I think you need to take what Loeb is saying with a very large grain of salt. There's a fair amount of annoyance and disgust within the astronomical community a

I think you need to take what Loeb is saying with a very large grain of salt. There's a fair amount of annoyance and disgust within the astronomical community at his misrepresentation of what other astronomers have or have not been doing, particularly given that he's only been interested in this for a handful of years, versus the decades others have devoted to it. There's a large degree of self-congratulation and self-promotion in what Loeb is saying, and denigration of what others have been doing. The idea that this field of research is "stifled" because people are "scared" is basically bullshit.