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

I'm going to go out on a speculative limb here and rashly conclude that Avi Loeb has not, in fact, found fragments of alien technology, and nor has anyone else in the entirety of human history to date.
 
Cainkane1 said:
As much as I'd like for him to be correct I doubt if what he has i truly alien. The little green men continue to elude us which is a shame if they exist.
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I've gotten so jaded about these kinds of claims that I wouldn't even like them to be correct anymore. I'd just like them to STFU.

And if an alien contact really does occur, I'd like there to be an official statement from the government, detailing what they know and how they came to know it, and vehemently repudiating any jackass who comes crawling out of the woodwork trying to piggyback his nonsense onto the real events.
 
Puppycow said:
Ordinary as in deferential? Unskeptical? Uninteresting? Did they talk about
UFOs or his claims that the little spheres of meteorite metal that he found
at the bottom of the ocean are "alien technology"? Or that Oumuamua was
an alien spacecraft?
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It was a chat between two guys on a variety of topics related to outer space.

Loeb starts with the idea of an alien civilizations launching a Pioneer
or Voyager space craft crashing into the Earth, but he spends less than
a minute on that possibility. He spends thirty minutes of the time talking
about the other possibility. The 500 kilogram object was an iron meteorite
from a shattered planet out in the galaxy. And lot's about the evidence
in the form lanthanum, beryllium, and uranium isotope ratios in the 700
spheroids he recovered from the Pacific Ocean.

Again, he mentions the possibility of Oumuamua being a light sail,
obviously from his work on Break Through Star Shot project, which
borrows from Robert Forward's idea of light sails. Not much time on
discussing any other possibilities. It diverged quickly into a discussion
of Dyson spheres.

They discuss the idea of the possibility of alien civilizations arising
roughly four billion years before the Earth formed. But they dismiss
the idea of space aliens visiting the Earth in UFOs / UAPs.

It's just a very long rambling conversation.
I didn't learn anything new or interesting from it.
 
Did somebody smack some sense into him recently? What you've just described is incredibly sedate for a guy who just five years ago was openly insulting the leadership of SETI on a Zoom meeting as closed-minded and hidebound after they publicly dismissed his Oumuamua-spaceship claim as lacking sufficient evidence.
 
Puppycow said:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=CvQxOmwAAAAJ&view_op=list_works&sortby=pubdate
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Re-checking that link, it looks like he and co-authors have published a paper about the spherules they found in the ocean.

https://scholar.google.com/citation...e&citation_for_view=CvQxOmwAAAAJ:C6rTQemI8T8C

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.15623.pdf

I see only one sentence in the paper that mentions the possibility that they could be alien artifacts:
Another possibility is that this unfamiliar abundance pattern may reflect an extraterrestrial technological origin.
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Make of that what you will. According to the authors' affiliations and acknowledgements, all of the co-authors are affiliated with the so-called Galileo project.

ETA: There's also this from the abstract:
We suggest that the “BeLaU" abundance pattern could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources.
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"or from more exotic sources."
 
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A 'C. Hoskinson' is also mentioned in the Acknowledgements as having funded this expedition.

Apparently this man:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Hoskinson

Under "Philanthropy":
Hoskinson contributed $1.5 million to fund a 2023 Galileo Project expedition led by astronomer and "alien hunter" Avi Loeb to explore debris from the meteorite CNEOS 2014-01-08 (also called IM1) that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2014.[23][24] Loeb argued that this object had come from outside the Solar System and that it could have been created by alien life, a claim which lacks widespread support from the scientific community.[25][23][24] The expedition reported finding tiny metallic spheres from the object on the ocean floor. Loeb said analysis of these "spherules" did not match any known alloy, though it was unclear whether they were artificial or natural in origin. Hoskinson said, "This is a historic discovery, marking the first time that humans hold materials from a large interstellar object" and that he was "pleased with the results".[26][27][28][29]
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Well, I hope he got his money's worth.
 
Checkmite said:
Did somebody smack some sense into him recently?

What you've just described is incredibly sedate for a guy who just
five years ago was openly insulting the leadership of SETI on a Zoom
meeting as closed-minded and hidebound after they publicly dismissed
his Oumuamua-spaceship claim as lacking sufficient evidence.
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He was more than welcoming for a scientific review of his paper this time.

On the SETI front he did say he thought it unlikely we would get a signal
as a significant number of sun like stars had turned into white dwarf stars.

Controversial stuff. Well, he thought the billions spent on the supercollider
looking for dark matter and super symmetry might better be spent on looking
for near earth objects. And, the two trillion dollars spent on the military would
be better spent on sending gram sized space probes to other star systems.
 
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