Knew who it was going to be before I opened the article. So, here’s the thing about Avi Loeb. He’s been very influential in the field being the chair of the Astronomy department at Harvard and serving on/leading several important committees and research initiatives. However, especially in his older age, he loves to spout any crazy theory he thinks up. Really, the majority of us in the professional astronomy field we just deal with him and mostly just ignore him. He likes to make outlandish claims which unfortunately can be very headline grabbing for the general public. Just put on your very skeptical goggles whenever you see something from him.
Yeah, once you’ve been around for so long, you can pretty much study anything and say anything you want.
Especially something like this where any “research” is cheap
He really seems to be losing it.
I’m not sure his being ignored is that respectful or much of a political courtesy at this point.
The claims are getting wilder and wilder.
First it was alien light sails as the most plausible reason for an oblong object traveling into the solar system, and now spherical metal in a meteor chemically consistent with the “sky iron” of antiquity can only be part of an alien spaceship?
He’s going to erode any legacy he once had by the time he’s done chasing windmills.
could we solve world hunger by mining for cheese on the moon.
/s
There’s a lot of objects in the universe. At the most generous imaginable estimate, what might be the ratio of naturally-occuring without any kind of conscious construction, to those that might be made by even the largest sci fi civilizations?
I feel like so many people get their hopes up, they want to see something cool before they personally die of old age or whatever. So aliens and AI and all that crap need to be today, not in the future when our capabilities have actually advanced enough to deal with these things.
Sorry people, we’re middle generations. We probably all die right before the super cool shit takes off, like life extension. We’re the middle child of Earth’s human history. We don’t get the simple times of our elders, or the magnificent times of our descendents. We get … this. It’s fine. At least you didn’t get polio and you can casually fly in aircraft and you carry the internet in your back pocket. And frankly, we’re still figuring out the fallout from that shit, so maybe taking it slower isn’t such a bad idea.
Really generous estimation of the hellscape we’re leaving for our descendants. This IS the glory days. It’s all downhill from here.
A sentiment as old as civilization. Hasn’t been right yet.
What?
You think no human civilization has ended?
Before it was on a local scale and humanity just moved around or survived elsewhere.
Humanity might survive climate change or nuclear war, but this global civilization would not unless we prevent it
No, people have been saying the end is coming soon for thousands of years. It’s also fun to research the oldest historical accounts complaining about “kids these days”.
This perspective that the end actually is soon requires some heavy cherry picking, where you ignore the evidence that it might not be. This is related to the perspective I was initially describing. People want to see something cool, maybe the end of the world even.
They’re probably not going to though, they’ll probably die of old age in a world that somewhat resembles this one.
Let me first clarify that I do believe climate change is real and something that we need urgent action on.
However in my 50+ years on this planet there has always been something to keep the people in fear and usually with cataclysmic consequences. In my lifetime the world or humanity should have ended already due to nuclear war, nuclear energy, peak oil, famine, over population, super weather (floods/hurricanes), acid rain, ozone layer depletion, y2k, ocean death, ice age (predicted in the 70’s), Yellowstone park eruptions, asteroid impacts, etc
The problem is when you have lived your entire life hearing that the end of humanity is near, you become desensitised to it and so when we do face a global catastrophe we are so apathetic.
Found this article interesting on the subject:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
Very good point, thank you for the contribution. It does create a certain … complacency.
Maybe look into the Bronze Age Collapse. It has happened before.
Yet we are still here. No single civilization needs last forever, no single way of doing things ever will. But we will remain. Likely still technological, likely still modern.
It took civilization thousands of years to recover from that collapse. This is not something to be simply dismissed.
Also, in the case of Climate Change, it will take millions of years for Earth to recover once our civilization has collapsed, this is an even bigger hurdle.
It took hundreds of years for a few civilizations to recover. Other regions were untouched. You are cherry picking.
Then it’s pretty bold of you to be making generalizations and predictions in your wall of text OP.
Yea, I won’t argue with that. I’m a fairly bold individual.
Least we had the best memes.
Here’s what I make of it… It’s bullshit…
Spherules, hm? :-)
Pieces of iron, hm?
Remember, iron wasn’t good enough to build the space shuttles. Iron comes down through the atmosphere, iron liquefies from the heat, forms a little droplet, falls into the ocean, cools down, gets hard again, gets picked up by scientist…
Just my own super scientific theory
Naah, it was actually made by me and placed by hand last time I flew through space. It’s sounds like BS but there’s equal amount of evidence for both.
Telling us that you formed the iron spherules by your hand… :-)
Indeed.
