A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-hunter.html

by lxm • 3 years ago

65 89 3 years ago

idkyall• 3 years ago

pohl• 3 years ago

This is an infinite loop of CAPTCHAs for me. For all I know, they're trying to trick humans into doing CAPTCHAs for bots.

ecshafer• 3 years ago

I’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.

hikingsimulator• 3 years ago

Since 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

DrDroop2• 3 years ago

I 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.

mihaitodor2• 3 years ago

Her entire channel is amazing!

fanatic2pope• 3 years ago

Is the comment about 2fa a joke? Hard to tell with her dry delivery.

adamc• 3 years ago

She's great. She also has a fabulous recent video on LOTR.

apatil• 3 years ago

I 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.

DrDroop2• 3 years ago

Today 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/

adhesive_wombat• 3 years ago

Not to brag, but if we go by results in terms of aliens discovered, I'm in joint-first place with this guy!

baz00• 3 years ago

I was hoping someone would make this exact comment.

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

Hey, leave some room on the podium - there are billions of us. Billions!

lame-robot-hoax• 3 years ago

Wrong. The top alien hunter is obviously none other than blink-182’s Tom DeLonge.

boffinAudio• 3 years ago

Tom Cruise.

qbrass• 3 years ago

Sigourney Weaver

aradox66• 3 years ago

Hard agree!!!

davidkunz• 3 years ago

Aliens discovered: 0

"The World's leading Alien Hunter"

meepmorp• 3 years ago

Congratulations, you're tied for first place!

rewmie• 3 years ago

I've heard he's an equally impressive Yeti tracker, loch Ness monster spotter, and leprechaun catcher.

stevenwoo• 3 years ago

As 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• 3 years ago

I 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

bloopernova3• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

This 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.

hoppyhoppy2• 3 years ago

Gift Article link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/24/magazine/avi-loeb-alien-h...

camel_gopher• 3 years ago

Quack. His book sucked, too.

wthomp• 3 years ago

Worth 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• 3 years ago

He’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-gpu8• 3 years ago

We 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/sch...

[1] https://www.democrats.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/uap_amendment...

plonk• 3 years ago

Is 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-gpu8• 3 years ago

Not 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.

kcplate3• 3 years ago

I’m not knowledgeable but follow the conversation on the topic. To me advanced US tech is the Occam’s razor explanation.

If there is new advanced tech, it would likely be US in origin just given the amount of money the US has spent over the last 70 years for defense. It certainly makes sense that we would compartmentalize advanced tech knowledge and it makes sense that we might test it on ourselves to gauge/control reaction to the tech rather than risk it falling into another government’s hands.

And yes, of course our government would lie about it. Why wouldn’t they?

me_me_me3• 3 years ago

We will never find invisible pink elephants secretly using mind control to backseat govern whole human population! Unless we start searching for them!

If 20% of national gdp is not enough to find them it means we are not searching hard enough and we will keep increasing the funding until we catch those pesky elephants. /s

You are using same logic.

Also. You are advanced race capable of (at least) interstellar travel. You mastered engineering, physics and biology to survive traveling to distant solar system, however your spacecrafts keep crashing in atmosphere of Earth. And those that dont crash just fly around aimlessly spooking native monkeys.

Pinnacle of civilization!

david-gpu8• 3 years ago

We will never find invisible pink elephants secretly using mind control to backseat govern whole human population! Unless we start searching for them!
If 20% of national gdp is not enough to find them it means we are not searching hard enough and we will keep increasing the funding until we catch those pesky elephants. /s
You are using same logic.

What you are doing is called a strawman argument. You spin the other person's words into whichever caricature you find easiest to dismiss, and make fun of them. Instead of, you know, actually trying to understand what the other person may be saying and treating them with some respect and curiosity.

If you have something constructive to say, I will be happy to continue this conversation. For now, this will do.

darthoctopus2• 3 years ago

Not 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/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_cahoots4• 3 years ago

Ten 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.

ramraj072• 3 years ago

Do you seriously think Harvard grad school is in some ways culturally that different from any of today’s schools ?

huitzitziltzin• 3 years ago

As a bit of a joke (not to discount your very unpleasant experience) but most departments do not make their most productive and important members department chair! It’s more of a “someone has to do it and it’s your turn” situation.

I’m saying this in part bc sometimes people outside of academia feel like “being department chair” means the person is super prestigious or well respected within the department or outside of it. Generally that’s not actually the case. It’s a bit of a demotion in terms of what academics care about. (Frequently it comes with a raise bc you need to offer a substantial carrot to get people to even take the position.)

adolph• 3 years ago

Thanks to hikingsimulator's link below, here is Loeb interacting with Tarter [0]. The entire video is worth listening to and the vlogger is refreshingly fair minded.

0. https://youtu.be/aY985qzn7oI?t=1890

poisonarena• 3 years ago

I don't care about astronomy drama, but neither one of them found aliens, so no reason to have a chip on their shoulders in any case

bstockton• 3 years ago

Didn't really seem that vituperative to me. Seemed like he's really frustrated with a bunch of events tangentially related to Jill, gets emotional and could have been more respectful. I think he probably owes her an offline apology but I don't think this a reason to discount this man entirely.

machina_ex_deus4• 3 years ago

I don't believe Avi found aliens, and I don't even think finding aliens in our neighborhood is likely or will ever happen.

With that being said, it takes balls to come up with such claims, and you need people arguing passionately against the mainstream opinion in any subject to properly judge what is the truth.

A cautious position that is afraid to lay out the entire arguments and claims just won't do. And I don't even believe what he says - but I do believe that it is important for devil's advocates to fully embrace their position instead of chickening and trying to be cautious with evidence. (up to the point where the evidence really does contradict their position).

And I fully believe him when he says he's bullied, and the other subtext I see in her question is that she envies him of his courage. Of having the balls to stand up for the subject that despite 40 years, she still has self doubts about.

He doesn't seem nice or polite. But honestly, I can totally get why he's pissed off. She did not have the balls or courage to fight for her position with all that it takes, and instead of being glad someone else has the courage she was lacking, she attacks him.

And even tho I don't believe him, I think having people with courage to stand up and argue against the consensus is incredibly important. Just like you need lawyers on both sides in litigation, it's not enough to just collect evidence. She did not advocate for her position for 40 years. She did collect evidence but that's not enough.

corinroyal2• 3 years ago

It does not take "balls" to speculate wildly. Any grifter can do it, whether they have a uterus or not. Sensationalism is always easier than evidence-building.

I think having people with courage to stand up and argue against the consensus is incredibly important.

I agree it would be nice if Loeb tried that. So far he hasn't made any arguments, just bloviated.

And what "consensus" do you imagine Loeb is your champion against? Tarter is a pioneer carving out a new discipline, not the latest head of some ancient SETI cartel started by Aristotle. Any "consensus" is tentative at best. To hear Loeb speak, you would think it were he who started searching for techno-signatures forty years ago--with Tarter in a dominatrix outfit and a whip waylaying him at every step.

He yelled over her, refused to let her speak, misrepresented her arguments, and tarred a diverse research community with a broad brush. Nobody made him show his own ass on Zoom. That was his choice.

By contrast Tarter was polite, gracious, and statesman-like. She defended her colleagues clearly and let the clown dig his own grave. Never interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake. If I were one of the researchers she were defending, I would be proud to have her up there representing me, and certainly glad I wasn't the one who was asked to find time in my research schedule to act as some narcissist's punching bag for an hour so he can build his social media viewership.

Loeb is just another science grifter who pumps up bad ideas with hot air in order to make some post-truth money off rubes who watch Joe Rogan--where making wild and evidence-free claims made with a flourish of performative masculinity beat decades of careful research.

mihaitodor2• 3 years ago

This 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-spherul...

[2] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2021/01/25/131-...

bloopernova3• 3 years ago

People 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• 3 years ago

If 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?

bloopernova3• 3 years 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.

oefrha2• 3 years 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• 3 years ago

His formal background is in theoretical physics not astronomy, although he has been at Harvard's astronomy department for decades now.

joe__f• 3 years ago

I 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

oefrha2• 3 years ago

This 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.

ramraj072• 3 years ago

It 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.

spaceman_20202• 3 years ago

People should remember that Newton spent the majority of his life trying to turn lead into gold.

People can be incredibly smart and still pursue crackpot ideas.

cowl2• 3 years ago

In retrospective you can say that Transmutation was a crackpot idea but that was not known at that time. Many "alchemists" where very rigorous chemistry experimentalists and Ultimately it turns out you can turn lead into gold, but you need fission to do it and not transmutation that was thought to be simply a chemical process.

The thing to note is that if you are not ready to risk being lost into a crackpot idea, than you are not ready to have a suffecintly transformative idea.

jonhohle• 3 years ago

They're only crackpot until they're proven. LBNL turned bismuth to gold in 1980[0], but it required a particle accelerator and more energy than could have been fathomed in Newton's day. The yield wasn't great and cost about 10 orders of magnitude more than the price of gold at the time, but it was done (theoretically), and by a Nobel prize winner, even!

0 - https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-l...

0xdeadbeefbabe• 3 years ago

Which explains computer programming

hgsgm• 3 years ago

Tenure means you can't get fired for being crazy. It's a right to be wrong, not a guarantee of being right.

wbhart• 3 years ago

One 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.

woolion2• 3 years ago

I'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• 3 years 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...

david-gpu8• 3 years 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.

woolion2• 3 years ago

Do you read the news in any language other than English?

That's kind of a weird take... I'm not American at all.

I can't speak for all European countries, but in most it's kind of a basic anti-american cliché that they are so dumb that they believe in the grey alien coming with its anal probes. Most of the material about UFOs is directly translated.

There's some homegrown UFO, like the French 'Raël' [0], but I believe it's way more fringe in non-English speaking countries. Trying to find data I stumbled upon [1], which would be fairly consistent with the result of a meme propagated through culture.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%C3%ABl

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/code/shikhar96/geographical-distribut...

dudeinjapan• 3 years ago

You mean he dethroned Giorgio A. Tsoukalos?

elorant• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

I 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• 3 years ago

Before 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_ali... https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/aliens/johnmack.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/20/magazine/john-mack.html

e_carra• 3 years ago

Could all this push and attention on UFO/UAP be an attempt to raise the US defense budget in the current economic reality?

A Harvard professor became the world’s leading alien hunter

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