Spherules determined to be interstellar

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Prof Avi Loeb demonstrates spherules collected from the Pacific ocean are indeed interstellar in origin



This is the first time humans have held onto objects from outside the solar system

Next step Loeb is determining is if these are gadgets or artificial in origin. On the precipice of big news.

ANOTHER sensationalist claim?

Has any other scientist confirmed his 'findings', or is he just desperate for money and attention?

Just because someone is a doctor, doesn't mean that they don't have strange or wrong beliefs about some things.

Having said that, I am open to the possibility to there being extraterrestrial life. It seems probable, rather than improbable.

Although alien life currently visiting Earth is another topic entirely.

To take a flying leap from "Infinitesimal Possibility" to "Absolute Certainty" takes either (1) a lot of research by qualified people, or (2) the audacity to make unfounded claims based on suspicion and fantasy.

There may be other flying leaps that Prof. Loeb could make, but I will not detail them here.

Professor Loeb was mercilessly ridiculed by his colleagues for stating that the object entering the earth's atmosphere in 2014 and landing in the Pacific off the coast of PNG was of interstellar origin because it was measured to be moving too fast.

His claim was subsequently scientifically verified
https://lweb.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/DoD.pdf

he has also made similar claims about the nature of other interstellar objects that have entered our solar system
https://earthsky.org/human-world/inters ... -avi-loeb/

Please don't be so quick to debunk his theories without counter-evidence

I don't see the hysteria over these little spheres.

It has been suggested that Pluto is a captured planet due to its odd orbit and I imagine a lot of asteroids and comets make flying visits without us even noticing them.

While it was nice of you to provide a link to your secondary point of an entirely different person having been professionally attacked, I can't help but notice the continuing absence of a link demonstrating that Loeb is being subjected to said or similar treatment.

I equally appreciate the convenient assumption that I won't want to investigate a phenomenon that I do not dispute exists (Socrates says "hi", and John Yudkin sends his regards), and am merely attempting to verify that this is what is actually occurring in this particular case.

Just cos he claims, or someone else claims on his behalf, that he's being undermined as a scientist, doesn't mean one should believe the claim, any more than any other claim should be believed, without evidence.

Harvard prohibiting someone from doing research is not the same thing as a colleague having an opinion of another colleague. And again, unlike John Mack, who's research was undermined entirely, nobody seems to have an issue with Loeb's science until he gets to the "therefore, aliens!" part. Additionally, given the fact that he's still doing science stuff, nobody seems to be preventing him from doing his science stuff. At worst, they seem to roll their eyes at the "therefore, aliens!" part.

Side note - alloys quite commonly occur naturally. While a new alloy may be a neat discovery, there's no reason to believe it's alien tech, as opposed to an interesting byproduct of a very old very distant supernova finally making it's way to our little corner of the boonies.

Dr Loeb breaks down how aliens could use dark matter to travel? Holy crap! He has no idea how aliens travel. Asking a human about alien propulsion systems is like asking an ancient sumerian which type of ram is compatible with my mainboard.

He spends half the video saying how people who disagree with him "just have opinions", as if his ideas aren't opinions. Someone who debates properly would pick apart the counterarguments made by his detractors. He doesn't even mention the points made by his detractors, he just says "those are just opinions, and we are doing the real science".

A real scientist would be happy to be proven wrong because knowing a hypothesis is wrong (even his own) gets him one step closer to the truth. How can we trust Dr Loeb to be objective when he has a personal attachment to his ideas?

Maybe this object really did come from outside the solar system. But aliens? Where is his evidence these spherules were manufactured? How does he know it's not just a rogue asteroid? Too fast to be an asteroid? Where is his evidence that interstellar rogue asteroids can never travel faster than a certain speed?

And saying, "We wrote a scientific paper and submitted it for publication" is about as dumb as a creationist saying, "I wrote a peer reviewed paper" (without mentioning whether or not it passed peer review). Just because Dr Loeb submits something for publication in a scientific journal that doesn't mean it will be published and it does end up getting published, that still wouldn't prove he's right.

The chance to analyse an object from another solar system would be of scientific interest even if it was of natural origin. He doesn't need to start mentioning aliens. And then he starts talking about how the aliens may use artificial intelligence because that's a trendy topic right now. If he was talking in the 1930s, he might talk about how aliens use pneumatics because that considered to be a pretty trendy technology at the time.

And that other guy who says "Yes" when asked what form the alien intelligence will take. "But I can't tell you". He reminds me of the kid on the playground who says, "I can do a backflip, but I don't wanna".