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Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology

Puppycow

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Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology

CAMBRIDGE - Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology from a meteor that landed in the waters off of Papua New Guinea in 2014.

Loeb and his team just brought the materials back to Harvard for analysis. The U.S. Space Command can confirm with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that it came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed.
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"It has material strength that is tougher than all space rock that were seen before, and catalogued by NASA," added Loeb, "We calculated its speed outside the solar system. It was 60 km per second, which is faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun. The fact that it was made of materials tougher than even iron meteorites, and moving faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the sun, suggested potentially it could be a spacecraft from another civilization, or some technological gadget."
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They've figured out interstellar travel, but still can't seem to figure out how to slow down and not burn up in the atmosphere.
 
Harvard researcher found some stuff that was harder and tougher than usual space rock, and therefore alien technology? I don't think it works like that.
 
Puppycow said:
Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology





They've figured out interstellar travel, but still can't seem to figure out how to slow down and not burn up in the atmosphere.
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To be fair, by the criteria of this "theory", WE have figured out interstellar travel. You just chuck something hard enough and it will keep going until it hits something. Doesn't mean we can make it stop. Or travel with any kind of useful speed.

This does seem far more likely than the usual high-tech craft hypothesis. But I'm pretty sure starting out with the idea that this might be aliens is very bad science.
 
Thermal said:
Harvard researcher found some stuff that was harder and tougher than usual space rock, and therefore alien technology? I don't think it works like that.
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It does if you're a Harvard astro-and-theoretical physicist who has a side hustle. But no, in terms of actual science, that's not how any of that works.

Spherules are the natural shape of metals that solidify during free fall. You can apparently have an I.Q. high enough to boil water and also be entirely ignorant of shot towers. Physical measurements such as hardness and toughness can vary in metals by substantial amounts. There is a difference between statistical variance in these variables and practical variance.

Never send a physicist to do an engineer's job.
 
I think Avi Loeb is a looney who misuses his Harvard credentials to line his pockets and to publish vacuous papers. Allegedly.

I was going to link to a YouTube video by acollierastro , but I don't know how.
 
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My favorite cheesy 1950s schlock Science Fiction movie is Planet of the Monsters. Early on, the crew receives a message from Earth Control (or whatever) about a distress call from a planet near them, and the call is not from a earth space craft.

The commander pauses to think, and with gravitas, says, "Then the ship must be from another planet."

So now we have Harvard guy claiming he's found alien material...in a meteorite...from another solar system...

I'm a simple man, but space seems to be a big place. Rocks zip across the firmament unimpeded for gazillions of years. Odds are a few are going to land here once in a while. Not sure how this is significant beyond finding a cool meteorite.
 
I like how this discovery is being mediated and paraphrased by CBS News.

Also it seems implausible to me that the US Space Command would be vetting such rocks. Their main business, as I understand it, is the militarization of low earth orbit. They're a neophyte offshoot of the Air Force. I imagine asking them to analyze space rocks would be like asking the USMC to analyze benthic extremophile remains because they have "marine" in their name.
 
HighRiser said:
I think Avi Loeb is a looney who misuses his Harvard credentials to line his pockets and to publish vacuous papers. Allegedly.

I was going to link to a YouTube video by acollierastro , but I don't know how.
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Is this what you're looking for?



Just take the part after "v=" and put it between the tags [yt][/yt]. Or just put the full link in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI

And yes, the guy is a looney.
 
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How does this guy not know the first thing about spherules in meteorites? They are a marker in craters around the planet indicating the crater was formed by a meteorite strike.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
How does this guy not know the first thing about spherules in meteorites? They are a marker in craters around the planet indicating the crater was formed by a meteorite strike.
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Sometimes a brother sees what he wants to see. In his case, I'm betting he saw 15 minutes on a silver platter.
 
HighRiser said:
I think Avi Loeb is a looney who misuses his Harvard credentials to line his pockets and to publish vacuous papers. Allegedly.

I was going to link to a YouTube video by acollierastro , but I don't know how.
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shemp said:
Is this what you're looking for?

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Yeah, I've watched that whole video myself. It's a good one. Loeb isn't quite full crackpot, but he's crackpot adjacent. He publishes lots of what she calls "homework papers". Three to five page papers where he sketches out the outlines of an idea and it gets published simply because he's a famous professor at Harvard.
 
Axxman300 said:
I'm a simple man, but space seems to be a big place. Rocks zip across the firmament unimpeded for gazillions of years. Odds are a few are going to land here once in a while. Not sure how this is significant beyond finding a cool meteorite.
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Exactly. We're just beginning to discover these. We've known about asteroids and meteorites in our own solar system for a long time, but logic says that the galaxy must be full of all sorts of debris zipping around, some of which will eventually fall out of the sky. It's also a scary prospect if you are actually trying to travel between stars because there's always at least a small possibility of getting hit by something like a rock out there in space somewhere en route. If it did happen the relative velocity would almost certainly mean that it is traveling at many multiples faster than a speeding bullet.
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
How does this guy not know the first thing about spherules in meteorites? They are a marker in craters around the planet indicating the crater was formed by a meteorite strike.
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Not just our planet. A significant portion of the lunar regolith are spherules, for that same reason. Loeb's degree is in theoretical physics, but he does call himself an astrophysicist and an astronomer. This is freshman level stuff.

Puppycow said:
Three to five page papers where he sketches out the outlines of an idea and it gets published simply because he's a famous professor at Harvard.
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One of these days I too hope to be famous just for being famous.

Puppycow said:
If it did happen the relative velocity would almost certainly mean that it is traveling at many multiples faster than a speeding bullet.
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More power to the main deflector. Make it so.
 
theprestige said:
Also it seems implausible to me that the US Space Command would be vetting such rocks.
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That part is certainly confusing but I think it simply means that they tracked the meteorite when it entered earth's atmosphere using radar and estimated its speed as well as an approximate location of where it would have landed.

The U.S. Space Command can confirm with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that it came from another solar system. The government gave Loeb a 10 km (6.2 mile) radius of where it may have landed.
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If it's moving fast enough, that's how you can tell that it must have come from outside of the solar system. That's how they determined that Oumuamua came from outside of the solar system. So the "99.999% certainty" probably only means their estimate of the velocity of the meteorite. The rest is just a logical inference.
 
I'd like to see someone perform some actual analysis on the thing.

It would be interesting to know if it was the product of a planetary collision, stellar collision, nova or neutron star etc. Especially if we have any idea what direction it came from.

:)
 
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