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> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips i

> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin,” he writes, “whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.” Uh... this isn't at all clear to me. I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be, its just that it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Recall that the scientific community has gotten its hopes up about aliens several times in the past with scientist proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few. If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?

Retric 6y ago
Yea, the actual fallacy is thinking you must identify what something is before you have enough information. 1I/2017 U1 is an unknown object and that’s perfectly ok. It didn’t display any radio signals, unusual thrust, or extreme velocity requiring it to be an alien probe. But, that doesn’t prevent it from being a probe either.
- eloff 6y ago
  Or even just a piece of debris of unnatural origin. I'm not saying that's what it is, or even is likely to be, but it's in the possibility space.
- jonathankoren 6y ago
  While it’s true that it didn’t produce any detectable radio signals, it have an unexplained force acting on it. It was this acceleration away from the sun that spawned the theories of undetected outgassing or light pressure. As for “extreme velocity”, that’s a bit a canard. It’s traveling at interstellar speeds, and humanity has already has five interstellar probes today. Now none of these indicate that it’s probe — working or otherwise — but these aren’t the reasons against it. (Well, no radio emissions is a reason against a working probe.) The big unknown for me about the object is that we don’t actually have a good idea about its shape. Drawings show it has a cigar shaped rock, which is only one possible configuration compatible with the radio reflections. If only we could have actually seen the object, a lot of this uncertainty would have been eliminated.
  - Retric 6y ago
    I chose unusual as it had thrust consistent with comets. After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from 'Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that 'Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/ PDF: https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/media/Oumuamuanongravitationalacceleration_1.pdf https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/me... PS: At to extreme velocity, something large traveling 0.1+ c or even 0.01c is very likely to be aliens. This was fast, but a long way from those kind of speeds.
    - BobbyJo 6y ago
      If you listen to his podcast with Lex he explains that the outgassing needed to give it the acceleration it had would require 10% of it's mass to cook off, as well as all of it had to be hydrogen else we'd have seen the trail. Why consider a comet made entirely of hydrogen more likely than an alien probe?
      - Retric 6y ago
        The paper addresses that point. The model predictions for the magnitude and temporal evolution of the non-gravitational acceleration are within a factor of about 2–3 of the observations (see Methods) for a water production rate of QH2O = 4.9 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 1.5 kg s−1) near 1.4 au and an addi- tional contribution from QCO = 4.5 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 2.1 kg s−1). Outgassing at this level does not conflict with the absence of spectro- scopic detections for outgassing of OH, because the values quoted are well below the spectroscopic limits on production rates16. However, the inferred upper limits for water production at 1.4 au, which are based on the non-detection of CN7 and assumed Solar System abundances for QCN/QOH17, show that ‘Oumuamua would need to be substantially depleted in CN (by a factor of more than about 15) relative to water. And: However, if the grains are predominantly larger than a few hundred micrometres to millimetres, they would not have been detected at optical wavelengths (see Methods). In the Solar System, comet 2P/Encke is noteworthy for its lack of small dust near perihelion18. Cometary behaviour implies that ‘Oumuamua must have some internal strength, at least comparable to Solar System comets19, because asteroid-like densities are ruled out (see Methods). It’s an interesting read, suggesting interstellar space as being significantly different than what you see inside solar systems.
eloff 6y ago
> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect oxygen on exoplanets, which is not conclusive evidence of life, but to search for industrial pollution is a non starter for exactly this reason. But that would yield much more interesting results (both for negative and positive results.)
- bostonsre 6y ago
  Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.
  - rtx 6y ago
    Yet we find this to be a recurring theme, I wonder when this switch happens. From a curious boy/girl who becomes a scientist to a conservative.
    - irrational 6y ago
      Grad school.
      - JALTU 6y ago
        Reinforced repeatedly with career/publication steps, homeownership, children's expenses, neighbor buying a Tesla first, etc.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - eloff 6y ago
    This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.
AlexB138 6y ago
> ... proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few For those out there who, like me, don't know these acronyms: GRBs == Gamma-Ray Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst FRBs == Fast Radio Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst
6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
There seems to be a giant mismatch about what side is open minded. People who think its most likely aliens think it’s closed minded to assign that low probability, presumably because we’re this tiny corner of the universe. People who think it’s most likely not aliens Think it’s closed minded to assign everything else low probability, presumably because aliens are a tiny corner of everything else. Is it a misapplication of the anthropic principle to say there are probably gazillions of advanced aliens, given that we appeared and therefore life probably is common? Or is it a misapplication to say it’s probably just another of the gazillions of non-alien things we’ve seen? It’s all differences of opinion over which claim is the extraordinary one. It is bold to claim confidence about the impossibility of FTL travel, or bold to claim confidence about the possibility of it? Is it bold to say we’re a freak occurrence or bold to say we aren’t? Most generally, is it bold to say we know a lot or bold to say we don’t?
- gfxgirl 6y ago
  I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.
  - PoachedSausage 6y ago
    Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog. There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.
    - godelski 6y ago
      The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become space faring. Because of their sizes they would have to consume significantly more resources to build simple things. A two story house probably couldn't be created out of wood or other basic biological materials making it difficult to transition into even the stone age. They also require higher food because energy requirements aren't linear. But think how much it costs to send a pound to space. Their first to space would be significantly more expensive. This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).
y-c-o-m-b 6y ago
> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing? I think what he's trying to convey is that thinking of this object under the assumption of "aliens" pushes us to develop experimental technology to prove it. This could then lead to future advances (whether intentional or accidental) potentially helping us detect alien technology where we otherwise wouldn't be able to had we not begun that pursuit. He's looking at it from a very long-term perspective.
- 7thaccount 6y ago
  We don't need Oumuamua to push technology further and further. We're already pushing. Now if some aliens showed up on a star cruiser and told us Warp drive is easily obtainable without massive amounts of energy. Then, that would be a new goal to direct ourselves to that could inspire us.
jonny_eh 6y ago
Also infuriating since Sagan was a proponent of long-shot science like SETI and the golden disc on Voyager. He proved that we can be scientifically rigorous and still take chances to explore.
pdonis 6y ago
> “It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” This is either very obtuse or very disingenuous on Loeb's part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. You investigate the claims in order to see what kind of evidence there is for them. I would expect the actual peer-reviewed paper, which unfortunately this article doesn't link to (I hate when pop science articles do that), to lay out in more detail what the evidence is and why Loeb thinks it establishes his claim.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  > Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. Even your former claim might not be necessarily true. What constitutes "an extraordinary evidence" exactly? Example: imagine aliens are freely living among us but our eyes are blind to certain light frequencies (they are in fact blind to most wavelengths) and that's how aliens utilize camouflage. Would revealing this fact be an extraordinary evidence for aliens? It's IMO extremely subjective. People might get very excited with such a discovery, sure, but the explanation does sound rather bland and super obvious (as all things in hindsight). So this whole "extraordinary" stuff reads more like popular old men bickering in front of the media for the goals of PR coverage and, who knows, maybe that increases their odds for scientific funding. I'd always look for the financial incentive and potential conflict of interest first.
noetic_techy 6y ago
>>I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct Listen to his interviews, he is talking about his colleagues at Harvard, not the general public. They are the ones saying things like "I wish it never existed because we can't explain it" >>it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Again, this is not at all what he is saying. Read his paper and listen to his interviews. It exhibits the signs and being an artificial construct, and he even points to a similar object that was detected that turned out to be a booster launched back in the 50s. You can't easily explain the acceleration of the object with known natural entities like comets and asteroids. It showed no plume nor ejecta, yet seemed to gain speed equivalent to 10% of its mass being ejected. The reason the booster did this was due to the push of solar winds on a thin shell of a hollow object. Hence the theory that this may be some kind of alien solar sail. It does have an extremely odd geometry. The renderings of it being a large turd of an asteroid is pure speculation. There is no clear picture of it. I bet if Voyager 1 made it to another star system it would accelerate also due to its thin surfaces and exhibit the same profile, albeit smaller. And we left a gold disk with our address on it. What if it has technology that we haven't even conceived of? It actually would be worth while for our species to mount an expedition to catch up with it and turn it around. Sounds expensive but wow would it be huge if it was an alien craft.
pdimitar 6y ago
> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing? Chicken and egg problem. We won't know until people are with unconventional ideas are free to try pursuing them without being mocked as "tin-foil hats" or "conspiracy nutjobs" or whatever. Let's take a moment to remember how many similarly not-at-all-related-to-space travel inventions have been made due to fighting the space race (who gets first to the moon) (like the CDs). I believe the quote is not a specific evidence for anything. It's a call for us to adhere to a slightly different principle: "Let's explore, for we are far from knowing everything and we shouldn't mock people who investigate things that to the majority look absurd. They might indeed be absurd but every now and then we make interesting discoveries".

Retric 6y ago

Yea, the actual fallacy is thinking you must identify what something is before you have enough information. 1I/2017 U1 is an unknown object and that’s perfectly ok. It didn’t display any radio signals, unusual thrust, or extreme velocity requiring it to be an alien probe. But, that doesn’t prevent it from being a probe either.

eloff 6y ago
Or even just a piece of debris of unnatural origin. I'm not saying that's what it is, or even is likely to be, but it's in the possibility space.
jonathankoren 6y ago
While it’s true that it didn’t produce any detectable radio signals, it have an unexplained force acting on it. It was this acceleration away from the sun that spawned the theories of undetected outgassing or light pressure. As for “extreme velocity”, that’s a bit a canard. It’s traveling at interstellar speeds, and humanity has already has five interstellar probes today. Now none of these indicate that it’s probe — working or otherwise — but these aren’t the reasons against it. (Well, no radio emissions is a reason against a working probe.) The big unknown for me about the object is that we don’t actually have a good idea about its shape. Drawings show it has a cigar shaped rock, which is only one possible configuration compatible with the radio reflections. If only we could have actually seen the object, a lot of this uncertainty would have been eliminated.
- Retric 6y ago
  I chose unusual as it had thrust consistent with comets. After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from 'Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that 'Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/ PDF: https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/media/Oumuamuanongravitationalacceleration_1.pdf https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/me... PS: At to extreme velocity, something large traveling 0.1+ c or even 0.01c is very likely to be aliens. This was fast, but a long way from those kind of speeds.
  - BobbyJo 6y ago
    If you listen to his podcast with Lex he explains that the outgassing needed to give it the acceleration it had would require 10% of it's mass to cook off, as well as all of it had to be hydrogen else we'd have seen the trail. Why consider a comet made entirely of hydrogen more likely than an alien probe?
    - Retric 6y ago
      The paper addresses that point. The model predictions for the magnitude and temporal evolution of the non-gravitational acceleration are within a factor of about 2–3 of the observations (see Methods) for a water production rate of QH2O = 4.9 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 1.5 kg s−1) near 1.4 au and an addi- tional contribution from QCO = 4.5 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 2.1 kg s−1). Outgassing at this level does not conflict with the absence of spectro- scopic detections for outgassing of OH, because the values quoted are well below the spectroscopic limits on production rates16. However, the inferred upper limits for water production at 1.4 au, which are based on the non-detection of CN7 and assumed Solar System abundances for QCN/QOH17, show that ‘Oumuamua would need to be substantially depleted in CN (by a factor of more than about 15) relative to water. And: However, if the grains are predominantly larger than a few hundred micrometres to millimetres, they would not have been detected at optical wavelengths (see Methods). In the Solar System, comet 2P/Encke is noteworthy for its lack of small dust near perihelion18. Cometary behaviour implies that ‘Oumuamua must have some internal strength, at least comparable to Solar System comets19, because asteroid-like densities are ruled out (see Methods). It’s an interesting read, suggesting interstellar space as being significantly different than what you see inside solar systems.

eloff 6y ago

> I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be. Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career. As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect oxygen on exoplanets, which is not conclusive evidence of life, but to search for industrial pollution is a non starter for exactly this reason. But that would yield much more interesting results (both for negative and positive results.)

bostonsre 6y ago
Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific.
- rtx 6y ago
  Yet we find this to be a recurring theme, I wonder when this switch happens. From a curious boy/girl who becomes a scientist to a conservative.
  - irrational 6y ago
    Grad school.
    - JALTU 6y ago
      Reinforced repeatedly with career/publication steps, homeownership, children's expenses, neighbor buying a Tesla first, etc.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- eloff 6y ago
  This is very common in science. New theories are usually rejected and ridiculed until/if they develop enough evidence behind them to sway people. Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades. Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.

AlexB138 6y ago

> ... proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few For those out there who, like me, don't know these acronyms: GRBs == Gamma-Ray Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst FRBs == Fast Radio Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst

6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

There seems to be a giant mismatch about what side is open minded. People who think its most likely aliens think it’s closed minded to assign that low probability, presumably because we’re this tiny corner of the universe. People who think it’s most likely not aliens Think it’s closed minded to assign everything else low probability, presumably because aliens are a tiny corner of everything else. Is it a misapplication of the anthropic principle to say there are probably gazillions of advanced aliens, given that we appeared and therefore life probably is common? Or is it a misapplication to say it’s probably just another of the gazillions of non-alien things we’ve seen? It’s all differences of opinion over which claim is the extraordinary one. It is bold to claim confidence about the impossibility of FTL travel, or bold to claim confidence about the possibility of it? Is it bold to say we’re a freak occurrence or bold to say we aren’t? Most generally, is it bold to say we know a lot or bold to say we don’t?

gfxgirl 6y ago
I thought the idea that there are gazillions of advanced aliens has been pretty much disproven by the fermi paradox. If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.
- PoachedSausage 6y ago
  Maybe there has been some sort of accident of scale, like the intergalactic fleet in Hitch Hiker Guide to the Galaxy that arrives to destroy Earth but is eaten by a dog. There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.
  - godelski 6y ago
    The problem with this is that mechanics is not scale invariant. This puts bounds on creatures. Unless there's some crazy different way to compute I wouldn't expect a being to be able to have strong cognitive functions and be the size of a fly. They would also have a difficult time building advanced machinery to get to galactic travel scales. Similarly I wouldn't expect a creature the size of a Brontosaurus to become space faring. Because of their sizes they would have to consume significantly more resources to build simple things. A two story house probably couldn't be created out of wood or other basic biological materials making it difficult to transition into even the stone age. They also require higher food because energy requirements aren't linear. But think how much it costs to send a pound to space. Their first to space would be significantly more expensive. This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).

y-c-o-m-b 6y ago

> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing? I think what he's trying to convey is that thinking of this object under the assumption of "aliens" pushes us to develop experimental technology to prove it. This could then lead to future advances (whether intentional or accidental) potentially helping us detect alien technology where we otherwise wouldn't be able to had we not begun that pursuit. He's looking at it from a very long-term perspective.

7thaccount 6y ago
We don't need Oumuamua to push technology further and further. We're already pushing. Now if some aliens showed up on a star cruiser and told us Warp drive is easily obtainable without massive amounts of energy. Then, that would be a new goal to direct ourselves to that could inspire us.

jonny_eh 6y ago

Also infuriating since Sagan was a proponent of long-shot science like SETI and the golden disc on Voyager. He proved that we can be scientifically rigorous and still take chances to explore.

pdonis 6y ago

> “It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” This is either very obtuse or very disingenuous on Loeb's part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. You investigate the claims in order to see what kind of evidence there is for them. I would expect the actual peer-reviewed paper, which unfortunately this article doesn't link to (I hate when pop science articles do that), to lay out in more detail what the evidence is and why Loeb thinks it establishes his claim.

pdimitar 6y ago
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. Even your former claim might not be necessarily true. What constitutes "an extraordinary evidence" exactly? Example: imagine aliens are freely living among us but our eyes are blind to certain light frequencies (they are in fact blind to most wavelengths) and that's how aliens utilize camouflage. Would revealing this fact be an extraordinary evidence for aliens? It's IMO extremely subjective. People might get very excited with such a discovery, sure, but the explanation does sound rather bland and super obvious (as all things in hindsight). So this whole "extraordinary" stuff reads more like popular old men bickering in front of the media for the goals of PR coverage and, who knows, maybe that increases their odds for scientific funding. I'd always look for the financial incentive and potential conflict of interest first.

noetic_techy 6y ago

>>I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct Listen to his interviews, he is talking about his colleagues at Harvard, not the general public. They are the ones saying things like "I wish it never existed because we can't explain it" >>it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Again, this is not at all what he is saying. Read his paper and listen to his interviews. It exhibits the signs and being an artificial construct, and he even points to a similar object that was detected that turned out to be a booster launched back in the 50s. You can't easily explain the acceleration of the object with known natural entities like comets and asteroids. It showed no plume nor ejecta, yet seemed to gain speed equivalent to 10% of its mass being ejected. The reason the booster did this was due to the push of solar winds on a thin shell of a hollow object. Hence the theory that this may be some kind of alien solar sail. It does have an extremely odd geometry. The renderings of it being a large turd of an asteroid is pure speculation. There is no clear picture of it. I bet if Voyager 1 made it to another star system it would accelerate also due to its thin surfaces and exhibit the same profile, albeit smaller. And we left a gold disk with our address on it. What if it has technology that we haven't even conceived of? It actually would be worth while for our species to mount an expedition to catch up with it and turn it around. Sounds expensive but wow would it be huge if it was an alien craft.

pdimitar 6y ago

> If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing? Chicken and egg problem. We won't know until people are with unconventional ideas are free to try pursuing them without being mocked as "tin-foil hats" or "conspiracy nutjobs" or whatever. Let's take a moment to remember how many similarly not-at-all-related-to-space travel inventions have been made due to fighting the space race (who gets first to the moon) (like the CDs). I believe the quote is not a specific evidence for anything. It's a call for us to adhere to a slightly different principle: "Let's explore, for we are far from knowing everything and we shouldn't mock people who investigate things that to the majority look absurd. They might indeed be absurd but every now and then we make interesting discoveries".