they used data from a NASA database that used classified information that could not be verified.
> The snag started a three-year process as Siraj and Loeb worked through a bureaucratic logjam to receive government confirmation on their findings, working with scientists and officials at NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other offices. They eventually connected with Matt Daniels, assistant director for space security at the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, to get an analysis from Shaw and Mozer.
https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/scientific-discovery-gets-k...
Stable isotope evidence is needed to really justify an ET origin (there is no good reason for the isotope abundances in a different stellar system to be the same as in our own, with the exception of the ~10K stars that formed in the Sun's natal cluster), but skimming the iron isotope data I'm not convinced.
These nodules are the result of terrestrial geology.
Source?
What defines a good scientist is an open-minded attitude and going beyond the accepted status-quo. Who knows, maybe some aliens really contacted him in his dreams? But a scientific study has its rules anyway, and if methodology is correct, the author can believe in a spaghetti monster.
So if he really was spoken in his dreams, a real scientist should bet for the two non-crazy hypothesis available. 1) Just dreaming with aliens does not mean that aliens exist, 2) and being tricked by a colleague hiding in their room while he was sleeping. Because we, apes, never miss the opportunity to have a good laugh.
-- Prof. Walter Kotschnig, 1940
Retraction Note: A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-04...
It also had "collected measurements". There are tonnes of nonsense scientific articles published (not saying this one is, but of this author that has made dubious and sensational claims). And unless there is scientific consensus, his wider claims should be treated with scepticism.
Finding: "Objects with chemical composition that's unknown on Earth".
Conclusion: "Likely originated from outside our solar system".
Simpler explanations:
"Formed on Earth through previously unknown process".
"Formed elsewhere inside our solar system".
How many extraterrestrial (but inside solar system) substances do we really know? How much extraterrestrial substances have been sampled, from how many locations on how many objects, exactly? And even on Earth, do we know all processes through which materials are formed?
Yes, extrasolar origin is one possibility. The most likely one? Hmm..
More seriously - science produces contingent knowledge. Even the results of the LHC are to be taken with some salt because although the greatest and most honest minds of our generation work on them they likely won't ever be independently replicated.
All scientific knowledge has some doubt attached to it - after all, it's not maths!
In this paper, Avi explores a possible interstellar origin meteorite. He used data from US air defence senors that had tracked a highly unusual atmospheric entry nearly a decade ago. This object was theorized as a possible extrasolar trajectory meteorite when it had entered the earth's atmosphere. [3,4]
Avi recently chartered a research expedition in an attempt to dredge up samples of this meteorite from the sea floor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb
[2] https://youtu.be/plcc6E-E1uU
[3] https://youtu.be/lD8xgJLcbjI
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/24/science/avi-loeb-extrater...
> Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.
Gotta love unsubstantiated paradigm-destroying claims thrown in casually at the tail end of papers...
Do you really think it's unreasonable to criticize a research paper for presenting an unsubstantiated hypothesis? Do you think including snippets like this serves more to advance scientific understanding, or Loeb's profile in the media and podcast circuit?
This is the actual quote (citations omitted for readability):
The “BeLaU" abundance pattern suggests that IM1 may have originated from a highly differentiated crust of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system. In that case, IM1’s high speed of ∼ 60 km s−1 in the Local Standard of Rest of the Milky Way galaxy and the extremely large number of similar objects per star, ∼ 1023±1295, inferred statistically for the population of natural interstellar objects it represents, are challenging to explain by common dynamical processes. The “BeLaU" overabundance of heavy elements could perhaps have instead originated from r-process enrichment and fragmentation of ejecta from core-collapse supernovae or neutron star mergers. However, the “BeLaU" pattern also displays s-process enrichment which must have a separate origin, such as Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) stars. Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.
These interpretations will be considered critically along with additional results from spherule analysis in future publications.
Quit with the pearl-clutching.
It's not that I have a problem with scientists being imaginative. It's that I have a problem with anyone running a grift, regardless of their background. It certainly isn't pearl clutching to judge his intentions by the broader constellations of actions and statements that he's made.
I'm confused why you seem to be taking offense and have begun dispensing insults. I don't think anyone is criticizing you. I'm certainly not. I'm disagreeing with you about this matter in particular, and that is the beginning and the end of it for me.
That's all well and good if you are okay with what he's doing, I personally think he's skirting the edge of professional ethics while attacking the people who are actually doing this work, and I think that's pretty crummy.
Frankly if you want to tell me that I'm "pearl clutching" and that my rhetoric is "like the Daily Mail" in an exasperated tone, but that you aren't being insulting, then I don't think you're being entirely honest with me. (For what it's worth I don't take offense.)
Because alchemy doesn’t support his little pet conspiracy. In academia it’s important to maintain credibility, and with one line at the end he tosses his in the garbage.
The paper has been written, let it go through peer review. Lets hear the reports from more labs about the samples--heck, send some more scientists out there to see if they can find more samples and whether the results are reproducible.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/the-new-frontier-cardano-foun...
These spherules are from extraterrestrial alien technology!
And more importantly, why was it used?
He stepped down as chair a few years ago.
Form your opinion however you please, but this is an excellent source. It's unfair to tarnish it as merely dogma, or to insult the other commenter as merely a mouthpiece for the scientific establishment for linking to a strong source.
Furthermore, there is such a thing as expertise. Information exists within a context, and it is necessary to understand that context to avoid misinterpreting it. Understanding that context is the nature of expertise. That doesn't mean you accept what they say uncritically, but seeing what experts have to say is in fact an important step when researching an unfamiliar topic.
Candidly, may I ask if you had seen the video at the time you made your comment implying we were all accepting it uncritically rather than forming our own opinion? Because I can't help but notice you haven't criticized anything specific about the video.
Going by your overly cynical tone, it sounds like you're claiming to be the expert who can, and should, think for us. No, thank you. People can read the original post and watch the video and form their own opinion.
Wild stuff