Astrophysicist Avi Loeb has become a minor celebrity of science since a mysterious object named 3I/ATLAS was first spotted over the summer. Most researchers think it’s an intriguing interstellar comet; Loeb has suggested that it could be an alien spacecraft. And now Loeb is lashing out at scientists who have argued that he’s wrong.
This from one of his recent Medium posts:
Imaginative scientists master the humility to learn something new from anomalies rather than display the arrogance of expertise….Life is worth living if we allow for the unexpected to surprise us. Bureaucrats or unimaginative scientists want us to believe in the expected. But the rest of us know that the best is yet to come.
These are fighting words in the world of serious researchers. Penn State astronomer Jason Wright has been one of the main scientists to criticize Loeb’s speculations while paying relatively close attention to the hoopla surrounding 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the Solar System. Loeb, meanwhile, has broadened his complaints to include NASA, because after the government shutdown ended, the agency held a press conference where representatives failed to take up Loeb’s points and instead maintained that 3I/ATLAS is just a comet.
A bit of background
Loeb is no stranger to suggesting that weird objects flying through space might have intelligent alien origins. He came onto the pop-culture radar back in 2017 when an earlier object, 1I/Oumuamua, visited the Solar System (he suggested that it could be a remnant of alien technology, perhaps a solar sail or even an instance of a “hybrid” type of propulsion). His enthusiasm for the idea that we are not alone has endeared him to plenty of legitimately science-curious people, but it has also brought him into the orbit (Sorry!) of some nutty characters and generated awkward alliances with the likes of oddball Rep. Anna Paulina Luna.
That’s all well and good – the realism of science celebrity can trend awkward as the scientists are forced to entertain various bizarre theories from figures who are “just asking questions,” or who have purely attention-getting agendas. What’s become more worrisome of late is how aggressively Loeb is sticking to his guns in the face of some pretty clear, science-based dismissals of his claims. For example, Wright points to a refutation of certain Loeb analyses by Arizona State astrophysicist Steve Desch, who says that Loeb’s 3I/ATLAS calculations are “100% wrong.” Like, not just a tad off, but completely off.
Basic errors
If Loeb has built his case for investigating 3I/ATLAS’s anomalies on shaky math and some basic errors of reasoning, then he really ought to turn his own arguments about scientists admitting mistakes back on himself. A chunk of the scientific community seems to be on record saying that Loeb doesn’t entirely know what he’s talking about. Wright doesn’t understand why Loeb hasn’t consulted comet experts. Prior to 3I/ATLAS entering the range of numerous probes and telescopes, some researchers were asking Loeb to tone it down so that the proper observation of the object could be conducted by scientists who are equipped to scrutinize interstellar phenomena. Regrettably, the cycle of the past week has been largely about how upset Loeb is that NASA didn’t entertain his notions. “NASA’s representatives should have emphasized what we do not understand about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that it is a familiar comet from a new birth environment,” he wrote on Medium.
But why should NASA have done that? It would have validated Loeb’s curiosity at the obvious expense of scientists who, studying the available data, have concluded that 3I/ATLAS is, to paraphrase, a comet doing comet things.
This is all disappointing
As someone who is fascinated both by the passion of scientists and their halting, often messy quest for truth and the amusingly deranged realm of UFOs and the lore and mythologies that UFO enthusiasts have created, I’m disappointed that Loeb thus far has ignored his critics’ specifics and has chosen to focus on the “arrogance of expertise.” He isn’t doing himself any favors by insisting that the experts who might disagree with him are more interested in defending their turf than they are in, you know, advancing their actual expertise.
We should certainly credit Loeb with keeping 3I/ATLAS very much in the news as the object passes through the Solar System, even if the headlines have at times been sensational and much of the activity of social media is best dismissed as engagement-farming science fiction. It’s worth pointing out the “3” in 3I/ATLAS is there because we’ve only identified three of these interstellar objects in human history. We want to find many more in the future. If Loeb’s speculations enable that, then we can easily forgive him for calling other scientists arrogant when they were really just being patient and not jumping to wild, if extremely interesting, conclusions.
