In late August, Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s blog stated that he had “Amazing news! For the first time in history, scientists have analyzed materials from a meter-sized object that came from outside the solar system.”
In July, Loeb recovered parts of a meteor that landed in the waters off Papua New Guinea in 2014. Local news in New York described the find as “metal balls less than a millimeter in diameter”, while Loeb called them “beautiful spheres that were colored – blue, brown or gold”.
Now USA today news:
The first analysis shows that some spheres from the meteor’s path contain “extremely high amounts” of an unheard-of composition of heavy elements. The team’s researchers say the composition of beryllium, lanthanum and uranium, labeled the “BeLaU” composition, does not match terrestrial alloys natural to Earth or fallout from nuclear explosions. Moreover, the composition is not found in Earth’s magmatic oceans, nor on the Moon, Mars, or other natural bodies in the Solar System.
Other elements are thought to have been lost by evaporation during IM1’s passage through Earth’s atmosphere, the researchers said, leading them to theorize that the spherules could have formed in a magma ocean on an iron-core exoplanet outside the Solar System.
Longtime Slashdot reader Okian Warrior writes that “Technical details can be found hereand a readable accounting of the analysis and results can be found at Avi Loeb’s blogLoeb writes that the exact composition of these spheres is now being studied in three separate laboratories, including one at Harvard.
In July, the New York Times published reactions to Loeb’s claim that “it is most likely a technological gadget with artificial intelligence.”
“People are sick of hearing about Avi Loeb’s wild claims,” said Steve Desch, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University. “It’s polluting the good science — we’re conflating the good science we’re doing with this ridiculous sensationalism and sucking all the oxygen out of the room.” Dr. Desch added that several of his colleagues now refuse to engage with Dr. Loeb in peer review, a process by which scientists peer-review their research to ensure that only high-quality studies are published… “What the public sees in Loeb is science doesn’t work.
Last week Salon he also had a few questions for Loeb:
In your book, you called Carl Sagan’s adage that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” a “logical fallacy.” How and why do you think this statement is somewhat flawed or a logical fallacy?
It’s used as an excuse for people who don’t want to deal with an exciting possibility. They don’t look for evidence and argue, “Well, we don’t have any evidence…”
If or when we do encounter alien life, do you think we will find it or will it find us? Why?
I think we will find it near us because most stars (formed) billions of years before the sun, so it is more likely that some other civilizations preceded us because their star, if it is like the sun, has already gone through what we might in the future we pass. We just have to be humble and modest, not assume that we are unique and special – we are Albert Einstein was the smartest scientist who has ever lived since the Big Bang – and join the search.
That’s what I’m trying to do, and the pushback is really weird in these circumstances because the people arguing against it have very strong opinions. But if you look at the history of science, they were very often wrong: people (who) thought, for example, that the earth was the center of the universe.
From Loeb’s blog post:
During my routine sunrise run aboard the Silver Star, I was asked, “Are you running from or towards something?” My answer was, “Both. I run from colleagues who hold strong opinions without looking for evidence, and I run to a higher intelligence in interstellar space.”
