Avi Loeb: Is 3I/Atlas Our Turing Test by a Superior Alien Intelligence? | Hacker News Reader

Avi Loeb: Is 3I/Atlas Our Turing Test by a Superior Alien Intelligence?

avi-loeb.medium.com

17 pointsilamont16 comments

I'm not sure Avi Loebs writings are worth any serious discussion on HN.

He exploits bad science journalism to get his name out there.

Generally with proper science journalism, it runs along the lines of the saying: "It's never aliens, until it is", but with Avi Loebs it always tends to be "It's always aliens, until it isn't".

> With the typical albedo of 5% for an asteroid, the diameter of 3I/ATLAS needs to be 20 kilometers in order to account for its brightness. But as argued in my first paper about it, the reservoir of rocky material in interstellar space can only deliver a 20-kilometer rock once per 10,000 years.

He's still repeating this?

Loeb previously performed an analysis that said if 3I/ATLAS wasn't a comet and was instead an asteroid with no coma, it would have to be an unusually large object to explain its brightness. Since then, we pointed the Hubble at it and clearly saw that it was a comet, not an asteroid, so the entire premise of the calculation is wrong.

> When I proposed that it might be technological in origin, just like 2020 SO, this notion was ridiculed by comet experts, in a historical echo of Chladni’s scrutiny.

To quote Carl Sagan: "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

This is a really common trope of crackpots. They absolutely love comparing themselves to Galileo and saying the scientific community is like the church was during Galileo's time.

Angela Collier has a video that goes over the common tropes and once you see it, you can recognize it quickly. It's the same thing with Erik Weinstein who is trying to sell his persecution, when in reality he's basically a paid propagandist for the billionaire oligarch Peter Thiel. Why Thiel wants Weinstein to discredit our academic institutions is a good question.

https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI?si=PeS4Fn8G_6T7Iu79

Angela Collier has the final word on physics and crackpots. Hilarious.

Not the weirdest professor, not by a long shot.

See Alexander Abian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Abian

Abian? That's a name I've not heard in a long time.

Abian was indeed weird, way off the deep end, but he wasn't promoting himself quite like Loeb does. Abian was a true believer in his theories, getting them out and having others believe them was more important to him than anything else.

I think the difference here is that Loeb can be seen as being promoting a thought experiment still. While Abian was apparently a true believer for destroying the moon until his death in 1999.

https://web.archive.org/web/20001204074300/http://www.amestr...

The "thought experiment" angle is just a trick to deflect criticism. It may be legit and interesting once, but not in every unusual event.

This guy is infamous for his crackpot theories. How he ever got employed by Harvard is beyond me. He does have a lot of expertise in one particular area -- getting his name inserted into the media cycle du jour.

Interesting idea. The only response short of SENDING IT BACK I can think of would be to measure its velocity, divide by our best estimate of its diameter, and broadcast the resulting frequency over radio in all directions.

I believe we would have failed a number of times: using diameter instead of radius in the calculation, frequency in 1/s is meaningless because seconds are man-made, and finally we'd be trying to communicate with an inanimate comet.

Frequency can be perceived in any unit of time

Grifter hint - he references a self-named entity "Loeb Scale" that isn't already well-established with term with his name.

I seem to remember a anecdote that Peter Shor gave lectures on his quantum factorization algorithm and only referred to it as the "quantum factoring algorithm" (or something like that) rather than "Shor's algorithm".

This may taking it a too far - he's too modest. Once it is well-established, go ahead and use the self-named theory.

But, some good smell tests for bad theories are a bibliography of mostly the same author and/or promotion of self-named entities.

No.

Another recent post by him was discussing that it might be emitting it's own light: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/does-3i-atlas-generate-its-own-l...

I feel like these are fun thought experiments.

No, he's become a grifter. He whines about "big science" trying to silence him when he literally IS big science being at Princeton and then a department chair at Harvard.

A few years ago when that interstellar object flew by he saw his chance to make a bunch of money selling books. Now he just makes wild claims with no evidence that the object was a light sail and contacts the media. He then tried to claim that SETI hasn't actually done anything and got told off by Jill Tatar...the literal inspiration for the movie Contact. Then he went off and dredged the bottom of the ocean and found some little spheres (extremely common) and started claiming they were from interstellar space and fudged the data.

What makes this complicated is that Avi was a pretty respected scientist with a huge number of papers. He knows how to do science properly and how the peer review process works, but doesn't care anymore now that he's getting attention and making money.

Check out

Angela Collier's video on YouTube: harvard & aliens & crackpots: a disambiguation of Avi Loeb

Professor Dave Explains video: Avi Loeb is a fraud now.

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