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A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter
- idkyall 3y agohttps://archive.ph/XSt1s https://archive.ph/XSt1s
- pohl 3y agoThis is an infinite loop of CAPTCHAs for me. For all I know, they're trying to trick humans into doing CAPTCHAs for bots.
- ecshafer 3y agoI’ve been seeing that also more and more with archive links. Nothing really out of the ordinary on my setup, ublock and Firefox. I’ll get dozens of captchas before i give up.
- alister 3y agoI get an infinite series of captchas with vanilla Firefox with no extensions or plugins at all. However, the archive site loads instantly on Vivaldi, a Chromium-based browser, on the same system. I wonder if their security setup has a bias against Firefox for some reason.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- hikingsimulator 3y agoSince it's on topic, I'd like to share a small youtuber who does science communication. She covered Loeb and the topics of crackpots in science [1]. Her other video on string theory and how it damaged science communication is really good too. [1] https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI
- DrDroop 3y agoI thought about her video as well. People like Avi are motherfuckers, you know they are BS artists but you are powerless to stop them because they feed of the all the other gullible idiots. The public debate is filled with clowns like this, people that sort of ought to know better but can't help being the crowd pleasers they are.
- mihaitodor 3y agoHer entire channel is amazing!
- fanatic2pope 3y agoIs the comment about 2fa a joke? Hard to tell with her dry delivery.
- adamc 3y agoShe's great. She also has a fabulous recent video on LOTR.
- apatil 3y agoI heard about this video from an astronomer friend a few months ago. It was mostly about how Loeb's social and professional behavior matches with that of past crackpots. He does seem to leave himself open to that. There wasn't really a material argument against his controversial hypotheses about interstellar objects. I counted an ad hominem (45 minutes of analysis of his awkward public persona), an argument from ignorance ('Omuamua is out of view so it's not possible to collect evidence for the lightsail hypothesis) and an appeal to the authority of the broader astronomical community. He is going out and looking for evidence about IM1, and is seeking cross-validation from other labs, in a very transparent way. He's making lots of possibly inappropriately optimistic public speculations in the meantime, but I haven't seen him make any actual claims that aren't justified, which seems like the defining feature of a crackpot.
- DrDroop 3y agoToday in the news, people still looking for the Loch Ness Monster using underwater microphones. They made all the recordings and are now looking to process the data, all in good faith and with an open mind. At some point you have to call a spade a spade for your own and everyone else's sanity. [1] https://www.facebook.com/groups/470765477828717/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/470765477828717/
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoNot to brag, but if we go by results in terms of aliens discovered, I'm in joint-first place with this guy!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baz00 3y agoI was hoping someone would make this exact comment.
- spaceman_2020 3y agoHey, leave some room on the podium - there are billions of us. Billions!
- lame-robot-hoax 3y agoWrong. The top alien hunter is obviously none other than blink-182’s Tom DeLonge.
- boffinAudio 3y agoTom Cruise.
- qbrass 3y agoSigourney Weaver
- aradox66 3y agoHard agree!!!
- davidkunz 3y agoAliens discovered: 0 "The World's leading Alien Hunter"
- meepmorp 3y agoCongratulations, you're tied for first place!
- rewmie 3y agoI've heard he's an equally impressive Yeti tracker, loch Ness monster spotter, and leprechaun catcher.
- stevenwoo 3y agoAs portrayed in the story he has an amazing ability to raise money for the searches. It reminds me a lot of influencers, and is possibly easier than getting academic funding for astronomy. It seems like he turned from hard science when his mother died around 2019.
- mturk 3y agoI am genuinely surprised they did not even mention J. Allen Hynek [1], who was department head at Northwestern for a long time. There was even a TV show (sort-of) about him a few years back! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Allen_Hynek
- bloopernova 3y agoI live in the town that's the home of the UFO sightings that led to Hynek's infamous "swamp gas" dismissal. It's highly amusing to me that even that story is incorrect: "After studying the reports, Hynek offered a provisional hypothesis for some of the sightings: a few of about 100 witnesses had mistaken swamp gas for something more spectacular. At the press conference where he made his announcement, Hynek repeatedly and strenuously stated that swamp gas was a plausible explanation for only a portion of the Michigan UFO reports, and certainly not for UFO reports in general. But much to his chagrin, Hynek's qualifications of his hypothesis were largely overlooked, and the term swamp gas was repeated ad infinitum in relation to UFO reports. The explanation was subject to national derision."
- Upvoter33 3y agoThis guy seems quite full of himself. I read his book - unfortunately - and it’s so much bragging and not much else. It seems like a guy who wants attention … desperately.
- camel_gopher 3y agoQuack. His book sucked, too.
- hoppyhoppy2 3y agoGift Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-hunter.html?unlocked_article_code=4mbvH8chkVNv_Yr5SB9xVpLeKYvCHdo7lPkeMN6Lc4djpVavmHFuuRYI1LHZX-H80DJzJ73A61MttxYhBO0LVSNcyQQzpMsbUhwBn7-s87s4NR30CYS6wJlqOQogTlJgjhATy9kHRsxf9fS67EZEt6TH9eKvG1hWjDLGIcZMgL-UYBf6_rjsc1z6nZ6rvZnnK5GR5BSuZj-V6nH5DQqGnqe30qtdNAwIWnRF61qYN74r_Nw0PZgqRO1fmTod1kH15Wk9hmEfg-gn_Le0K2o2UiCvb1--n95ts2e9-gfuCJrtxWu6lhUpskFytfF89HmBExj3NmuRpZrfVUedTJEF8g&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-h...
- wthomp 3y agoWorth mentioning that essentially all professional astronomers / astrophysicists consider this person a grifter. It’s amazing that he keeps getting so much press though, would love to learn his secret.
- quickthrowman 3y agoHe’s exchanging a career’s worth of credibility for media attention and the resulting financial opportunities that result from media attention. It’s as a simple as using an existing platform to say outrageous things in a confident manner frequently enough to stay in the spotlight, many politicians around the world are running this playbook right now. It helps to play the victim when (rightly) criticized, it helps create an other to fight against.
- david-gpu 3y agoWe won't find new stuff if we don't go searching for it first. Or if we classify every intriguing observation "in the interest of national security". That's why I'm curious about what may come out of this year's NDAA bill with its "UAP Disclosure Act" amendment [0,1]. [0] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/schumer-rounds-introduce-new-legislation-to-declassify-government-records-related-to-unidentified-anomalous-phenomena-and-ufos_modeled-after-jfk-assassination-records-collection-act--as-an-amendment-to-ndaa https://www.democrats.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sch... [1] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment.pdf https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...
- plonk 3y agoIs it plausible that the US military would use "UAP" as a cover for tests of new technology, and make up/classify new footage to keep the conspiracy theories alive? Completely paranoiac or possible? I've heard the theory a few times but am curious what people more knowledgeable than me think about it.
- david-gpu 3y agoNot really knowledgeable, but I do follow the UAP subject. I'm open minded about what could be going on. In my opinion the root of the problem is that the people who have the best equipment to detect incursions in the skies are military forces, particularly the US, and their policy for decades has been to classify, dismiss and ridicule. Are they sometimes doing that to hide secret tech? Seems very likely. Are they sometimes doing it to hide something else? We don't really have a way to know. So what makes highly-cleared people in the Intelligence Community and the DoD to make these outrageous claims? I'm talking about people like David Grusch, Karl Nell, Chris Mellon or Luis Elizondo. I don't really know, it is hard to find a parsimonious explanation. What I don't want to do is jump to conclusions one way or another. If you look at their resumes, the people making these claims either are or have recently been in positions where it's very plausible that they would have access to this sort of information. So, let's investigate and figure out what makes them say these things. Some of them have testified in secure facilities, providing data such as the location of these alleged craft, so it would make sense to follow up and see what's in there. If there's nothing, all the better.
- darthoctopus 3y agoNot mentioned in the article, but pretty widely circulated in the astronomy community when it happened, is Avi's utterly disrespectful and frankly uncalled for vituperation onto Jill Tarter in response to her public criticism of his (self-demonstrating) Messiah complex: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/02/16/watch-harvard-astronomer-mansplains-seti-to-the-legend-who-inspired-carl-sagans-contact/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/02/16/watc... For those out of the loop, Jill Tarter is a SETI legend, who has dedicated her life's work to a principled search for extraterrestrial life, of exactly the kind that Avi has claimed to have been neglected by the scientific community (to obviously self-aggrandising effect). The arrogance here is just astounding. This man is a toxic and hypocritical bully, and this bad behaviour should not be rewarded even if he were correct (which, as the article describes, appears unlikely).
- in_cahoots 3y agoTen minutes talking with this man single-handedly turned me off from attending Harvard grad school. Any environment that would promote him to (I believe) head of the department was not one I wanted to study in. Glad to see I made the right choice.
- ramraj07 3y agoDo you seriously think Harvard grad school is in some ways culturally that different from any of today’s schools ?
- darthoctopus 3y agoanecdata, but at least in my grad school astro department (which will go unnamed) this kind of bullying behaviour would be, and actually was, called out and ostracised, rather than rewarded! granted, it took a whole year for the university to get its act together and do something about it…
- in_cahoots 3y agoYes, I remember there were a couple of prominent astro cases around the time I finished up my PhD. Glad to see that there was a good end result.
- mihaitodor 3y agoThis guy completely lost his marbles [1]. Sean Carroll interviewed him [2] a few years ago for his podcast and I don't recall hearing any extremely outlandish claims in that episode. After that, however... [1] https://avi-loeb.medium.com/starting-the-analysis-of-spherules-from-the-interstellar-expedition-2bc608d2d7ce https://avi-loeb.medium.com/starting-the-analysis-of-spherul... [2] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/01/25/131-avi-loeb-on-taking-aliens-seriously/ https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/01/25/131-...
- bloopernova 3y agoPeople are too concerned with human timescales when thinking about extraterrestrial life. We're a tiny nanosecond blip of electromagnetic noise that might, with difficulty, be received at Alpha Centauri. If simple life develops in many places, intelligent life is still vanishingly rare over galactic timescales. In our own little ephemeral lightning flash I highly doubt there's anything within our galaxy. Non Terrestrial Intelligences (NTIs, to borrow from The Abyss movie) might be interested in places where life gets more complex than a few RNA fragments. I just can't see why they'd want samples more frequently than every few million years or so. Certainly we'd have come and been long gone before any probe made a flyby.
- ericb 3y agoIf you think that: * It is possible to create von Neumann probes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft * At least some percentage of civilizations would create them * The odds of intelligent life occurring around a star is less than one in 200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (the number of stars) Then, in all odds, they should be here already. And why move on, when von Neumann probes are "free" in that they have zero marginal cost?
- bloopernova 3y agoIf you've seen a million planets evolve life, you might not want to gather any more data. We're probably just not very interesting.
- david-gpu 3y ago> If you've seen a million planets evolve life, you might not want to gather any more data. > We're probably just not very interesting. Yet we humans continue to explore our solar system and find all sorts of things intriguing, from exo-geology to weather patterns in other planets, to the life cycle of the most insignificant beetle. I think it is far too early to be making assumptions about what could motivate a hypothetical alien probe to explore this planet.
- 3y ago
- oefrha 3y ago> Loeb could not have been any more mainstream or credentialed, yet here he was, saying that maybe an alien spaceship had arrived. Speaking as a former physicist (but not astrophysicist), at least to us practicing physicists, someone being well credentialed hardly lends any credence to their more out there theories. I know multiple renowned professors in high energy and/or cosmology, including at least one in my department (Princeton Physics), who have been pursuing more wacky theories late in their careers that others in respective fields ignore for the most part. In fact, being well credentialed probably makes it easier to gravitate toward the fringe, since there’s no more normal career objective to pursue. No comment on this specific case.
- david_draco 3y agoHis formal background is in theoretical physics not astronomy, although he has been at Harvard's astronomy department for decades now.
- joe__f 3y agoI remember when I was doing my masters I was really excited to go and see Penrose speak, and I was surprised when none of the cosmology staff I had lectures with were going to the talk. When I asked them they told me they'd looked and they couldn't see any evidence for cyclic conformal cosmology in the CMB
- oefrha 3y agoThis reminds me of my first day as a PhD student in the department. Talked to a bunch of professors to figure out my potential advisor. Probably the most famous professor out of the bunch surprised me with his really strange BSM theories that AFAICT few people took seriously.
- ramraj07 3y agoIt is generally true that any lecture by a Nobel laureate or a professor very late in their career is for the most part useless. Best case scenario you get a rehash of decades old research you can glean from your review. Worst case is you get what you mentioned.
- wbhart 3y agoOne mildly good thing to say about Loeb is that he spoke out very harshly about the quantum woo that the UAP "whistleblower" David Grusch invoked to potentially explain how aliens got here without travelling great distances (something about the "holographic principle", which really hasn't got anything to do with aliens appearing "in our dimension"). If you go back through news articles from 2017, 2019 and 2021 you will find that some "academy to the stars" claimed to have retrieved parts of crashed UAPs. There's some woo about how holding it near people had strange effects on them. They put it under a microscope and found some layered lead-bismuth alloy that had no known use on earth. And they found something that resembled frog skin. So you have crashed UAPs, reverse engineering and non-human biologics. They even tried selling the reverse engineered tech back the Government through I think Bigelow aerospace. So that's who is behind the current UAP push. There's also some folklore circulating about pilots having their brains literally scrambled by these UAPs. Loeb at least sees through all this and speaks out against it. But all he seems to have is some spherules of metal from the bottom of the ocean which I'd say he has little to no evidence even came from space, let alone from a crashed UAP. Unfortunately, if you look far enough into these things, you just find a trail of cash, extracted one way or another from a scientifically illiterate general public. I'm not sure what the answer is. Yes, we need to look, which means spending money. But we need to make sure it isn't going into the pockets of pseudoscientists and people who use "classification" to cover up their (non-reputable) sources.
- woolion 3y agoI'm always happy to see very reputable sources who report on very serious endeavors by very serious people. These last years have seen a terrible increase in what people call "post-truth discourse", or more simply "fake news". These terrible things poison our democracy, making people doubt major institutions and look for conspiratorial explanations to the noblest pursuits, such as the quest for science; instead, they see everything as motivated by money transfers and bullshit. This is a big problem with the internet increasing polarization badly. Among this darkness stands a beacon of light. The New York Times, reputed for it infallible thoroughness, providing accurate reporting on all subjects. From the Iraq war to pre-2023 reporting on Sam Bankman-Fried, their flawless track-record shows that they can be trusted to shield truth from independent journalism. >“Two-thirds of the American public believes there is extraterrestrial life, more than the 56 percent that believes in the God of the Bible,” Loeb told me. Dismissing their questions as unworthy of consideration, he argues, is not a good way to earn back the trust of an American public that has become skeptical of science and scientists. I think we should open new university departments that go one step further and study "why do aliens love the USA so much?". Most alien activity, either recorded by the public, the media or the government, happens in the USA. This is a major question that deserves the same level of scrutiny, if not more, than questions such as "do aliens exist".
- yyyk 3y ago>I think we should open new university departments that go one step further and study "why do aliens love the USA so much?" Professor Dave Barry explained the reason sometime ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20131103013600/http://www.ufoera.com/articles/whats-alien-you-by-dave-barry_1190310857.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131103013600/http://www.ufoera...
- david-gpu 3y ago> Most alien activity, either recorded by the public, the media or the government, happens in the USA. This is a major question that deserves the same level of scrutiny, if not more, than questions such as "do aliens exist". Do you read the news in any language other than English? Is it then surprising that all the UFO sightings you hear about are written in English by English speakers? If you actually had any interest in answering the question, which you obviously don't, you would have looked for information in other languages and you would have found plenty.
- dudeinjapan 3y agoYou mean he dethroned Giorgio A. Tsoukalos?
- ausbah 3y ago[flagged]
- elorant 3y agoI tried to read his book about oumuamua. It was borderline impossible. Two thirds of the book were about him and his accomplishments. I gave up halfway there. I didn't gain any insights about the object itself more than what I could read in an article or a blog post. How is this guy considered an expert is beyond me.
- hotdogscout 3y agoI appreciate the few remaining glimpses of diversity of thought in academia. While I may not always agree, it's valuable to have those who question assumptions. The existence of similar anomalies on Earth regarding intelligent life suggests the possibility of similar phenomena elsewhere, and dismissing such inquiries with "crackpot" accusations doesn't make sense to me.
- beautifulfreak 3y agoBefore him there was John Mack, the Harvard professor who turned serious attention toward alien abduction stories and was the world's leading authority on them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Mack#Psychology_of_alien_abduction_phenomena https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._Mack#Psychology_of_ali... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/magazine/john-mack.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/magazine/john-mack.html
- e_carra 3y agoCould all this push and attention on UFO/UAP be an attempt to raise the US defense budget in the current economic reality?