[zikzak]

No, he's the new "we should consider what this would look like if it were an artifact of an alien civilization" guy. You know, open minded.

He's also a well respected and very accomplished person who has acknowledged this is a comet.

If it happens to slow down and change trajectory after it passes behind the sun, he might change his tune but he's pretty focused on the science at this point.

[ceejayoz]

He was well respected. As the saying goes, open your mind too far and it falls out of the cranium.

[philbo]

I think 3I/Atlas is a comet.

But I also think the question "what if it wasn't" is useful to consider.

I'd label anyone unwilling to discuss that topic a crank, not the other way round.

[ceejayoz]

“What if” is just fine.

Loeb goes quite a bit further than that.

[philbo]

Does he though? Honestly I haven't seen it.

I've been through the last ~10 or ~15 posts on his Medium this evening, to check. Sentence-by-sentence I don't see anything that goes beyond "what if". Can you share some of the quotes you have in mind?

I think this is an interesting phenomenon, because it seems that lots of people throw personal insults at him (not saying that's you btw) without addressing the meat of whatever they're reacting to.

And lest we forget! One of the founding essays [1] of this very website discusses it: if you're slinging ad hominem attacks or personal insults around, you're by definition losing the "argument" (not that I think this qualifies as an "argument").

[1]: https://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

[ceejayoz]

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/alien-technology-oce... as an example.

[all2]

There's an excellent quote from the WH40k universe:

    An open mind is like a fortress with its gates unbarred and its walls unguarded.

[exe34]

that's not what an open mind is though. an open mind is one that is willing to question what is inside as much as it is willing to question what is outside.

a side effect of questioning what is inside leads to allowing some of what is outside in.

[ares623]

My favorite piece of media is Contact (book and movie).

Ellie is someone I would consider having an open mind. She dedicates her work, at great risk to her own career, finding signs of extraterrestrial life. Despite everyone telling her not to waste time and resources on it. But she does and she does it by collecting the evidence first, and when she got it, double and triple checked it before making the announcement.

Avi kind of does the opposite. He hypes his ideas up first, often taking credit for others' work, without sufficient evidence.

[andrei_says_]

One of my other favorite piece of media is the intro of a Rick and Morty episode parodying the plot of contact. Highly recommended.

[ares623]

I missed that. I’ll have to look it up.

[zikzak]

Um, ok. I think he's still doing ok and his fellow academics would prefer he didn't openly speculate about pet theories. They think it is embarrassing.

But ask yourself where we'd be if noone ever asked what if.

There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?

[ceejayoz]

> There's a reason he called his project to observe anomalous phenomenon The Galileo Project. Ring a bell?

Sure, like the Patriot Act was about patriotism.

[alganet]

"What if it's an alien artifact?" - We're going to observe it.

"What if it's a natural object?" - We're going to observe it.

That's it. It's all we can reasonably do for now. It changes nothing.

[exe34]

Very little observing involves just the eyes. much of what we observe relies on millennia of assumptions. if we don't consider alternatives that we would normally reject out of hand, we can miss things.

[alganet]

Space agencies are already pointing every single instrument they can at this thing.

[exe34]

I bet the aliens are having an annual picnic in the opposite direction!

[ares623]

Didn’t Galileo collect evidence first?

[phyzome]

Last I checked, he was making claims well beyond that.

[xorbax]

"What if 3I/Atlas is responsible for the Wow! Signal?!" is one of the sillier ones

He's definitely turned into a "I'm just asking questions and keeping an open mind" kinda grifter, whatever his past qualifications and respectability

[bsdetector]

Seems reasonable that an alien craft travelling between stars might want to illuminate the whole star system to detect dark objects and plot a safe or more perfect course.

Apparently Wow! came from the same area and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft, so that doesn't sound that silly to me.

Unlikely to be the real cause, not silly.

[addaon]

> and seemingly was blue-shifted by an amount that could make sense from an approaching craft

What do you think the natural spectrum of the Wow signal was, for determining amount of blue shift? What resolution of spectral data do you think we have on it?

[bsdetector]

Wikipedia Wow! article says it is equivalent of hydrogen line plus 10 km/s blue shift.

Even if this was a scanning beam I think we can assume it would take a lot of energy and so may be based on a simple scalable physical process. Using hydrogen to create it makes sense as it is low mass and can be replenished.

[xorbax]

How is it "illuminating the whole star system"?

It seems more likely that it'll act like a non intelligent hunk of rock going through some random trajectory.

It's less silly to declare you'll win the lottery. That has happened many times over - but we're yet to discover that can or has existed outside of Earth. While it's nearly impossible it hasn't happened several times over, it's so far impossible that we've encountered even the crumbiest excuse for life.

I assert that it is silly. We're not indigenous American happening upon European settlers. We're indigenous Americans wandering about the continent harassing mammoths, inventing stories of how it'll go when it happens.

[bsdetector]

A ship approaching a sun will see the objects on the far side illuminated fully, but objects on the near side will be illuminated only on a thin edge, like a crescent moon, because they're looking at the 'back' side of the objects.

By sending out a pulse of light they could not just light up the ship-facing side of objects but also determine their precise location and velocity. Seems like something you'd want to do to not waste your thousand-year mission by accidentally colliding with a dark object.

The Wow! signal could be just such an event.

Aliens might use some type of scanning beam rather than a big flash, but I doubt we have the 1977 data to differentiate between a beam scanning our area and a solar-system-wide flash.

[827a]

Well, you know what they say; don't be so open-minded that your brain falls out.

[keepamovin]

Nonsense. Open minded means not precluding possibilities based on irrational bias, which would only increases intelligence.

[827a]

Sure, if the biases are actually irrational, but in this case the biases are things like "idk maybe we should follow the scientific method", while Loeb pushes "here's an idea that is unfalsifiable and untestable, but look its peer reviewed and its on a harvard domain name so you have to pay attention to me".

Loeb is, to be very clear: unintelligent and unscientific. He has no desire to actually test the theories he publishes, and because of that, most of the theories are literally untestable. He just wants to shit-publish wild ideas, which is totally fine, if we were talking about a blog or something of that similar caliber. But that would not attract the $$$ views he demands to afford his lifestyle.

[ReptileMan]

I am open minded, but Arthur Clarke solved it. If it was alien it would have slingshotted around the sun. Unless it is on collision course with a planet or using the sun to modify its course towards another star - you can assume that it is not alien and functioning.

[DennisP]

Fwiw, Avi's hypothesis for Oumuamua was not that it was functioning, but that it was old, defunct light sail.

[antonvs]

His Galileo Project is explicitly looking for “extraterrestrial technological signatures”, and he’s just using any opportunity for hype about that.

He got attention for writing about this for Oumuamua, and now he’s just rinsing and repeating for 3I/Atlas. It’s exactly like any youtuber chasing the most effective clickbait.

It’s like when Altman talks about AIs building a Dyson sphere. Everyone with any understanding of the issues knows it’s self-serving hype.