[HN Gopher] Why is Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb working with ...
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Why is Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb working with ardent UFO
believers?
Author : tejohnso
Score : 35 points
Date : 2022-01-30 19:24 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| trav4225 wrote:
| In general, I think a large part of academia is basically "toe
| the line or get out". And I've worked in academia for 28 years.
| oneepic wrote:
| This piece reads like a celebrity drama article. It's so much
| back and forth between Loeb and his detractors, plus fitting in
| plenty of colorful emotions like "his anger boiled over..." Not
| much intellectual stimulation here.
| telxosser wrote:
| "But others say Loeb is tarnishing astronomy and undermining the
| search for extraterrestrial intelligence"
|
| I mean I think this is all nonsense but the idea someone doesn't
| have the correct credentials to produce scientific evidence is so
| distasteful.
|
| We must first put on our properly powdered wig, dance the minuet,
| then and only then is one capable of collecting UFO evidence!
| dogma1138 wrote:
| Credentials do matter to some extent or at least actually
| following the scientific method.
|
| But overall there has been quite a big regression since SETI
| has pretty much failed to capture anything of even remote
| interest.
|
| Loeb isn't Sagan but the fact that you can't even get funding
| for simple missions like looking for technological markers in
| the atmosphere of exoplanet does seem to indicate that there is
| a lot of stigma these days against anything related to
| searching for intelligent life.
| jjeaff wrote:
| Credentials can help filter out a lot of garbage. For
| example, some podcast bro spouts something about vaccines
| that goes against the prevailing wisdom, I'll mostly ignore
| it. If an ER doc from the University of Barbados says
| something, I'll probably give it some time and effort. If an
| immunologist from the mayo clinic says something, I'm going
| to really give it some serious thought and time researching
| it.
|
| I wouldn't discount something purely on lack of prestige and
| education, but you have to be able to filter some based on
| credentials or you'll spend all your time fact checking
| things like whether the Sandy Hook school shooting was all
| faked or whether 9/11 was an inside job or if the government
| is using 5g to give us all COVID so they can use the vaccine
| to implant tracking chips in everyone.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| Why shouldn't he? There are multiple credible reports of UFO's
| demonstrating interesting or unknown capabilities. Someone should
| be investigating this stuff.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| Yeah, the idea of Oumuamua as space junk is faintly plausible
| simply because not enough data is present to determine what it
| really was. And if somewhat-above-human level technological
| societies existed, they'd send out probes that would spend
| 99.9999% of their time as space junk so this might well the
| _only_ evidence of alien life humans will _ever_ see.[1]
|
| But jumping from there to earth-based UFO is a serious mistake,
| since virtually all of these have been debunked and their claimed
| existence generally violates most basic laws of physics.
|
| [1] This is just assuming nothing more than somewhat-above-our-
| level tech exists. And everyone assuming dramatic aliens
| essentially has assume things absolute impossible for our present
| tech. And maybe these things are just absolutely impossible.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Why is it such a serious mistake to attempt to collect data? I
| don't understand all the hate for a plausible hypothesis. He is
| not putting his fingers in his ears and yelling there are UFOs
| over and over, he is starting a project to collect data for a
| plausible hypothesis.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Right, it's plausible but I think most of the plausibility it
| due to the data being very sparse. Like how a blurry video of a
| figure is _plausibly_ Bigfoot.
| mgalgs wrote:
| > virtually all of these have been debunked
|
| I don't know if you're aware but a lot has changed in the past
| few years. I used to dismiss is all as whacko sci-fi until last
| year, but the government is now confirming the reality of
| unexplained aerial phenomena (UAP a.k.a. UFOs). You should
| check out the report to Congress last year which detailed 140
| incidents, 139 of which could not be explained prosaically, 80
| of which were confirmed by eyewitnesses and _multiple_ sensors,
| and 21 in which "observers reported unusual UAP movement
| patterns or flight characteristics".
|
| https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/27/politics/ufos-uap-extraterres...
|
| These are highly credible reports from the highest levels of
| military. Check out David Fravor's "Tic Tac" account off the
| coast of San Diego to get a taste of what's going on.
|
| I've been curating this YouTube playlist of credible sources
| (including David Fravor) confirming the reality of these things
| if you'd like to learn more:
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7gMGIbRUmhTRTuUHX8CA7H_s...
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| UFO believers? They believe that its... unidentified?
| Smoosh wrote:
| I would hope that anyone rational would accept that based upon
| the evidence to date and our current knowledge of astronomy and
| physics, extra-terrestrial visitation is possible, but very
| unlikely. Thus it becomes a case of "extraordinary claims
| require extraordinary proof". But instead, all we have is
| blurry, shaky footage. Or some phenomena such as lens flare.
| And the claim that "what 'they' are doing is impossible
| according to our physics, so it must be extraterrestrial." So
| much willing misinterpretation and jumping to an unsupported
| conclusion.
|
| Now, efforts like that described in the article to obtain more
| evidence would usually be good, but you can't prove a negative,
| and no amount of undetected aliens, or explained and discarded
| "evidence" will convince the true believers that ufos are not
| real aliens.
| netizen-936824 wrote:
| My point was that the wording is rather bizarre, it sounds as
| if the term 'UFO' is being equated with 'definitely probably
| aliens' instead of ' _Unidentified_ Flying Object '
|
| For example: I believe in UFOs, there's _no way_ we have
| positively identified very last thing flying through our
| atmosphere. That doesn 't mean I think they're living
| extraterrestrial visitors though
| bostonsre wrote:
| Sure, why not? There are those that dismiss all sightings as
| aberrations and lies and don't believe there are actual objects
| that are flying around our atmosphere. Then there are people
| that believe there are actual objects that are flying around
| but don't know wtf they are.
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(page generated 2022-01-30 23:02 UTC)