I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.
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.
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").
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I go for "I can understand experts, but not add much to the conversation" as a benchmark for knowing enough to participate in discussions at work. Then I use that "I can solve my immediate problem" method going forward.
I was sitting with my dog in my yard one night and a green meteor lit up the evening sky like the day. It also made a sizzling noise (or maybe crackling).
I found out that the green was probably nickle content and the sizzling sounds also has an explanation which I don't recall.
What amazed me was that until I understood what I saw was a natural phenomenon, it seemed absolutely mind blowing and still stands out as one of the coolest things I've experienced yet no one I talked to saw it, there was no mention of it on the city subreddit, etc.
This was before the age of everyone having dashcams and doorbell cameras but something that remarkable happening over a densely populated suburban area at around 9pm not even being noticed by a single person I knew or was in contact with on socials suprised me.
I am tired of people mocking me for my interest in this topic so I won't bother to back this up too much, but this article doesn't really do what you say. It is itself disinfo designed to provide a simple, easily digested explanation for people that don't wish to think too deeply on this topic.
Anyone taking a cursory interest knows that the US government routinely sends out disinfo on the subject and uses it to cover up their own secret aerospace development. That was never contentious.
However, sightings and reports of strange phenomenon go back very far in recorded and oral history and they are not limited to the United States.
My personal feeling is people are terrible eye witnesses and historical sources are prone to be misinterpreted through a biased, modern lens. But I also know that if you read the Wikipedia article on von Neumann probes, it doesn't seem that far fetched to think one might have found its way here especially considering we are not that far away from being able to build them ourselves.
Many can accept forwarded emails and some will offer an email address you can use to subscribe to newsletters. I prefer the former because you can cancel the forward rule if you don't want to continue with a given rss app or service.
When I was in cooking school, it was assumed we would not have the time or equipment to constantly be monitoring temps with a thermometer so we had techniques for determining fairly precisely the temp of things.
Poaching liquid was evaluated based on the quantity and rate of bubbles rising from the bottom of the pan.
Milk was scalded (e.g. for bechemel) when the milk foamed but was shut off before it boiled over.
A knife inserted in a steak, chop, or roast could be tested for temp against your lower lip or wrist (yes, yes, hygiene and so forth).
The techniques you are talking about all came about because of all understanding of food that led to science asking "why does cheese happen the way it does". The precise techniques leading to a sharp, hard cheese or a soft, fresh cheese were well understood long before instant read thermometers.
I tend to agree here. I haven't been allowed to code for a few years now but I spend a lot of my time talking through code with developers. I find many of the people on my teams lack a perspective I can provide to frame a problem or evaluate an approach.
I also help them get to the heart of problems quickly simply because I'm not stuck in the code all day. For example, if I see a developer taking too long to identify the source of a bug, I'll get on a call and get them to take me through that code and get them prove any assumption ("ok, show me the code that checks that value is greater than zero").
By doing this I'm using my coding experience directly without actually coding. I'd consider coding a huge waste of time for me, but spending 30 minutes to unstick a developer when I am sure they should have found the problem by now seems like a really good use of my time.
It also lets people know they can't just spend three days on something that should take a couple hours without someone checking in, which I don't live having to do but it's a reality for some teams I work with.
Did he conclude it was a starship or argue we shouldn't dismiss out of hand that an object like this has a non-zero chance of being an artifact of another civilization?
I spent a very frustrating 20 minutes with someone this week (a nice person I like, which is why I spent this time) explaining that the Python code chatgpt had provided them would just copy files from one folder to another and was no different from using Windows drag and drop copy.
It would not do any of the things they thought (lots of parsing and file renaming that it took a while for them to articulate). We also discussed how the corporate IT would not be installing a Python interpreter on their computer. Oh what's that? Let me explain. And so on.
ChatGPT didn't help, in this situation, as it turned out.
