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> 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 b

• 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.
    • xattt 6y ago
      The most recent event that comes to my mind is the lead up to the discovery of H. pylori causing gastric ulcers.
      • sterlind 6y ago
        Tectonic plates was another big one.
        • mensetmanusman 6y ago
          This is a current fun topic with some controversy related to tectonic plates: do solar flares cause earthquakes? https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the-sun-might-trigger-earthquakes https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the...
          • Enginerrrd 6y ago
            Despite being a really stupid-sounding premise, that is actually kind of interesting.
        • treeman79 6y ago
          Peoples position on that one shifted very slowly.
          • 6y ago
  • voldacar 6y ago
    Yes, it is. And it has also been happening for the whole history of anything recognizable as "science." The nice, pretty scientific method we learn about in school is largely an idealized myth
  • erdos4d 6y ago
    "Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis" => chopping the legs out from under a competitor because they stepped in something taboo. Happens all the time. Academia is a snake pit and this is low hanging fruit.
  • munificent 6y ago
    > Ridiculing scientists for plausible hypothesis seems very unscientific. Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible? Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.
    • kls 6y ago
      Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible. It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.
      • munificent 6y ago
        > It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. Agreed, but self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and outright fraud are also tools in the toolbox and if you don't have strong enough defensive tools, you are open to attacks from those. Obviously, they can be misapplied. Humans are not perfect. But without powerful social tools like ridicule and shunning, science becomes essentially a honeypot for charlatans like Andrew Wakefield.
  • matheusmoreira 6y ago
    Happens all the time. People's ideas get ignored even when they have evidence backing them up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis > Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. > He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      Medical doctors and surgeons are not scientists. They don't do research, they don't publish papers. Medical research is an entirely different field which overlaps in skills sometimes. But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.
      • matheusmoreira 6y ago
        Many doctors publish research. Is that not science?
        • XorNot 6y ago
          The point is that there's a difference between medical doctors as a profession, and medical doctors by training engaged in research. It's not a homogenous demographic, and it doesn't have a substantial overlap. So there is a very large (super-majority) of medical doctors who have absolutely no training in research, statistics etc. Because it's not what they do - they are not scientists. Their training is about their obligations to follow current developments in best practice, drug prescriptions etc. (or the same but for surgical technique) and apply it. They do not do science, they don't even necessarily particularly understand the scientific method. So it is absolutely incorrect to imply that all medical professionals are "the scientific community". They're not. Those which participate in and publish research are but that is not even a significant fraction of their population. Comparisons about what general population surgeons and medical doctors historically reacted to changes in practice does not say anything about the idea that these people represent a peer-reviewed scientific consensus, because they didn't. They represent the equivalent of a mechanic rejecting manufacturer recommendations on fuel quality and complaining about it to their colleagues.
• matteocantiello 6y ago
  I thought the idea of searching for industrial pollution was actually a pretty bad one. We've been polluting at detectable levels for just ~100 years. And if we keep doing it we'll likely wipe us out in a few hundred more. Overall it seems very likely industrial pollution is a very short-lived phase of any civilizations, so chances of detecting this signature are tiny.
  • naikrovek 6y ago
    Pollution capable of completely killing the dominant species of a planet would last a long time after the creation of that pollution ended. The pollution would vastly outlive the polluters, so it would be detectable for some time after their demise, especially if anything they automated also polluted. That stuff would continue to pollute after its creators all died, at least a bit. Also, it seems that the chance of detecting pollution would increase linearly as we continue to discover more planets.
    • vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      The phrases "a long time", "some time", and "at least a bit" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Oxygen has been in the Earth's atmosphere for over 2 billion years. How long, roughly, is "some time"?
      • naikrovek 6y ago
        How big, roughly is the planet in question? How thick, roughly, is the atmosphere? What, roughly, is the composition of the atmosphere? What is the median temperature of the planet? List all species capable of metabolizing pollution back into harmless compounds. What are their lifespans? How do they reproduce? ...hopefully my point is made, now. I can't give details because they don't exist. If a species produces sufficient pollution that it kills that species, it is a reasonable assumption that it was also produced at a rate far higher than the planets natural ecosystem could absorb it. It is also reasonable that the pollution also kills one or more species which were consuming or absorbing the pollution, slowing the rate at which it can be removed, or maybe even stopping that process completely. Pollution does not disappear at the same time pollutants stop being introduced into the atmosphere. There will be a time after which no pollutants are produced and before no pollutants are detectable. That is a non-zero amount of time. That is why I say that pollution could one day be detected on a planet that has not had a living civilization for "a long time." "A long time" being "more than five minutes" if you really want me to nail it down.
• User23 6y ago
  Yeah, look what happened to Tom Van Flandern.
• XorNot 6y ago
  This is ignoring the obvious question: what are we not doing that we should be with researching Oumuamua on that basis? What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock? The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up. So what exactly is requiring us to start from "it might be aliens" in order to get funded?
  • buildstatements 6y ago
    I only saw part of the Lex interview, and in the part I watched Loeb was saying if we had seen it on the way TOO Earth, we could have sent a rocket to investigate. If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look? Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be-prepared-sars-cov-3.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.
    • XorNot 6y ago
      But we are looking: there is enormous interest in discovering more interstellar objects. It's estimated there should be about ~1000 such objects in the solar system at any given time, and they all represent priceless data about the material composition of the universe outside of our solar system. People weren't not looking for them, but by their nature no one knows a way to find them reliably (other then, find all the things, look for anything which has a hyperbolic trajectory relative to the sun). Same problem with an intercept plan: we would like to do it, but the problem is not particularly tractable with our current space technology. Up until we saw Oumuamua we didn't even have a baseline for what we might expect the behaviour of objects to be - which is a problem when you're coming up with a propellant budget for a space mission, since you have no idea how much fuel or weight you can afford for an intercept. As it stands, we probably need to see a couple more Oumuamua-like objects to develop a reasonable expectation of the frequency of different classes and come up with a mission-profile which we can reasonably expect we'd be able to launch at one in the next 20-40 years. Or a way of establishing a permanent capability (which is not focused research its "yes, let's build the lunar gateway station and develop a long-term La Grange point mode for the Starliner - which is also something which you'd do if you were colonizing Mars). This is my point: nothing here benefits from "it was aliens" as a starting point. In fact, all of this useful work is pretty explicitly "it's probably not aliens". Because if aliens have gone to the expense and trouble to scout the solar system, then we basically don't need to do any of it - "it was aliens" closes research paths. If we're sure it's aliens, then a much more cost-effective strategy is waiting for them to send another probe that assuredly would move in to study the most interesting thing in Sol - us. Which will be much easier to see because we look closely for Earth-orbit objects.