[HN Gopher] Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He...
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Astronomer Avi Loeb Says Aliens Have Visited, and He's Not Kidding
Author : gscho
Score : 16 points
Date : 2021-02-02 18:18 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scientificamerican.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scientificamerican.com)
| 7thaccount wrote:
| The key points were that he believes the scientific community is
| scared to discuss more SETI related research for fear of redicule
| and job impacts. It sounds like he thinks it is impacting the
| science too as someone will gladly create a proposal to look for
| liquid water outside our solar system, but scientists are too
| worried about getting shunned to look for the molecules in
| industrial pollution (arguably a better use of time assuming that
| the hunt for water was a proxy for what they really wanted to do)
| on those planets instead. I think looking for water on exoplanets
| is still pretty relevant though and is useful to know even if you
| believe ET doesn't exist, so I don't really understand his
| argument here to be honest. I agree with what he's saying
| regarding string theory and other related fields that are very
| hard to run experiments on. In his eyes, they're more outlandish
| than SETI research as they can be made to fit a lot of different
| models. He is not against that kind of research, but is arguing
| that if you're okay with string theory, you should be okay with
| SETI.
|
| I still feel like he's being a little brash in assuming Oumuamua
| is an alien vessel. I think it's possible, but likely there is
| another possibility that we haven't thought of.
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