Good grief — he just can’t help himself! Classic narcissist. Everyone’s fav* Harvard astronomer has struck again! This has to be, as we call it here in Australia …. ‘taking the piss’, right? RIGHT?!?!?! HT SpaceFam pvt chat and someone that Loeb already has once tried to take on lmao
Im sure what Arthur C Clarke meant to say was “any sufficiently misunderstood phenomenon is indistinguishable from alien technology”
It seems a two word abstract would have been enough: Probably not.
Ugh!
Betteridge’s law applies to arXiv as well en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteri...
"The eclipse by the Sun from Earth of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion, would allow it to conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre" Oh no, not the clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre! 😱
🤣🤣🤣
Now I wonder why that manoeuvre was made illegal. And who made it illegal. Which government, which laws? Will these interstellar visitors get arrested when caught?
Didn’t Picard use that against the Cardassians in Season 4?
He got his " minutes of fame " when SiriusXM/CNN's Michael Smerconish had Loeb on the show the last time Loeb lobbed this "hand grenade" into Astronomy. "This guy is no kook" Smerconish kept emphasizing. My thought was "Erich von Däniken strikes again." Still is with this.
They lost me with the first half sentence of the abstract. Calling its last few months before perihelion the "early stages" of its passage through the solar system shows they don't really understand what the solar system looks like, so how can they be trusted to recognize alien spaceships?
omg boooo, Florida Man of Astronomy, begone!
Indeed! I mean, it’s also wild to see someone really Torch their career / history like this!
Yeah idk who the other two are but 😬
I wonder how off the rails one has to be to get fired from a professorship ...
But he still gets to keep his tenure and his salary, so.... He's out there writing the weirdest comet fan fiction of all time while able to pay Boston prices. Meanwhile, the assistant professors and us soft money researchers are out here wondering if we'll be able to afford life in a year.
I am taking "comet fan fiction" to describe these papers and using it extensively forever more.
It’s soooo messed up
It must have been an irresistible trade-off for a narcissist. You can have millions of lay-people hanging on every word you say and buying your books, and all you have to do is torch your career among a few thousand professionals
It's always kind of telling when someone just dumps a mass of declarations at you instead of focusing on a single topic. It seems to be common for people trying to push crackpot theories. They just yell an incoherent pile of statements and hope some part of it catches on.
My father used to say of this kind of person. If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, you baffle them with bullshit.
Yup. Because it takes more time to disprove a claim or give a coherent explanation than it takes to shoot off another claim. That's why clickbaity and dismissive one-liners generally get more views than good explanations, even if the one-liners make no sense.
You're all laughing now, but when the aliens perform their clandestine maneuver and arrive at earth in time for Christmas, the last laugh will belong to Jesus and Loeb (but I repeat myself )
"As largely a paedagogical exercise..." As in, how not to do science? As in, why is it silly to add a "God of the gap" argument into anything we don't understand?
Will the Daily Mail count as a peer reviewed publication?
Lmao
........ok. It can't just be me that takes the "as an exercise" as anything but a thinly veiled "so I was doing a what if while taking a crap and made students do math about it". Because handwaving usually gets your work knocked down a few marks, yeah?
We're seeing the rise of a new religious movement it seems... 🫣
I knew Loeb would deliver bsky.app/profile/swif...
Was Dark Forest used before the Three Body Problem series popularized it?
Looks like the name comes from the book, but the concept itself has existed before the series.
woho, post -observation quantification of surprise, my favourite
i am surprised that all three authors have first initial A (p< 1.2e-4)
He's *still* on this?
I deduced he would be amongst the authors, from the title 😐
lol Imagine that was your brand — the alien quack guy
Cc @guillermolpd.bsky.social
The one man on Earth where you never need to ask "Oh god, what has he said this time?" because he only ever says the one thing.
Oh geez Avi Loeb
I was wondering when he was going to opinion himself all over this story
So if you are affiliated with Harvard you can post Vixra papers in the Arxiv? 😂 Interesting example of how the authority argument is still one of the most powerful things in science. Dude is from Harvard so whatever he does must be science…
"As largely a pedagogical exercise" He spelt "preposterous" wrong...
My eyes are rolling back faster than 3I is moving thru the solar system
And rolling into the next dimension, Phil! Honestly, this is like an April Fools thing!
Not an astronomer (not even close) but I am a Star Trek fan and even I can recognise they wouldn’t have used this as a viable script* - there’s to much going on. It’s a triumph of words on a page. -(* JJ might’ve, tbh)
Harvard, have a word!
this isn't real, right???
It is unfortunately real. And it is the second arXiv posting that Avi Loeb has unaccountably been allowed to make about 3I.
Hey, he's just working on his alien invasion screenplay!
lol
My question is why anyone is willingly working with Avi Loeb.
