To not bury the lead: His team studied data the government made available from military missile tracking systems, which conveniently also false-positives on asteroids. There was one in 2014 which slammed into the Pacific Ocean at a speed at least twice that of the speed stars around us move relative to the sun, which makes it likely to be extra-solar. Based on that speed & how much burned upon entry, they concluded its material must be tougher than iron. They're planning an expedition to the oceanic area around Papa New Guinea, mostly funded through private donations, to recover the object.
And here I didn't even consider the chance that it was an elaborate ruse to grab a punch of rare-earth metals. Apparently my heavy diet of sci-fi and techno thrillers hasn't trained me well enough yet. ;)
These are not rare earths, rare earths are a family of chemically similar elements close together in the periodic table that are not actually that rare geologically. Platinum and iridium are just rare elements.
Theres a great documentary about that by the name 'Azorian - The Raising of The K129 on Amazon' - I think I bought it for $1 - you should give it a watch if you haven't yet.
Or just a chunk of titanium. It's only made in novas and supernovas so having an abnormal trajectory, and speed only supports the theory. A bunch of titanium slapped onto some rock and then later breaks off or something.
Right, but titanium is stronger than steel, let alone iron.
>When compared to steel in a strength-to-weight ratio, titanium is far superior, as it is as strong as steel but 45% lighter. In fact, titanium has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of all known metals.
Strength doesn't matter here as much as melting point. When they say tougher than Iron, I imagine they mean it ablated less in the atmosphere. I don't know what elements that might mean. Certainly not platinum group metals. Tungsten possibly. Carbon or diamond. Or alien tech.
Edit:
"Based on the speed of the meteor and how much of the object burned upon entry, Loeb determined that it must be made of a material that is tougher than iron."
As your quote says, titanium has a higher strength to weight ratio. It's not necessarily stronger, and it's not necessarily "tougher" against the circumstances described than whatever type of iron they think it might be. The meteor isn't out to minimize weight. The strength to weight ratio isn't relavent here at all and does not make titanium more likely to survive until the object comes to rest on Earth.
Isn't it sort of funny that they think the asteroid might be some new material, or at least something tougher than iron, yet they are planning to use a magnet to pull up pieces? What happens if it's non-ferrous...
The fact they are bringing a magnet shows how confident they are its iron. My hypothetical scenario:
"There's a chance its not iron but something new!"
"What chance is that?"
"Its inverse to the chance we told our funders, who gave us millions to collect it with a magnet, that it was iron."
"So its pretty guaranteed its iron"
"Yup".
"Aren't your funders concerned you are saying it could be something different than iron?"
"You see the name of the university and a few corporations on the ship? Would you be talking to us if we were just getting a run of the mill iron metorite?"
It may be an iron alloy. Many of them are magnetic.
If it's an extra hard iron alloy it would be more interesting because they can analyze it and perhaps reproduce the composition and perhaps the heat process that created the meteorite.
Supposedly it's in pieces from the impact. Small samples would be fine to locate and collect via ROV with a metal detector on it to check below the silt.
If they want mass extraction after that, then potentially a form a dredging could be used (vacuum and filter could work to leave the sand and silt on the bottom).
Niobium on its own isn't even ferromagnetic, it's paramagnetic, and not very strong. However, it can be alloyed with other metals including iron and nickel to produce a stronger magnet than any pure element.
This seems a reasonable question to me, not having read the article. IIRC from grade school days, only a few metallic elements are magnetic. Iron, nickel, cobalt, and some rare earth metals. That was a long time ago and doubtless oversimplified, but please do enlighten me why it would be expected to be magnetic?
It seems like they must still be assuming it's largely made of Iron.
Ferromagnetic matter is magnetic by nature. If you look at the periodic table you'll see that most of the elements are actually metals. Below Carbon there's a line which parts metals from semi metals and non metals.
But with proper equipment you can detect non magnetic conductive materials. Not sure what's it called, but if you pass a magnet near eg. copper the magnetic force from the magnet will induce electricity on copper which in turn with also produce a slight magnetic field. There are many good YouTube videos on this topic and they're quite cool! (https://youtu.be/u7Rg0TcHQ4Y)
That's not what they're doing though. There literally going to drag a magnet across the sea floor and examine anything that sticks to it. Which will be largely iron, nickel, and cobalt. Were it to be alien tech, it probably won't have large amounts of those and won't stick to the magnet. At least it seems that way to me. Could you make a magnet that would create a strong enough attraction to pick up a piece of gold? I suspect not, or there would be a reality TV show with rednecks trawling the ocean in Alaska with magnets, searching for gold.
Even though I would love to see any non-human technology, I would probably bet that they're just going to find a bunch of dust, rocks and of course, human trash.
Definitely. But of course a metal detector coil can also look at simple change of inductance, hence responding to conductivity even with magnetic mu = 0.
I am not sure toughness has anything to do with ferromagnetic properties. But it seems like a bad idea anyways considering that very few materials are naturally ferromagnetic.
I get the "from outside our solar system" part, and it seems believable that sensors designed for missile tracking would get enough telemetry info to establish that.
But the "tougher than iron" part? Based just on how much material was lost during atmospheric entry, as reported by sensors not really designed for that purpose? That's a tough pill to swallow. It would be really interesting to hear more about how much this asteroid differed from others measured by the same equipment.
I have a dim memory that missile tracking systems pay close attention to how fast an object decelerates when it hits atmosphere, as part of distinguishing real warheads from decoys. Maybe you can use that data to estimate how fast a rock is eroding að it falls.
> The spelling lede (/ˈliːd/, from Early Modern English) is also used in American English, originally to avoid confusion with the printing press type formerly made from the metal lead or the related typographical term "leading".
It's actually more about the lead paragraph, not the leading news story. If you bury the leading news story, that would imply putting it on page 13 or something. Buring the leading paragraph is putting the most important information at the end of the article where fewer people are likely to encounter it.
>To “bury the lede” (sometimes spelled “bury the lead”) means to delay sharing the essential information in a story, and beginning with secondary details instead. The term originated in the news-writing world but is now applied widely in all fields of writing.
If anything "color" is correct, being the original Latin spelling. The Normans started misspelling it by the time they went about conquering the British Isles, but Middle English reflects both spellings.
On the other hand, English is descriptive rather than prescriptive, so both spellings might as well be equally correct.
On the third hand, they're both wrong if we want to get old school about it; no sense in catering to a bunch of French invaders when we have the perfectly good words "blee" and "hue".
Can the title be revised to something like "Harvard Professor on Quest for Possible Alien Tech that Crashed in the Pacific Ocean"? Current phrasing makes it seem like the professor crashed into the ocean.
The usage of “that” as opposed to “who” is the key there in English taught before the 2000s. Now of course, the usage of the pronoun who is dead, and that is used everywhere because people are objects in English now.
Reconstructing what the article appears to be saying:
1. a catalog of government sensor data on meteorite strikes was discovered
2. based on the data, those strikes that could have originate outside of the solar system were gathered
3. one hit in particular appears to be harder than iron based on its speed and loss
Then:
> Despite the government releasing limited data due to national security concerns - he had discovered something groundbreaking. A paper he wrote with his student laid out what he believed to be true. But three years after writing his findings, a major development confirmed what he knew all along.
Great, let's find that paper and see what's up. Wait, where's the link? No matter, just tell me the journal and I'll find it. Nope. Ah, that's right, this is the popular media where such things simply aren't done.
"
Based on the CNEOS catalog of bolide events, we identify the ∼0.45m meteor detected at 2014-01-08 17:05:34 UTC as originating from an unbound hyperbolic orbit with 99.999\% confidence. The U.S. Department of Defense has since verified that "the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory... Its high LSR speed implies a possible origin from the deep interior of a planetary system or a star in the thick disk of the Milky Way galaxy."
"
I wonder how many meteors were detected in that data. Are we talking a few hundred or hundreds of thousands? That would make a failure with 99.999% confidence more likely
Did google and didn't find it. Maybe my Google fu just isn't as advanced as yours. Then again, why not just include the link?
It turns out the key here is to use "Abraham" not "Avi" in the search. The latter returns crapola and the former yields your link a few hits down.
Don't worry about lack of pictures (there actually are some figures), I'm pretty good at this English thing. Turns out the object was quite small:
> Given the impact speed of the meteor, ∼ 44.8 km s−1, and the total impact energy, 4.6 × 1018 ergs, the meteor mass was approximately 4.6 × 105 g. Assuming bulk density values of 1.7 g/cm3 and 0.9 g/cm3 for Type II and Type IIIa objects respectively, we obtain a radius, R, of 0.4m – 0.5m for a spherical geometry (Ceplecha 1988; Palotai et al. 2018).
The small size of the object was something the article didn't address.
"It's not a philosophical question whether we live in an environment where objects are flawed. Around that are representing extraterrestrial technologies."
I can't make sense of these sentences. And the spelling mistakes are helping either.
"Today [Galileo Galilei] would have been canceled on social media."
For what exactly? And his this guy not seen the quality of social media commentary? The bar is loooow. Spectacular but unfounded claims are a mundanity and it's worrying that he's mixing these culture warrior talking points with science.
"Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere."
Unfounded spectacular claims just like this. The object is interstellar maybe, but where has he shown evidence of a technological origin? This is pretty important. How is it just left unchallenged?
It's a weird article. The video looks like a shot from The Thunderbirds and it reads like something from a local station affiliate run twice through translation software.
I don't see anything in the original research that suggests it is "tech". I think the article completely made this up.
To be pedantic, nearly all of the material that we are made of came from other stars, manufactured in their nuclear fusion and supernovae. I think what they mean is a macroscopic object that was formed in another star system, which they've inferred from its incoming trajectory.
> I don't see anything in the original research that suggests it is "tech". I think the article completely made this up.
It's because it's coming from Avi Loeb, the guy who suggested Oumuamua might be a Rama-style spacecraft. I don't think he's dead set on alien hypotheses, but he wants them to at least be taken seriously as possibilities.
Ah, I didn't know it was the same guy. It's not clear, at least to me, how extreme his original claims even were, considering how fast things get distorted with sensationalist media these days. He does seem to be a quite serious scientist and not a crank.
I haven't listened to the whole thing, but he seems to think that aliens visiting our solar system is likely enough that it makes sense to look for. He falls short of the confident certainty I usually expect from cranks though, he's talking about investigating possibilities. I think he's eccentric, but I wouldn't call him a crank.
I don't think it's an unreasonable hypothesis. At this point we know that the government has been cataloging evidence of advanced craft in the air and ocean that behave intelligently and are far beyond the capabilities of any major world power. A small portion of that evidence has been released to the public and officials with clearance (including elected officials) have stated that the evidence they've seen is significant. Doesn't mean its aliens but unless there is some elaborate conspiracy there is compelling evidence of technology in our planet that violates our current understanding of physics.
Loeb is connecting dots and hypothesizing that there is a connection between that phenomena and extrasolar objects. It's not a completely unreasonable theory and I think it's worth examination.
> At this point we know that the government has been cataloging evidence of advanced craft in the air and ocean that behave intelligently and are far beyond the capabilities of any major world power.
We do not know this to be true. We know the government has told us these things have been cataloged and observed. We barely know anything outside of (dis?)information that’s been slowly drip fed through small congressional committees and a bizarrely eccentric cadre of former DIA agents who have spent the last five years cultivating a personality cult and a subculture weirdly reminiscent of Q-Anon.
“The government is lying” is certainly not an exotic explanation for an unexplained phenomenon reported by a group of intelligence officers from the military-industrial complex.
It's possible that this is government disinformation but that's an extraordinary claim. It requires a conspiracy that's far more elaborate than the theory that the moon landing was faked. The Brazilian[0], Chilean[1], French[2], Soviet[3] and many other governments have or had UFO programs and have disclosed reports and evidence. Additionally there have been mass sightings without clear explanations witnessed by large groups of people, for example the Tuscany football stadium incident witnessed by ~10,000 spectators[4] and the Ariel School UFO incident[5].
That's not to say these are aliens, there are certainly other possible explanations however none of them are very good and they don't dismiss the possibility that these are non human intelligent beings.
I will just say that in the astronomy faculty community, although Avi Loeb is the head of the Harvard astro department, his "research" has garnered him questionable and often head-shaking disapproval and a decrease in respect from colleagues. Some, bordering on many, think that he's just out to grab headlines and has become a bad joke at this point (past examples: solar system interlopers as "UFOs", etc).
Maybe Avi says that he worked his way to this position to be able to tackle interesting and off-the-path subjects, but somehow his work doesn't feel like it has the same integrity as expected from the chair of a leading institution. Or maybe that he goes to tv news channels preferentially over arxiv publishing. And maybe it's just something that happens to professors with age (like one's parents) -- they start going down the weird ideas rabbit hole.
I think Avi Loeb is legitimately excited about this topic. He's also aware that the public is tremendously excited and inspired about the possibility of UFOs, alien flybys of the solar system, etc.
I think he's achieved professional recognition, paid his dues playing the game of academia (very successfully), and is now pursuing things that he finds most exciting. The man has co-authored a thousand papers, literally, so I doubt he'd get much marginal excitement from hypothetical paper #1001, i.e., another instance of fitting a curve through noisy data to build support for an obscure model that very few researchers care about.
He has also pointed out that it's an invitation to ridicule in academic circles to talk openly about UFOs. He doesn't care though (why would he?), and that for sure is triggering folks who take themselves very seriously.
> That for sure is triggering folks who take themselves very seriously.
I don't think anyone in the field is triggered by some guy pursuing his interest in aliens and UFO.
What they get triggered about, is that guy using his relatively large platform to say that anyone not agreeing with him is part of the establishment or otherwise useless, or to say that there is no other possible explanation to a certain phenomenon than aliens, or to be insulting to another colleague during an online talk.
> to be insulting to another colleague during an online talk.
When did this happen? In the podcasts and interviews I heard, Loeb was often provocative towards the establishment, but I never saw him make negative comments about an individual.
Yeah exactly. No one is getting "triggered" as in a juvenile college student way.
If anything, I would say the annoyance is that for the department head of Harvard to be spending his time (and seeking fame) on topics like this, instead of using his position to 1) further "real" research, 2) address problems in the field, 3) in general, make more of the role he has, is something of an insult to people trying all their lives to reach such achievement.
Good for him. What a way to lead a life, searching for alien tech at the bottom of the Pacific. I'd swap the grind for that any day. Let the other professors shake their heads and stir their Earl Grey in the cramped faculty staffroom, I know who I'd rather be.
Head shaking can result in, or, be a symptom of group-think. It’s important for scientists to realize the importance of public relations due to funding.
If the public is interested in the origin of life, contemplating aliens or distant stars seem about as interesting, especially in regards to the Fermi paradox.
The hints of a persecution complex in the last paragraph -- implicitly comparing himself to Galileo and saying that Galileo would have been "canceled on social media", is a bit of a red flag. That being said, sure I hope they find and study this object, why not.
He was giving a Zoom talk this week at a local po’boy shop in New Orleans and free copies of his book were being distributed. There didn’t seem to be much push back from starstruck fans.
I think I've seen this movie before; just don't let anybody touch the strange Sphere thing and you should be alright.
Seriously though, this doesn't make much sense to me. Finding shipwrecks even when you know they exist and what general area they should be in is hard enough. This sort of search is a huge money sink, the ships, towed sonars, etc all cost a ton of money to operate.
ha! I was gonna mention that movie here but I don't know what to make of this. This professor seems legitimately convinced its possible but who will believe him?
Should be "sensors" (used correctly a few sentences later). Is this a text-to-speech thing, or written by a non-native speaker, or just appalling editing?
> Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere.
This is Avi's second questionable alien obsession/quest. Not sure if it is something mental, grift, or perfectly rational impulse to check out incredibly unlikely but incredibly amazing possibilities.
He is a kwak, instead of actual science he shills these ideas on podcasts because the general public is interested in it or something like that. Whenever I meet someone from Harvard I think of this guy and automatically think less of them. Maybe that is wrong of me but then the Harvard alumni ought to have called him out on his BS.
I tentatively agree with that take, but am trying to be charitable. The reason I tend to think this is right is that his podcast arguments for why umamua? was probably alien tech were either disingenuous or displayed incredible ignorance. i.e.: pretending that nobody had any explanation for how it accelerated without any visible tail.
The title is a little silly. It’s from outside our solar system, but there’s zero evidence suggesting it’s technological or made by aliens. It’s just a meteor that was going really fast, and it was made of something that was sturdy enough not to break up too much.
I would think that, if other people agree with his analysis and this does seem extra-solar, and we have a reasonable guess as to where it might have landed, a couple million would be a small price to check out an extra-solar object.
> "We’re planning to board the ship and build a sled and a magnet attached to it that will scoop the ocean floor. And we will go back and forth, like mowing the lawns across the region, 10 kilometers in size and collect with the magnets, all the fragments that are attracted to it, and then brush them off and study their composition in the laboratory."
Wouldn't this only work for iron fragments of a meteor? If the theory is that it's made of something else, then I don't think this would be helpful.
It's possible that it's an iron alloy. Which can be stronger than iron, and also magnetic.
But in regards to feasibility of such a project, I feel that 10km range is a major understatement. Think of the effort it took to find fragments of Malaysia Flight 370, even with a pretty narrow path. And that search was the most expensive search operation in history at $155MM [1].
30 years ago, Lobe was the first to suggest that we should look for exoplanet with the help of gravitational lensing. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h... He was also amongst the first to study the epoch of reionization that now forms one of the primary mission directives of the JWST. And those weren't his only firsts, he was also the amongst the first to study the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe. https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
He has had such an amazing career and has done such great work that it physically pains me to see him slide into Nobel disease this way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease He has always been fascinated by the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, but he was such a reasoned person who proposed great techno signatures like looking for pollution as a means to detect industrial-age civilizations.
It’s like watching a giant stumble and hurt himself on purpose. And it gets worse when non-technical people come up to me and ask, “have you heard of Avi Loeb?” Instead of being a beacon for enlightenment, he has gone down the path of spreading conspiratorial ignorance. It is painful to watch such a great career fall this way.
And no, based on my conversations with my professional astronomer friends, no one inside the field takes him seriously anymore. They don’t laugh at him either, they just don’t take him seriously. It’s probably why he doesn’t seem to have a more prominent role with the JWST. Interesting projects don’t want to associate with him anymore. It’s sad.
Even if this thing in the ocean is just a lump of heavy metals ejected from some remote cataclysm, that would still be interesting in its own right. Is it really so terrible that he wants to go and look at an actual physical thing from space instead of finishing his career staring at computer screens? Give him a few million dollars and let him have his field trip.
But people don't exactly go running around saying that they're trying to find Thor's spaceship from that time O'Neill, Carter and Teal'c blew it up. (sorry huge Stargate fan) Even if he finds nothing, will the conspiratorial people believe that? Or, will they believe that The Powers That Be hid the Top Secret Alien Technology from the enterprising scientist?
I honestly don't care if he hypes it for laughs, cold hard cash, or because he believes it; as obsessions go this one strikes me as harmless.
You do make a good point about conspiracy types, but I don't think it's necessarily his responsibility to educate everyone out of that. The best way to let the air out of that particular balloon is to send a small rover to the moon and land it near the original Apollo site, and then just drive it around beaming back pictures of stuff on the moon and attractive hi-res pics of Earth on a daily basis.
Does it break any new scientific ground? Nope. Will it do wonders for public awareness of/engagement with science? Hell yes.
Doesn't matter. You just swamp them with volume. The thing about mis/disinformation is that it moves to fill voids, not unlike gas rushing into a vacuum; falsehoods have a first mover advantage because it takes less time to make something up than to report it accurately. But if you're generating interesting content on the regular, conspiracy stuff gets sidelined.
A simpler example again than a rover would just be installing a camera on the Moon that points back at Earth and beaming a high-res whole planet image in real time. The lack of imagination in existing space projects is just deplorable. If you want a bigger science budget, a planetary selfie stick will pay off in spades. Flat earth people will dry up and blow away after a year of people being able to look at the planet they live on and see weather patterns, wildfires etc.
Unrelated to the contents on the article but the wording of the title made me think that the Harvard Professor crashed into the Pacific Ocean. You might want to consider clearing it up.
I don't think a Harvard professor could be retrieved from the ocean floor using a magnet. Unless he had been an android, in which case I guess that would be worth investigating.
This is more like a remote, uncontacted tribe "discovering" other civilizations via trash that washes up on their shore. Given enough scale, this wouldn't be an unlikely event. Who knows, maybe the universe is littered with bits and pieces of ancient Dyson spheres.
Also, we’ve crashed numerous probes at the end of their lifecycle into many of the objects in our own Solar System. If an interstellar probe from a civilization like our own completed its mission, would it also be programmed to self-destruct itself in a similar manner? I think it’s a highly unlikely series of events, but there is a method to the madness.
So (and I welcome correction here) the logic is: An asteroid travelling at great speed would surely burn up in the atmosphere (ice ect.), therefore this asteroid must be made of iron or stronger (a manufactured alloy). And thus Loebs conclusion that since a manufactured alloy must have been made by someone somewhere, it's worth a look?
The “article” is a transcript of sections of the video. Removing the culture war bit about Galileo being cancelled, we have:
“It’s not a philosophical question whether we live in an environment where objects are floating around that are representing extraterrestrial technologies. We just need to use our telescopes and find out. […] Once I realized that we found an object from a technological origin that was produced elsewhere, I would not seek approval from anyone else. I don’t need likes on twitter. I just want to know what it is.”
He doesn’t seem to be saying “it’s aliens”, but rather “If it’s aliens, I want to know — it’s not a matter of faith, if we find evidence of it, it’ll be true”. His use of “Once I realized” is confusing, but I believe he’s speaking in the hypothetical that aliens are confirmed.
There is, of course, a massive leap from “an object from outside the solar system hit Earth and was very strong” to “because this object was very strong it might have been made by aliens”. I also don’t see any reason why the fragments they’re looking for should be magnetic.
Interesting pitch: To conduct this kind of search & retrieve project for an object out in space would cost $1B+, so we'll look here on earth at this obvious outlier which government agencies have already stated they are confident has come from outside our solar system.
I mean it makes a certain type of probabilistic sense, and in multiple ways. If you fund this there's a better-than-lottery chance that you'll at least be part of something big, whether alien tech is in there or not...
I was open minded about "Debris", but only made it through the first episode and had to stop watching. It was really bad. Just terrible.
However, if anyone out there likes this kind of science fiction, I must highly recommend the 2019 series "Project Blue Book" starring the superb Aidan Gillen (GoT fame) playing the character of J. Allen Hynek.
Unfortunately, this amazing series was canceled after only two seasons, likely due to poor timing, since it was showing during the chaos and uncertainty at the height of the pandemic. But every episode is well written and the acting, for the most part, is really good. Check it out.
One of the things I like most about the Project Blue Book series, is how they try to recreate the 1950s-1960s aesthetic, somewhat following in the footsteps of what "Mad Men" sought to achieve in terms of recreating a bygone era.
The title had me remembering the line from Michael Creighton's "Sphere" where one of the people asks why we always imagine alien spacecraft crashing on land when 70% of the world is covered in ocean.
UFO nuts are probably already making memes like, "See, even Harvard believes in E.T." Just like they did about the gov't report that said "of course there are unidentified objects in our skies."
But, unlike their favorite Facebook group's grainy phone videos, this sounds fairly real. Drag the thing up and put it under a spectrograph, and if we haven't seen the stuff in it before, figure out what that means.
This guy's name has come up before in HN. His stuff seemed well-written but the conclusions he came to were a little outlandish. What is the likelihood that this guy just wants to study a cool asteroids and is using aliens as an excuse?
EDIT: I know this is not HN kosher and I don't normally do this, but why am I being down voted? This is one of the most inoffensive comments I've ever posted. Not angry, just completely baffled
I feel like the smarter play would be pitching or investing in a startup to work on changing the economics of gravimetry, sonar and undersea robotics that would be required to identify technology signatures and find objects with extra-terrestrial origin to get talent working on one of the most important existential questions facing our species, and the reward is the mineral resources you find with the tech along the way.
English is so ambiguous that the title made me think that the professor himself had crashed into the ocean. Saying "Alien Tech That Crashed in.." would clear things up, but I guess it would be too long?
So the only thing that has been confirmed is that it is a meteorite from outside of the solar system. Jumping to the conclusion that it is "possible alien tech" seems a liiiittle bit of a stretch.
