Someone else posted a video of a blue triangular object (could have been anything really)....I guess the pandemic is causing some kind of mental effect.
That is an easy one:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/blue-u ... aii.11526/
Sure, I'll give a critique. The source was the New York Post.
To make it better, the source of the video is FOX News. I like how the small clips were Loeb actually talks he never says alien, probe, extraterrestrial, intelligence and others (suggesting he wasn't so sure as the journalists).
Anyways, Avi Loeb is known in the bussiness to make wild claims and speculation. He is a scientist indeed, but there is no peer reviewed publication from him where those ideas are expressed as facts. The most optimistic of his papers always states that it is pure speculation and it does it as to justify a possible model in case those speculative ideas were true. As it seems he also likes a lot to appear on camera. But yeah, he's a scientists, but that is unimportant, the important thing is to know what he says and on which grounds. In science we don't really care about credentials (even if they usually are a good indicator of research quality compared to the facebook antivaxx mom). In the end is all a matter of the true arguments and the actual evidence.
Also I would notice that this is not "new news" as the NYP and others are trying to make it appear. The hypothesis that Oumuamua might have been a thin solar sail was proposed by Loeb in
a 2018 article. Why this is this been told as news now? Because Loeb has written
a book recently. The book is obviusly non-peer reviewed and is not a scientific article at all, it is just him speculating. The majority of quotes in the interview are extracted from the book, not from his 2018 paper.
Also I have to notice that Loeb's 2018 paper says that "
We explore the possibility that the excess acceleration results from solar radiation pressure". This
does not translate to "We think that solar pressure is responsible for Oumuamua's acceleration", as the believers and the journalist would like, but translates to "The debate around the anomalous acceleration of Oumuamua is not settled, we want to explore what are the physical constraints imposed on the object in case the anomaly could be accounted by solar radiation". You see, the conclusion is not that the solar radiation explains the anomaly in motion, but it is the assumption. Their conclusion is that
IF AND ONLY IF solar radiation was the cause, then Oumuamua would be a very very strange object (which most probably means that the assumption is totally wrong, not that aliens are responsible). If people are so interested in the topic why they don't bother to read the actual scientific article? There he also states: "
The observations are not sufficiently sensitive to provide a resolvedimage of Oumuamua, and one can only speculate on its possible geometry and nature." He is quite optimistic indeed but he didin't said that he have discovered aliens nor he believe Oumuamua is an alien ship. The worst thing he says is that "
a more exotic scenario is that Oumuamuamay be a fully operational probe". Throughout the paper the speculative nature of the research is made clear.
Another importat thing to know is what the scientific community response has been since that two-year old paper.
In 2019 a paper showed that Oumuamua's behaviour can be naturally explained by the YORP effect on a dust agreggate of porous nature (which is a kind of object that is predicted by cometary formation models in protoplanetary disks). Another possibility that Loeb didn't care to analyse is that Oumuamua could have quite an ordinary shape if we consider that the surface have different optical properties (that are observed in the Solar System by the way), just like was rigurously explained
in a 2020 paper. Another
2020 paper showed that the effect could be due to out-gassing (like a comet) but of molecular hydrogen instead of water, CO and CO2 (which weren't detected), that alone could explain many properties of Oumuamua and some of the anomalous acceleration. Loeb willingfully ignores this in his new book apparently, and goes on to spaculate about aliens, but even worse, the journalists make a very very broad oversimplification of his work to enhance the folklore.