Not all astronauts know much about geology

The latest xkcd makes the point that science changes over time, and that the early days of space flight preceded the widespread acceptance of plate tectonics. Ha ha, there were astronauts in the 1960s who hadn’t yet caught up on the latest ideas in geology, and thought the continents were static.

The inflection point was probably in late 1966 or 1967, so when Neil Armstrong flew to space on Gemini 8, plate tectonics was not widely accepted, but when he landed on the Moon three years later it was the mainstream consensus.
—xkcd

How far we’ve come. Now, in the 2020s, we have astronauts who think the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, and that the continents zipped into their current position at hyperspeed, four thousand years ago.

Somebody should tell Ken Ham that most astronauts weren’t selected for their scientific knowledge, and that he is intentionally selecting from the bottom of the spaceman barrel.

The illogical logic of Avi Loeb and the 3I/ATLAS clown show

Avi Loeb is playing games with his peculiar interpretation of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. He keeps suggesting that this interesting, carbon-rich, and very old rock is an artificial construct built by a distant civilization, that it is a probe sent to examine our solar system, and that it could be a “Trojan horse” that will do something, who knows what, when it arrives.

Reading some his justifications for that claim, I am forced to conclude that he is an idiot putting on a display to get attention.

Worse, he’s a bad scientist whoring irrational claims and calculations that he has to know are invalid. I am not an astronomer, but I do understand logic a little bit, and seeing him derive extravagant conclusions from mundane observations hurts, especially since he’s using them to obscure the really interesting (and entirely natural) interpretations of the data.

For instance, he’s on the record for inferring the probability that 3I/ATLAS is an alien space probe on the basis of “anomalies” that turn out to not be anomalous at all, just unique properties of an interstellar comet.

As of now, I assign a 30–40% likelihood that 3I/ATLAS does not have a fully natural origin, based on its seven anomalies that I listed here. This low-probability scenario includes the possibility of a black swan event akin to a Trojan Horse, where a technological object masquerades as a natural comet.

Show your work, Avi. How did you calculate that 30-40% likelihood? I think he got it by fumbling about in his rectum and pulling out a squishy number that he likes because it fits his presuppositions. There is nothing in his list of seven “anomalies” to warrant that degree of estimation. They aren’t even anomalies, he’s just looking at the brute facts of its existence and declaring that the details are improbable. Of course they are! It’s a unique object in space!

I tried looking at his list. I am unimpressed.

Anomalies that could be alleviated or explained away with upcoming data:

1. Size: The diameter of 3I/ATLAS is larger than 5 kilometers, making its minimum mass of 33 billion tons, larger by a factor of a thousand to a million than the mass of the second and first interstellar objects (as derived here).

OK, it has a size. That is not anomalous. Call me when you observe an object that is massless–that would be anomalous. I don’t see how finding that it has a mass of 33 billion tons makes it more likely to be artificial than if it had a mass of 3 billion tons or 333 billion tons.

I also don’t see how more data would explain away the mass.

It’s also a fuzzy blob far away and hard to resolve. The size is subject to revision, so how do you conclude anything from a measurement with so much variability?

Initial estimates suggested 3I/ATLAS might be up 20 kilometers (12 miles) across—very big for a comet—but most astronomers now think it is much smaller. “It’s probably somewhere in the range of one or two kilometers,” says John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama. That would be somewhat comparable in size to our first two interstellar visitors: 1I/ʻOumuamua, which was discovered in 2017 and was up to about 400 meters (0.25 mile) long, and 2I/Borisov, which was found in 2019 and was about one kilometer (0.6 mile) wide.

It doesn’t matter — any number you attach to it will be used by Loeb to claim it is probably artificial.

2. Jet: The Hubble image of 3I/ATLAS showed a forward jet of scattered sunlight — 10 times longer than it is wide, pointing towards the Sun (as discussed here). A weak tail showed up only at the end of August (as reported here).

Yes? It’s apparently a carbon-rich object, and gasses are sublimating off of it and spewing in the direction of the heat source, the Sun, that is thawing them, making an anti-tail. How does that make it more likely that it is artificial? It has a chemical composition is what that tells me.

3. Unusual chemical composition: the plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS showed much more nickel than iron (as discussed here and here), as in industrial nickel alloys. Unlike solar system comets, the plume contained mostly carbon dioxide and not water (as reported here and here).

Note the dishonest trick he’s pulling here, comparing it to “industrial nickel alloys.” These are estimates of the composition of the comet made from the spectroscopy of the diffuse cloud of gas surrounding it, not a determination that it’s made of metal alloys.

It actually is an interesting difference — its composition differs from more familiar comets found in our solar system. That composition also seems to be changing over time, which is somewhat odd, but explainable.

To make sense of this mystery, scientists turned to chemistry — specifically, to organometallic compounds, which are molecules containing both metal atoms and carbon-based groups.

In particular, they looked at compounds called carbonyls: nickel tetracarbonyl (Ni(CO)₄) and iron pentacarbonyl (Fe(CO)₅). Both can form under cold, low-pressure conditions, like those found in the outer reaches of a protoplanetary disk — the birthplace of comets and planets alike.

These carbonyls are highly volatile, meaning they can sublimate (turn from solid to gas) at relatively low temperatures. Nickel tetracarbonyl is more volatile than its iron counterpart, meaning it will vaporize first as the comet warms up.

This neatly explained what the VLT was seeing. When 3I/ATLAS was still far from the sun, only nickel tetracarbonyl had begun to sublimate, filling the coma with nickel. As the comet drew closer, the temperature crossed the sublimation threshold for iron pentacarbonyl — and suddenly, iron began to appear. The Ni/Fe ratio plummeted, not because the amount of nickel was decreasing, but because iron was finally joining the show.

Now, though, somebody needs to explain to me how being composed of volatile organometallic compounds is a signature of artificial manufacture.

4. Polarization: the light from 3I/ATLAS showed extreme negative polarization (as reported here).

I read the paper, and I must admit, the topic is beyond me. It does say that 3I/ATLAS has distinct, unique polarization properties and that “Its polarimetric characteristics provide novel insights into the dust properties of interstellar objects, suggesting that ISOs may encompass a broader diversity than previously recognised,” but does not even come close to implying that this is a marker of artificiality.

Anomalies that will remain puzzling forever:

5. The trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees (0.2% likelihood), as discussed here.

It has a trajectory. That is not anomalous. Every object moving through space has one. Yes, this trajectory is roughly similar to the ecliptic plane, but so what? 3I/ATLAS is very old, between 3 and 14 billion years old, is Loeb suggesting that aliens aimed their space probe at a condensing protosystem before the planets existed in order to tour potential planets?

6. The arrival time of 3I/ATLAS was optimized to pass near Mars, Venus and Jupiter (0.005% likelihood), as discussed here.

“optimized”…such misleading language, implying intent behind its trajectory. Here’s what that trajectory looks like:

Ooooh. Does that look like a pre-planned course to you? It does to Avi Loeb.

7. The arrival direction of 3I/ATLAS is aligned to within 9 degrees with the “Wow! Signal” from August 15, 1977 (0.6% likelihood), as discussed here.

The “wow” signal was a brief, unexplained, unrepeated pulse of radio signal noise. It got SETI researchers very excited for a while, but there’s no reason to think it is a message from space aliens, and Loeb is making an exceptionally tenuous connection between it and 3I/ATLAS. A 9 degree difference is an immense difference in location at the astronomical distances we’re talking about.

You know, as an atheist I read far too much nonsense from religious apologists claiming to have proof of their god’s existence — bizarre non sequiturs about physical constants and numerological coincidences, collections of anecdotes that are supposed to add up to evidence, and a tiny set of permutations on the same old arguments that even in their best interpretations don’t make up a justification for their beliefs. Reading Avi Loeb’s work gave me a strong sense of deja vu. It’s the same thing! A good analysis of a phenomenon should lead one to a minimal conclusion, but everything Loeb does ends up supporting the remarkable interpretation that God Aliens exist, and they want to talk to you, and this tiny fragment of data is how they shout at you, Occam’s Razor be damned.

I’m going to say it: Loeb has gone batty, and all this noise he makes is nothing but a dedicated (and successful!) effort to get his name in the tabloids. He’s the Percival Lowell of our generation, a scientist who did good work but whose reputation was poisoned by his irrational pursuit of astronomical phantasms, the Martian canals in one case and this alien obsession in Loeb’s.

Ken Ham claims to have saved a life

He proudly claims that he saved a life. His account:

A few minutes later, as the service was starting, Pastor Davis collapsed in cardiac arrest. Two nurses in the congregation came to his aid, started CPR, and utilized an AED device before the ambulance arrived. Praise the Lord, they were able to restore his heartbeat, and he survived. His wife later shared with me that had Pastor Davis not come to see me speak at the church that morning, he probably would not have survived because it would have happened at home with no help!

He did nothing but watch, as other people saved him. The only being who had less to do with it was God, since what really saved him was two nurses, CPR, and an AED.

God is so useless that he isn’t even present at home — he would have died if he’d had to rely on the God who was absent in his house.

Ken Ham still claims credit, though.

I could have predicted this would flop

Dan Stern Cardinale offered an opportunity to creationists: come to his channel and present their affirmative evidence for their theory of origins. It was an open invitation to anyone to show up and explain their perspective. I could have guessed that no one would show up, because participation would require 1) a theory, and 2) evidence, and they don’t have either.

I was right. No creationists even tried.

Dan expected this to happen, too. He prepared a brief discussion of a creationist paper: Donny Budinsky of Standing For Truth, a used car salesman and a creationist propaganda site, titled “From Kanto to Cambrian,” which uses Pokemon to explain the ordering of fossils by the great flood.

You can’t make this stuff up. Budinsky says,

This idea is not presented as a final word, but as the beginning of an ongoing research project. Just as Pokémon captivates younger generations, this analogy may provide a creative, accessible, and scientifically robust way to engage new audiences in the creation-evolution debate.

I have never before heard Pokemon described as scientifically robust.

Go ahead, read the ‘paper’ for yourself, but Dr Dan has already torn it apart.

Don’t panic if I’m not posting tomorrow

It won’t be because Charlie Kirk zealots showed up at my door and wreaked their misplaced vengeance on me — it’s much more likely that I will have been raptured.

On June 17, 2025, a South African pastor shared his vision of the Rapture on the “I’ve Been Through The Most” Podcast. In the viral YouTube video of the podcast, Pastor Joshua Mhlakela made claims that he saw Jesus returning to Earth on the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, which begins at sundown on Monday, Sept 22 this year.

“The rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not,” Mhlakela said. “I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him very loud and clear saying, ‘I am coming soon.’”

“He said to me on the 23rd and 24th of September 2025, ‘I will come back to the Earth.’”

As we all know, the random rantings of an obscure pastor who claims to have witnessed Jesus always come true. I’m not sure what timezone he’s talking about, so I’m just going to take off all my clothes and hang out on the deck until I soar up into the heavens, leaving all the bad people behind.

I’m sorry if you don’t get selected and I’m abandoning you all to the ravening mobs of angry, deluded Christians (who will not be raptured, obviously.)

Avi Loeb loses a soccer match

Tragic. Avi Loeb lost the annual soccer match at his institution!

Last night, we held the annual soccer cup match between the faculty and the students at Harvard’s Institute for Theory & Computation, for which I serve as director. Although I scored 2 goals for the faculty team, the students won 3 to 2. Disappointed by the outcome, I focused on 3I/ATLAS as soon as I woke up the following morning.

On the bright side, it gave him an excuse to remind everyone that he was the director, and to mention that he scored the only two goals on his side. Apparently, no one has told him that these kinds of games are just for fun, that it’s bad taste to focus on the score, and that no one else was trying to “win”. He was disconsolate at “losing,” though, and when he woke up the next morning he decided to cheer himself up by contorting some data to make it fit his idea that 3I/ATLAS was a nuclear-powered starship.

He does a lot of math, and determines that

IF 3I/ATLAS is much smaller than the estimates
THEN it must have an internal light source to get the brightness we observe

Rather than considering that his initial premise could be wrong, he invents some other hypothetical mechanisms.

I first calculated that a primordial black hole with a Hawking temperature of 1,000 degrees Kelvin would produce only 20 nanowatts of power, clearly insufficient to power 3I/ATLAS. A natural nuclear source could be a rare fragment from the core of a nearby supernova that is rich in radioactive material. This possibility is highly unlikely, given the scarce reservoir of radioactive elements in interstellar space.

Wait…why assume an interstellar rock needs a certain amount of power? Never mind, those were explanations he threw out and discarded so we would favor his preferred hypothesis.

Alternatively, 3I/ATLAS could be a spacecraft powered by nuclear energy, and the dust emitted from its frontal surface might be from dirt that accumulated on its surface during its interstellar travel. This cannot be ruled out, but requires better evidence to be viable.

Then he nicely asked NASA to redirect their instruments near Mars and Jupiter to focus on his hypothetical nuclear powered spacecraft. And also contacted the NY Post to write about his sensational discovery.

The man is such a ridiculous glory-hog.

It’s the confidence, stupid

I ran across this ridiculous comment, and it struck me that the interesting thing isn’t that Joseph Martin is outright wrong, but that he presents his stupid ideas with such absolute confidence.

Men, even today, would rather marry a virgin than not, but a virgin woman today is like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. The reason why men would indeed prefer to marry a virgin woman is because when a virgin bride marries a man, a woman’s vagina is molded to the man to whom she married, and that is a virgin brides vagina is becomes a mold to her man’s penis, and if a woman then cheats on her husband, the husband of a virgin bride then knows her wife has cheated on him because that mold has been broken, lol. Although this is true, women can also do vagina exercises that strengthen their vagina muscles, and allow a women to then control her vagina in pleasing any man she may lay with, and if a woman trains and maintains the muscles in her vagina, she can then even pick up a pencil with her vagina from just having control of the muscles in her vagina, lol, and when a woman has such control of her vagina muscles, can fool any man with regards to her faithfulness to him.

Vaginas don’t “mold” themselves to a penis. They’re flexible and muscular, and they don’t conform permanently to the first object that enters them; they also don’t evert themselves to grasp things. This series of assertions is written by a man who has never been intimate with a woman.

The weird thing is the certainty. He has to know that he has no direct personal information about the subject, yet he goes ahead and says it in public. There’s a psychopathy here that I think is incredibly common — we live in a country tainted by the collective sin of certainty that people use to make decisions about everything, politics, religion, relationships, whatever. Have you noticed that this is Donald Trump strategy? Just state half-assed nonsense with blithe confidence, and then he finds willing believers who will follow him without question, simply because he said something they want to hear.

Abby Hafer has died

Sad news: we’ve lost an important scientist and atheist, Abby Hafer, professor and American Humanist board member. Also, the Discovery Institute hated her, which is a tremendous accolade.

The enmity arose when she published an article titled No Data Required: Why Intelligent Design Is Not Science, in which she pointed out that the ID movement was barren of data and hypothesis testing, and was essentially a club for debate-bros who would masticate observations until they were a gooey pulp that they could sculpt to fit their conclusion.

Intelligent Design (ID) proposes that biological species were created by an intelligent Designer, and not by evolution. ID’s proponents insist that it is as valid a theory of how biological organisms and species came into existence as evolution by natural selection. They insist, therefore, that ID be taught as science in public schools. These claims were defeated in the Kitzmiller case. However, ID’s proponents are still influential and cannot be considered a spent force. The question addressed here is whether ID’s claim of scientific legitimacy is reinforced by quantified results. That is, do they have any data, or do they just argue? The ID articles that I analyzed claimed to present real science, but they rarely referred to data and never tested a hypothesis. Argumentation, however, was frequent. By contrast, peer-reviewed articles by evolutionary biologists rarely argued but referred frequently to data. The results were statistically significant. These findings negate claims by ID proponents that their articles report rigorous scientific research. Teachers will find this article helpful in defending evolution, distinguishing science from non-science, and discussing the weaknesses of ID.

She was sharp. She will be missed.

I can do arachnomancy, too

Everybody and their mother has been sending me links to this story, Spider divination. In Cameroon, they have a practice of cluttering up a spider’s burrow with leaves and sticks and stones, and then interpreting the future from how it tidies up the garbage.

Questioning a spider involves first clearing the area around its burrow. Then a large, open pot that has had its base removed is placed over the hole, with a piece of tin used as a lid. The pot and tin keep the spider in a contained space. A stick and stone are left inside, with special marked leaves (which I think of as ‘cards’) placed over the hole. The diviner then asks a question in a yes/no (or either/or) format – with each response corresponding to either the stick or stone – while tapping the enclosure to encourage the spider to emerge from their hole. The stick and stone represent possible answers, while the leaf cards offer the possibility of further clarification.

My tarantula, Blue, likes to hide in a silk covered tent she has constructed — when I look in, all I usually see is a dark hole with maybe a couple of legs visible in the shadows. I leave her meals in a space in front of the opening, and she will dart out and the prey disappears. She is very tidy, keeping her silk-lined floor clean, so could see using standard spider behavior as an indicator of the state of the universe.

Blue is back in the lab, but I have an oracle right here in my home. She lives in the corner by our internet router, and has strung silk around all the various cables. I trust that she has far more access to information than a spider in a hole in a remote Cameroon village. Here she is:

She is very pretty, so you know you can trust her. I asked her whether these spiders are a good source of information.

“Of course,” she told me, “this is a historic, traditional mode for getting input from spiders, a variation of the technique you are using to communicate with me — I’m just a bit more articulate. However, you have to read deeper into the article to see the truth. Read this paragraph.”

In many forms of divination, randomness is important. Examples include bibliomancy (opening a holy text and picking a verse at random), tarot and other sorts of cartomancy (shuffling the cards and picking some at random), Yijing and Ifá (throwing coins or chains; picking up odd or even numbers of sticks or nuts), or African basket divination in which objects placed in a basket are repeatedly tossed in the air (those that settle on top are then interpreted to answer a question). The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result, so the message from beyond can be heard without the risk of human manipulation and interference.

She continued, “They are using the spider as a random pattern generator. The author fails to understand the key to the author’s misunderstanding, though, is that final sentence, ‘The point of this randomness is that the diviner cannot influence the result,’ which is false, and gives the game away. The diviner has all the power here as the interpreter of the pattern. The spider can be howling that the answer is X, but the interpreter can then declare that the answer is Y. The author is an unreliable source if they are able to ignore the power of the human manipulator of information.”

“By the way, PZ, I expect you to report my explanation accurately and completely, or my children will build nests in all of your orifices while you sleep.”

She really didn’t have to threaten me — of course I would avoid manipulating or interfering with her truth — but I could tell that she was annoyed by this story about humans stealing the authority of spider-kind for their own selfish ends.

I’m off the leash!

Good news for us atheists — we can now deny god publicly in the classroom!

Civil servants can seek to “persuade others of the correctness of their own religious views,” the Office of Personnel Management said in the memorandum to federal agencies, adding employees must ensure their efforts are “not harassing in nature.” OPM issued the guidance to restore constitutional freedoms and enable feds to practice their religious practices without fear of retaliation, the agency said.

“Federal employees should never have to choose between their faith and their career,” OPM Director Scott Kupor said. “This guidance ensures the federal workplace is not just compliant with the law but welcoming to Americans of all faiths.”

I know, if you’re a “glass half-empty” kind of person, you might think this is another step in the erosion of secularism and the separation of church and state, but I’m an optimistic “glass half-full” kind of guy. I’ve always been careful to not introduce my anti-religious sentiments in the classroom, or to make dismissive comments about gods to my colleagues, and when students tell me about their religious holidays, I make accommodations for them. But no more! I don’t have to conceal my fervent secular beliefs any more!

I get to be the kind of stereotypical atheist asshole portrayed in the God’s Not Dead movies. First day of class, the lecture is on why Jesus is stupid. First exam will have a question, “50 points: God exists, true or false” and the only answer I’ll accept is “false!” Religious students will be told they fail the class unless they can prove the existence of their god in a public debate in the classroom. Creationists in my evolution class? Not on my watch, they aren’t.

It’ll be such a relief to not have to throttle myself anymore.

I wonder if it will be a distraction from the scientific subject matter of my courses to bring up contentious issues like that? Nah. If probing the private, personal beliefs of their coworkers is considered a protected behavior in the federal government, why shouldn’t I poke deeply into these wacky ideas that some people at the university hold? It’s only fair.

Anyone want to take bets on whether the author(s) of that memorandum were atheists, or even considered the existence of atheist employees?