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Comment by timuckun | Hacker News Reader

He is the boy who cried wolf at this point. Every interstellar object is (oops I mean could be) alien artefact.

Also he raised a bunch of funds to dig one up under the ocean and got nothing.

When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day.

I’m inclined to let those searchers speculate in public. If society’s rule is that you can’t even speculate about X until you have proof, it will hold back science significantly. History has many such examples of forbidden speculation leading to long delays.

Any idea why he gets so much pushback, when string theorists get a pass? Is it because "alien tech" is more easy to understand as a concept than Calabi-Yau manifolds?

because of UFO Conspiracy Theorists. When someone says Alien in a serious context, most people immediately associate it with UFO nutjobs.

String theory has not really made its debut in the conspiracy crowd afaik. I think "Quantum-___" has done so, especially with the "collapse of the wavefunction through the observer" it has so many esoteric people raving.

String theory is so meaningless to the normal person.

I think it comes from a place of insecurity. people get sensitive about it because all astronomy is pointless and arbitrary, so someone having outlandish fun while doing it runs the risk of highlighting this fact.

There's been very few interstellar objects he's claimed as alien, in fact only one - and for onomua (or however it was spelt) he also said the most likely outcome would be a natural object. His expedition to recover metal spheroids from the ocean floor was a fascinating one which garnered a lot of support and I believe still had value in devising methods to recover impact materials from underwater.

So really it's the same thing, he gets a lot of aggressive pushback online for mentioning 'aliens', but generally speaking nothing he says or does is actually that baseless.

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