Harvard astronomer's "alien spherules" are industrial pollutants | Hacker News Reader

Harvard astronomer's "alien spherules" are industrial pollutants

bigthink.com

10 pointsnithinj9 comments

What a weird hit piece of an article. Setting up straw man after straw man, then knocking them down. Loeb never claimed what the materials are, at most he's theorized different possibilities that fit with the current data. But there are no quotes of him claiming what they are. The article also leaves out all information that conflicts with the author's viewpoints and the summary of most of the arguments is just "nobody can prove with 100% certainty X is true, so therefore X is false".

Loeb swings his Harvard degree around and did rounds claiming "they are silencing me" for his claim that ʻOumuamua was an alien craft.

Is that Rama, or the other one?

> Loeb never claimed what the materials are, at most he's theorized different possibilities that fit with the current data. But there are no quotes of him claiming what they are

He did so in no unclear words: see titles The IM1 Spherules from the Pacific Ocean Have Extrasolar Composition and Reconstructing the First Interstellar Meteor, IM1 in my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483438

Fun link dump:

* harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb by acollierastro (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=5s

* Critique of arXiv submission 2308.15623, "Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide", by A. Loeb et al by Steve Desch, Alan Jackson https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07699

* The IM1 Spherules from the Pacific Ocean Have Extrasolar Composition by Avi Loeb (August 2023) https://avi-loeb.medium.com/the-im1-spherules-from-the-pacif...

* Reconstructing the First Interstellar Meteor, IM1 by Avi Loeb (September 2023) https://avi-loeb.medium.com/reconstructing-the-first-interst...

  >Other authors have concluded there’s less than a 50% chance that CNEOS 20140108 was interstellar

Lazy research. The linked article is just a simple "doubt paper" questioning the error bars of the raw data, published prior to the DoD releasing information about the error bars.

To give such an outdated paper the last word (and even use the loaded word 'conclude') makes everything the author writes highly suspect.

Where is the cited paper outdated? It's from 2014, is it that what makes outdated being from 9 years ago? And then you jump from "hey this guy in an article with like two dozens external links has one link to a paper that is slightly too old for my taste" to "lazy! just doubts! highly suspect!"

It's all about probabilities.

The paper linked in that quote was from 2019, not 2014.

The paper is outdated because the DoD later addressed their concern about error bars. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/it-takes-a...

  > And then you jump from "...a paper that is slightly too old for my taste" to "highly suspect!"

It's worse than mere age.

The paper he chooses to "conclude" a major section is cherry-picked from the middle of the story, within a highly-publicized drama within the academic field. It's unlikely that anyone even casually following could be unaware of the real ending to the story.

The author is either incompetent at research or deceptive. Either way, "highly suspect" is warranted.

I have long ago stopped considering the Harvard brand as a proxy for high quality analysis and prediction.

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