No. It’s not Aliens.
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There's a lot of ongoing drama around Harvard professor Avi Loeb’s unsubstantiated claim that the peculiar, interstellar object `Oumuamua was actually an alien exploratory craft.
Loeb is a serious scientist with a reputable background. He was the chair of Harvard's astronomy department. In the recent past he's debunked claims of alien contact. But in an interview with Scientific American, Loeb betrays the fallacies behind his own thinking by dismissing the well-established, evidenced backed theory of cosmic inflation outright.
Inflation successfully predicts the spectrum of thermal noise observed in the universe while simultaneously explaining how said could be correlated across large scales and how the universe got to be so large without collapsing in on itself (among other possible outcomes). Inflation - like any scientific theory - does not predict the “why”. It’s an unfortunate confusion of purpose that’s roiling around in theoretical physics circles these days.
Loeb’s claim on `Oumuamua’s origin does the opposite. It asserts the why (aliens) without the how. `Oumuamua is the first object of it’s kind to be classified. The unexplained motion of a class of as-yet understudied class of celestial objects is to be expected! The immediate appeal extraterrestrial intelligence is as unwarranted as any claims that the field of cosmology is “over”. We’ve seen these false claims before.
Loeb does make a valid point around the scientific conservatism incentivized by a significant imbalance in the academic job market. But to say that no one is considering these matters professional is simply untrue. In the SA piece, Loeb brags about having “zero footprint on social media”. Perhaps if he had, he might be more engaged in the public dialog, and maybe exposed to the inconsistencies in his own positions. Natalie Wolchover - physics writer and editor at Quanta Magazine - framed the entire "discussion" masterfully in a single tweet.
