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.

I have evidence that spiders are posting on the internet

This ‘person,’ David Love, is definitely a spider.

Female spiders possess structures in their reproductive tracts called spermathecae that are used to store sperm. Humans lack them, and in fact, the human female reproductive tract is hostile to the survival of sperm. From this, I am forced to surmise that David Love is, in fact, a spider — and further, a female spider.

Alternatively, many other invertebrates have spermathecae, so it’s possible that he is instead a hermaphroditic earthworm.

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.

The misinformation economy

MAHA is cannibalizing its own! This one dumb ‘influencer’ went viral with a tiktok in which she got outraged that Lucky Charms contains sodium phosphate, and she went to Home Depot to show that you can buy industrial-sized tubs of the same compound, implying that this must be bad for you. Then a second idiot influencer copied the same content, almost word for word, chasing after the same gullible MAHA viewers.

As Jessica Knurick says, “Can the people who never took a chemistry class please stop ‘teaching’ us about chemistry?”

The first ditzy tiktoker racked up millions of views of her phony story. I guess ignorance pays.

Practically my first exercise as a young labrat many years ago was making up phosphate buffered saline. It’s routine and good and safe — you don’t need gloves or a fume hood. If you’re working with embryos, or surgically opening up adults, you can’t just leave them naked and dry on the bench top, you have to keep them immersed in an osmotically balanced salt solution of the proper pH. That’s what sodium phosphate salt solutions are good for. If they’re safe for laving little embryos, why are you upset that your kids are getting it? (The problem with Lucky Charms should be the sugar content, not the basic baking ingredients used to make them.)

I also have a big jug of sodium bicarbonate, research grade, in my lab. You know there are different grades of reagents that reflect the purity of the substance, right? It makes a difference. Food grade salts are purer than the industrial grade stuff you might buy at Home Depot, and research grade is purer still.

Hey, if I made a tiktok video of me measuring out phosphate salts and mixing them into distilled water, do you think I’d get millions of views?

No, that broken robot does not need human rights

A guy who works for OpenAI makes an observation. I agree with the opening paragraphs.

AI is not like past technologies, and its humanlike character is already shaping our mental health. Millions now regularly confide in “AI companions”, and there are more and more extreme cases of “psychosis” and self-harm following heavy use. This year, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of chatbot interaction. His parents recently filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI, and the company has said it is improving its safeguards.

It’s true! Humans are social creatures who readily make attachments to all kinds of entities. We get highly committed to our pets — people love dogs and cats (and even spiders) and personify the animals we keep — furbabies, you know. They don’t even need to be animate. Kids get attached to their stuffies, or a favorite blanket, or any kind of comfort toy. Some adults worship guns, or cuddle up with flags. We should not be surprised that AIs are designed to tap into that human tendencies.

We should maybe be surprised at how this author twists it around.

I research human-AI interaction at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. For years, we have seen increased humanization of AI, with more people saying that bots can experience emotions and deserve legal rights – and now 20% of US adults say that some software that exists today is already sentient. More and more people email me saying that their AI chatbot has been “awakened”, offering proof of sentience and an appeal for AI rights. Their reactions span the gamut of human emotions from AI as their “soulmate” to being “deeply unsettled”.

It’s not that humans readily extend humanization to all kinds of objects…it’s that AI is becoming more human! That people think AI is sentient is evidence that AIs are sentient and deserve rights. Some people are arguing for rights for software packages before being willing to give puppy dogs those same rights. This is nuts — AI is not self-aware or in need of special privileges. Developing social attachments is a human property, not a property of the object being attached. Otherwise, I’ve been a terrible abuser who needs to dig into a landfill to rescue a teddy bear.

This author has other absurd beliefs.

As a red teamer at OpenAI, I conduct safety testing on their new AI systems before public release, and the testers are consistently wowed by the human-like behavior. Most people, even those in the field of AI who are racing to build these new data centers and train larger AI models, do not yet see the radical social consequences of digital minds. Humanity is beginning to coexist with a second apex species for the first time in 40,000 years – when our longest-lived cousins, the Neanderthals, went extinct.

AI is an apex species? It’s not even a species. It is not equivalent to the Neanderthals. It is not in competition with Homo sapiens. It is a tool used by the already-wealthy to pry more wealth out of other people and to enshittify existing tools.

“medbeds”

Watch this video. Are you fooled? Does this look at all convincing to you?

It’s not even a good AI video. On technical merits alone, it’s crap; but it’s also touting a non-existent medical technology that it doesn’t bother to explain how these “medbeds” would work. It was promoted by the President of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump, making it merely the latest in a long string of cringe.

In reality, the video, first flagged by Media Matters’ Alex Kaplan, did not air on “My View with Lara Trump,” as it claimed, or any other Fox News show. These so-called med beds do not exist. Yet many QAnon devotees insist the non-existent technology secretly keeps John F. Kennedy Jr. alive. As investigative journalist Jacqueline Sweet has discovered, the earliest mention of the video’s claim comes from a now-deleted Instagram page that “uses a common fake name for fake doctors in romance scams.” By sharing the AI footage of himself, Trump is giving his MAGA followers false hope that he will soon grant them access to the elites’ magic product. The video was eventually deleted from Trump’s account on Sunday morning — but not before it gained traction online.

Trump defenders, as they are often wont to do, rushed to laugh off the incident as a harmless joke. But a quick social media search reveals that a lot of people who are dying or watching a loved one fade away with cancer and other illnesses really believed it. QAnon-type spaces were excited at the possibility that Trump would finally release all the hidden cures. Many MAGA believers have refused medical treatment because they believe med bed tech will restore their health in minutes. This is both depraved and heartbreaking.

How would crawling into a bed with a plastic bubble over it improve the quality of your health care? I don’t know. They don’t know. This is pure cope: the people who are busily dismantling the functionality of conventional health care are trying to compensate by inventing fantasy magical technology to replace it.

This is not a real thing.

It must hurt when he ejaculates

Wow. There are actually people who still believe in spermism, to an even more extreme than Pythagoras?

Actually he was in your husbands balls you just carry the home he needs to grow in
“eggs develop in a female fetus during pregnancy. So while she was in her mother’s womb, she grew fallopian tubes, ovaries, and uterus.”
No shit. The point is the actual BABY was in your partners balls. You carry the tools to hold the baby for it to grow and develop but that baby itself was never part of you. It’s home, the egg it grew from yes but what actually creates the baby no women don’t got that power.

In case you were unfamiliar with historical embryology, this was spermism.

As most of the ancient Greek thinkers were, Pythagoras was half scientist and half mystic, and for the longest time his theory on inheritance prevailed. Pythagoras’s theory attempted to explain the mechanisms between the physical similarity, or “likeness,” of parents and their offspring. At the heart of his theory lay his suggestion that hereditary information was carried predominantly in male sperm. This hereditary information was gathered by the sperm circulating throughout the body and absorbing metaphysical information from its environment (arms, legs, heart, etc.). Since this theory focused mainly around the sperm, it became known as spermism. This information-infused unit matured in the womb whose main objective, according to Pythagoras, was to provide nutrients for this raw data to be transformed into a child. The focus around the male as the primary source of hereditary information had far-reaching effects in society, with civilizations viewing women as nothing more than “human incubators,” and men being considered the forebearer of all children.

Spermism was effectively replaced by Aristotle’s view that both male and female carried hereditary information, so he’s only 2500 years behind on his homework. Nobody is arguing that there is a whole flotilla of complete babies swimming in semen, which would make every ejaculation a horrific mass murder of between 10 and 200 million babies. This ignorant guy probably considers himself “pro-life” while picturing every sexual encounter (or masturbation) as a horrific slaughter of “babies”.

It’s Tylenol?

RFK jr claimed over a month ago that this month they were going to find and announce the cause of autism. We all knew he was full of shit — he’s permanently full to the eyebrows with shit — and that this was a political game they were playing, because autism is a multifactorial syndrome with multiple enabling factors, and you’re not going to find a ‘magic bullet’ for it. Well, yesterday the gang of frauds and liars in the White House announced that there was a central link, and that it was acetaminophen, or Tylenol. This is like announcing that the cause is consuming bread — something with a widespread, long-term use that a huge number of pregnant women had eaten. Mothers with autistic children will now think that using a common, well-tested pain reliever is the cause, and blame themselves.

Trump gathered his crack team of worthless quacks to make this announcement.

Speaking from the Oval Office alongside US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary, US National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and US Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump did not keep his remarks to Tylenol during pregnancy. (I don’t know who the woman is, I guess no one thinks she’s important enough to name)

Of course Trump tried to take credit for this “discovery”.

It’s too much liquid, too many different things are going into that baby, Trump said, without providing further evidence.

Extensive research has shown that there’s no link between vaccines and autism.

Trump thanked Kennedy for bringing autism to the forefront of American politics, along with me. Kennedy, a longtime anti-vaccine activist, has promoted discredited theories that vaccines cause autism.

We understood a lot more than a lot of people who studied it, Trump said.

Oh god. All the gullible people who believed him about ivermectin are now going to be telling pregnant women that they just have to suffer through headaches and fevers, all because a group of elected and appointed clowns say so. They presented no evidence for a link between autism and Tylenol, but just blithely charged in and invented one. The studies have been done to show that Tylenol is not a significant factor! Here’s one that looked at 2,480,797 children and found no connection.

Study reveals no causal link between neurodevelopmental disorders and acetaminophen exposure before birth
NIH-funded research in siblings finds previously reported connection is likely due to other underlying factors.

Acetaminophen exposure during pregnancy is not linked to the risk of developing autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability, according to a new study of data from more than 2 million children in Sweden. The collaborative research effort by Swedish and American investigators, which appears in JAMA, is the largest of its kind and was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Scientists compared siblings — who share genetics and other variables such as parental health, environmental exposures, and socioeconomic factors — and were able to limit the influence of other potential risk factors. This allowed them to focus specifically on, and eliminate, the risk associated with acetaminophen. The study design was unique due to the size of the population captured in the Swedish Medical Birth Register and the Swedish Prescribed Drug Register. Before siblings were considered, there appeared to be a small increase in risk for neurodevelopmental disorders in children exposed to acetaminophen, which was noted in previous studies.

Acetaminophen is commonly used as a pain reliever and fever reducer and is found in a variety of medicines available over the counter and via prescription. It is often taken during pregnancy instead of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, known as NSAIDs, which can cause low levels of amniotic fluid, according to the Food and Drug Administration. The reasons pregnant people might take acetaminophen, including fever, or conditions such as chronic migraine, could be, and in some cases are, associated with an increased risk for later neurodevelopmental disorders following pregnancy.

One limitation of this study is that it relies on data from prescribed acetaminophen and from self-reporting from pregnant people during prenatal care. It may not capture all use or dosage in all people, particularly over-the-counter medicines. However, the number of patients included in the study sample and the ability to control for many other confounding factors support the conclusion that acetaminophen is not directly linked to an increase link of autism, ADHD, or intellectual disability.

To inform best preventative strategies, additional research is required to fully understand the genetic and non-genetic factors that increase the risk of autism, ADHD, and intellectual disability.

The effect is simply not there! Because Trump has surrounded himself with incompetent frauds, this claim is going to resonate through society and have multiple deleterious effects on American health. Makary, Bhattacharya, Oz, and RFK jr belong on a list of infamous quacks alongside disgraced “doctor” Andrew Wakefield.

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.

Loon sighting confirmed!

I told you that Brian Lauer is an ignorant buffoon, but you shouldn’t trust my opinion alone. Last night, Mark Reid and Dr. Dan worked over the same presentation and came to the same conclusion, so it’s official: Lauer is a kook.

But perhaps you are cautiously skeptical. You need more evidence. You want direct evidence from Lauer himself. Here’s the introduction to a podcast on Real Science Radio (it’s not real science) which is just conspiracy theories stacked on conspiracy theories.

RSR host Fred Williams is joined by Brian Lauer to unravel the World Economic Forum’s “The Great Reset”, a consortium of wealthy and powerful evolutionists looking to use the pandemic as an excuse to push their worldview. On the surface, it’s just another socialist economic plan in a similar vein to FDR’s disastrous New Deal and LBJ’s failed Great Society, but this time it’s driven by the flawed science of materialism and climate change. Like its predecessors, the underlying false assumptions will end up hurting the economy and tearing away at the middle class, further dividing society and fueling class warfare. “The Great Reset” globalists have posted 8 predictions of what the world will look like in 2030 if governments buy into their short-sighted ideas. Better stock up on T-bones now!

But even more sinister are a litany of ideas hidden in the subterfuge of “The Great Reset”, such as biometric surveillance and transhumanism. A key advisor to “The Great Reset” is Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. While he warns that transhumanism can be pushed too far, such as digital dictatorships with total control over their population, his false worldview steeped in the fake science of materialism leads him to the silly belief that humans are “hackable animals” that can have their total consciousness manipulated such that “free will is over”. For more, check out this brief video Brian found and hear it for yourself! You can also hear more from his talk at a recent creation conference.

I choked and passed out at wealthy and powerful evolutionists, so the rest was just noise.