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Comment by jackmott42 | Hacker News Reader

This is Avi's second questionable alien obsession/quest. Not sure if it is something mental, grift, or perfectly rational impulse to check out incredibly unlikely but incredibly amazing possibilities.

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He is a kwak, instead of actual science he shills these ideas on podcasts because the general public is interested in it or something like that. Whenever I meet someone from Harvard I think of this guy and automatically think less of them. Maybe that is wrong of me but then the Harvard alumni ought to have called him out on his BS.

Do we want no one contemplating the n>1 theory of life in the universe?

Meh, good luck to him, he is not hurting anyone and he seems to genuinely be a smart guy that believes what he says. Its ok to be eccentric.

He's not eccentric, but a self-promoting grifter

What’s his grift? Running off with 1.5 million USD? He probably makes half of that a year already, what a pay day.

Convincing gullible billionaires and foundations to support his vanity projects

A list: the blackhole initiative, breakthrough starshot, the Galileo project, and now this

I'm strongly in favor of separating gullible billionaires from their wealth, this is one of the least mean ways to do it.

I tentatively agree with that take, but am trying to be charitable. The reason I tend to think this is right is that his podcast arguments for why umamua? was probably alien tech were either disingenuous or displayed incredible ignorance. i.e.: pretending that nobody had any explanation for how it accelerated without any visible tail.

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