The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer's alien spherules
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
Anybody that thinks he's made hard claims are mostly just suckered in by trash pop sci articles that spins what he says into ridiculous headlines/articles like "Loeb says there's UFOs on the ocean floor!" to get clicks.
Ironically, the very article that was linked here makes unscientific hard claims: "The seismology data used to locate this meteorite wasn’t due to an impact, but merely a truck passing near the seismic station". That's a hard claim. There's no "we think the most likely explanation is X" or "the data is better explained by X theory". The paper the article links to as "proof" also makes no hard claims but merely says that they think the data "suggests" a traffic based origin better explains the data. The article itself is the definition of unscientific and everything they're trying to pin on Loeb.
[Edit] The paper which claims the traffic-based origin also has a grammar mistake in the very first paragraph, so I'm not very enthused about reading further and seeing how methodical their methods were, when they couldn't even manage to write a one paragraph summary without error.
Under very weak assumptions (basically that an intelligent race would have the desire and ability to explore the galaxy via self-reproducing probes) the galaxy should be crawling with such probes. Even at sublight speeds---and even if probes were only sent between stars when the stars naturally moved closer than a light year from each other just from their orbital movements around the galaxy--in a few million years the probes would be ubiquitous.
What is extraordinary is the negative evidence we get from not observing these probes. It means that there has never been even one intelligent species who had the technology and desire to explore the galaxy. Or even that there wasn't a small minority of them who wanted too--or even one Elon-Musk-esque individual who wanted to.
Given that we can almost do this ourselves (heck, if our own Elon Musk tried, I wouldn't bet against him succeeding) Avi Loeb's hypothesis that one of these probes might have hit the earth isn't an extraordinary hypothesis at all. We should expect to find these probes, and maybe we haven't found them yet because nobody has bothered to look for them.
Bracewell-Von Neumann probes don't exist, as far as any can tell. You seem to be basing your credulity towards one unproven phenomenon on another unproven phenomenon. If anything, the fact that VN probes would in theory be easier than the sort of exotic physics breaking technology supposedly demonstrated by UFOs and yet the entire galaxy hasn't been consumed and assimilated as the math suggests should happen should cast even more doubt on UFOs.
You know.. all of the actually difficult (thus far impossible) criteria and complexity that would required for Von Neumann machines to work in practice.
What's humiliating is what's happening in Psychology right now. Humiliating is having to retract your paper because you made up the results. Humiliating is losing your career because you are a big fat fraud.
In this, Loeb is different from promoters of the end-Pleistocene comet strike in North America, where all the criticisms were obviously specious and tendentious. In that case it was the critics who were humiliated. E.g., Boslough insisted, both circularly and speciously, that the historical rarity of comet strikes proves that no such recent strike could have occurred.
Loeb is different from promoters of the 130,000 year old mastodon butchery site in San Diego, where all the criticisms published after were already fully refuted in the original paper.
Well, the ability to conform to the conventional wisdom of the field isn't necessarily a skill which promotes scientific progress.
You know what skill does? The ability to ask the right question. And Dr. Loeb asked himself, "hmm....could I collect material from an interstellar meteorite if I trawl the seabed with a magnetic sled?"
Now I think that is a pretty good question. The answer may be "Yes" or the answer may be "No". But either way, it's a great question, which apparently nobody else asked, let alone put in the effort to raise money and try to answer. And it would be a shame if such questions weren't asked for fear of being bullied.
Alas, really, the only way we know of asking the right question is to ask a lot of questions, most of which will be the wrong question :-( We tend not to emphasize this fact, but everyone who ever made a breakthrough has asked an endless amount of stupid questions. But if you don't have the courage to look dumb, you'll never get anywhere.
A hypothesis about aliens is just a slow pitch, right over the plate for the inquisitors to smash.
The inquisitors are hell bent on making sure young people understand that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
Why does it have to be called humiliating and basically attacking Dr. Loeb the whole time?
Although I agree with you that "humiliating" might be too loaded a word (but it drives clicks, so here we are).
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/mar/17/cosmic-cathe...
Also funny that Avi takes string theory as an example of mainstream science. Some scientists are not sure it's science at all because it was never based on anything but assumptions.
Edit: my apologies, the baby changed their answer when they realized the question wasn't an offer of string cheese. Results are inconclusive.
Social media did a number on those scientists with "big personalities". It is one thing that influencers and grifters get a platform on social media. But it is another thing, and more harmful, when people with credentials and power abuse those platforms. Look at Avi Loeb, Jordan Peterson, all the science/physics gurus going crazy with an ever-increasing desperation to stay in the limelight...
Surely we should encourage young scientists to "dream big", as long as we also teach them to actually "do science" effectively right?
Maybe it's the vagueness of what "dream" means here. Imagination, creativity, and the like can be valuable insofar as they steer us to look in new useful directions and ask new useful questions. As long as the "looking" and "asking" are done with an honest aim toward finding the truth and an understanding of the tools scientists have developed to do that effectively I don't see the problem.
I don't see the takeaway message from this article being "this scientist's dreams were too lofty", but something more like "this scientist ignored good scientific practice in pursuit of his lofty dreams".
If you do this in a way that you can be forgiven for being wrong… then the risk is even lower.
We should be surprised that more leading scientists are not in fact frauds.