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Comment by sailingparrot | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what is happening with Avi Loeb. I was not familiar with him before Omouamoua but from what I gathered he is a respected academic in the field. So how can someone like that be so disingenuous about this topic?

There is currently basically no evidence whatsoever that Omouamoua is an alien constructs. If we are generous we can consider this at most a plausible explanation among others (certainly not the most plausible), and yet he is just pretending like this is not the case and putting on the front page of his book definitive statements like "The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth", or saying that since all other possible explanation have been excluded (which is categorically wrong) then we must accept the remaining explanation that this an alien object.

What can push an Harvard academic to just disregard any scientific ethic and just go full-on junk science? Is it just a concession to sell more books or gain more fame?

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Avi Loeb's work was "validated" by his school's chair of astronomy, so we have to remember that to do science is to mitigate against being human. We all have different standards as to what is science as the anti-vax'ers demonstrate. What is interesting to me is that Loeb's chair notes that the object's trajectory differs from the expected by a statistical difference. While such difference implies a great deal of energy we can't account for, it's a hurdle to overcome in the search for understanding of this event/object.

Here's the chair of Harvard's astro dept.: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-...

The amount of press and public interest he’s drummed up likely encourages young folks to get into the field, raises the profile of the work, and encourages public support of more funding and exploration.

And, since he’s not wrong or right - just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

> just exploring possibilities and being imaginative, I think it’s pretty cool.

I completly agree with that, but I believe you can do that without being disingenuous, as Carl Sagan did.

> since he’s not wrong or right

This is what is written on the back of his book: "Harvard’s top astronomer, showed it was not an asteroid; it was moving too fast along a strange orbit, and left no trail of gas or debris in its wake. There was only one conceivable explanation: the object was a piece of advanced technology created by a distant alien civilization."

How is that not wrong? It is even worse than wrong since he is very aware of the other potential explanations, it's straigh up lying.

Have you read any of his arguments? They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them. Can you offer an actual rebuttal?

Yes I have read them. And don't get me wrong I find some of them interesting. What I consider junk-science and what really irks me is his tendency to just try to suffocate all other possible explanations brushing them off like they have no merit.

As I said, I don't think we should not consider the possibility that this may be alien technology, but the carthesian in me just cannot take seriously anyone that is willing to make such strong claims based on such very little evidence. Science is not supposed to be politic, where you just try to yell louder than your "opponents".

> They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them.

You can find a very good synthesis of rebutals in this video [1] by Professor Kipping.

You can also find a partial rebuttal in a paper by the very team that discovered Omouamoua [2].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms&t=240s

[2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01910.pdf

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