Because of course he did, since he was going to happily declare anything he found to be of extrasolar origin. The preliminary analysis of the metal spheres he found at the bottom of the ocean has been published in ArXiv, as he announced on…the Michael Shermer podcast? I’m already prejudiced against believing him.
From a July expedition off the coast of Papua New Guinea, a collection of small metallic spheres was recovered from the sea floor, which famous Harvard scientist Avi Loeb said Tuesday are from outside our solar system.
Tuesday’s press release, first reported by USA Today, suggests that 57 of the 700 metallic spheres, which were recovered by using a magnetic sled the team dragged through the water and sand, are interstellar in origin “based on the composition and isotopes.” That is unmatched by existing material in our solar system, Loeb said in an interview on “The Michael Shermer Show.”
“This is a historic discovery because it represents the first time that scientists have analyzed materials from a large object that arrived to Earth from outside the solar system,” Loeb wrote in his Tuesday blog post on Medium.
The paper has also been posted on the X, formerly known as Twitter, shitshow.
I've been waiting for a long time to finally post this paper. I co-authored a paper with Avi Loeb analyzing the samples we collected from the Pacific Ocean. We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium,… pic.twitter.com/DRNCk5cL3A
— Charles Hoskinson (@IOHK_Charles) August 29, 2023
Not peer-reviewed, obviously, and Shermer and X are the outlets used to display the results? Not impressive.
So what did he find? I don’t know. I’m not really qualified to interpret this result — maybe you are.
What he found is that the tiny little spheres he pulled up are enriched for beryllium, lanthanum, and uranium, which is unusual compared to C1 chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites have an elemental composition reflective of the elements in the solar system as a whole, so this difference is taken as evidence that the meteor was from different star system altogether. Or, as was my first thought, that the meteor was not a carbonaceous chondrite. Or that the melting as it passed through the atmosphere altered the distribution of elements. Or that sitting in the ocean for a decade degraded the material in interesting ways. Or that his sampling technique was biased towards plucking out unusual samples. I don’t know, this is way outside my expertise, I just know I’m extremely suspicious of anything Avi Loeb says. I mean, he also declared that meteor was of interstellar origin based on a letter that used wobbly estimates of its speed and trajectory.
The interstellar origin of IM1 was established at the 99.999% confidence based on velocity measurements by US government satellites, as confirmed in a formal letter from the US Space Command to NASA.
I love the fact that he got 99.999% confidence from a third-hand letter based on largely confidential evidence. That tells me all I need to know.
But also, all the recent foofaraw about UFOs, like the recent congressional hearings, is rich old fools with no scientific background. They’re just certain that the aliens are here.
In a 2017 interview with 60 Minutes, Robert Bigelow didn’t hesitate when he was asked if space aliens had ever visited Earth. “There has been and is an existing presence, an ET presence,” said Bigelow, a Las Vegas-based real estate mogul and founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a company NASA had contracted to build inflatable space station habitats. Bigelow was so certain, he indicated, because he had “spent millions and millions and millions” of dollars searching for UFO evidence. “I probably spent more as an individual than anybody else in the United States has ever spent on this subject.”
He’s right. Since the early 1990s, Bigelow has bankrolled a voluminous stream of pseudoscience on modern-day UFO lore—investigating everything from crop circles and cattle mutilations to alien abductions and UFO crashes. Indeed, if you name a UFO rabbit hole, it’s a good bet the 79-year-old tycoon has flushed his riches down it.
If Loeb is famous now, it’s for quickly jumping on that cash cow and riding it hard. He found a UFO fanatic sugar daddy, and is milking him for everything he can.
From a scientific standpoint, all this money seems wasted on a zany quest that is akin to the search for Bigfoot or Atlantis. The same might be said of Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb’s recent hunt for evidence of extraterrestrial life off the coast of Papua New Guinea, which cost $150,000 and was funded by cryptocurrency mogul Charles Hoskinson. Loeb’s polarizing claims of finding traces of alien technology and of having a more open-minded and dispassionate approach to fringe science have garnered a truly staggering amount of media coverage, but his peers in the scientific community are rolling their eyes.
It’s the latest stunt by Loeb, who also helms a controversial UFO project and previously drew the ire of his colleagues with outlandish claims about the supposedly artificial nature of an (admittedly weird) interstellar comet. Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University, recently told the New York Times: “What the public is seeing in Loeb is not how science works. And they shouldn’t go away thinking that.”
Exactly. Loeb is just the latest in a long line of ignoramuses and charlatans who claim to have extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims, but when asked to show it reveal a thimble full of cherry-picked dirt. Unfortunately, it’s another symptom of the inequitable and unearned distribution of wealth, which allows absurdly wealthy people to throw barrels of cash undiscriminatingly at anyone willing to endorse their delusions. They keep sucking up unwarranted acknowledgements from prestigious institutions as well!
Unfortunately, much of this nonsense has, at one point or another, been masked with an aura of legitimacy by prestigious institutions. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lent its imprimatur to an alien abduction conference in the early 1990s—which Robert Bigelow helped pay for. A generous benefactor to academia, Bigelow also gave millions to the University of Nevada during the 1990s to study supposed psychic phenomena, such as telepathy, clairvoyance and the possibility of life after death. (In recent years, the billionaire has turned his attention and money largely to the afterlife.)
Indeed, there is a long tradition of fringe science at prestigious universities. The dubious field of parapsychology, for instance, owes its existence to the decades of pseudoscholarship churned out at Duke and Harvard University–and financed by wealthy private patrons. Some of our most illustrious thinkers, such as the eminent psychologist William James, have fallen for it. Belief in Martians sprang in large part from a wealthy amateur astronomer, Percival Lowell, who built the observatory that still bears his name. A University of Arizona psychology professor attracted criticism in recent years for taking money from the Pioneer Fund, founded in 1937 by textiles magnate to promote the racist science of eugenics.
You know, universities — especially the large already rich ones — are often fueled by capitalistic grasping at money, right? And when idiots have lots of money, they aren’t shy about pandering to them.
By the way, Loeb made this announcement on the day his new book, Interstellar, was released. Very convenient.