A small Thanksgiving present

It’s Thanksgiving, so today’s post is going to be (a) short, and (b) free to all. Happy Thanksgiving!

Actual micrometeorites

It’s been a week of people dumping on celebrity astrophysicist Avi Loeb, the guy who believes aliens send mother ships to Earth. He has ruffled a lot of feathers by telling the media all kinds of Alien Visitation stuff that virtually nobody in astronomy agrees with, and raked in millions in donations in doing so; so it’s a nice little present to many of us when he finally gets some shade. This was one nice little dump: Dr. Kaitlin Rasmussen (featured in The UFO Movie) tweeted the following slide from a presentation she was working on:

“Sometimes teaching scientific literacy means naming names.”

A second Thanksgiving present comes to us in the aftermath of Loeb’s sea hunt for remnants of alien technology. With his donors’ money, he organized a shipboard excursion to drag the ocean floor looking for bits of alien machinery that may have drifted down to Earth as micrometeorites. He brought back a wealth of metallic spherules, to the delight of his alien-curious donors. However, it was soon revealed by scientists whose minds were open to explanations other than aliens that the spherules were merely coal ash — pollutants from human industrial activity. A full report on these findings is here. Here’s a snippet:

Naturally, Loeb disagrees with this analysis, and wrote about it on his Medium blog. It is very telling that the image he used to illustrate that response is a painting of Galileo being prosecuted for heresy by the Church — an analogy Loeb makes at every turn; most notably including the name of his donation basket research institute at Harvard, The Galileo Project. People promoting anti-scientific viewpoints have been comparing themselves to Galileo for decades. It’s called The Galileo Gambit: “They laughed at Galileo, but he was later proven right; therefore I too will be proven right because they laugh at me.” Except, they didn’t laugh at Galileo. In fact his views were in line with most scientists in his field; he was just bold enough to go public despite the Church. Loeb doesn’t face opposition from a church, though; he faces it from virtually all of his peers in the field.

But wait, there’s more:

In a related example of Loeb giving out presents, I was on UK television live back in September with Loeb and astrobiologist Dr. Antígona Segura. After the interview portion but while we were all still on camera, Loeb threw a tantrum complaining that he hadn’t been treated fairly. Later that day, Dr. Segura emailed to tell me it was her birthday, and Loeb’s tantrum was her birthday present.

So I’m thankful today that finally there is some pushback against people like Loeb, who use their celebrity to promote commercially popular pseudoscience to the media, and undermine the work of science communicators like myself.