What a weird hit piece of an article. Setting up straw man after straw man, then knocking them down. Loeb never claimed what the materials are, at most he's theorized different possibilities that fit with the current data. But there are no quotes of him claiming what they are. The article also leaves out all information that conflicts with the author's viewpoints and the summary of most of the arguments is just "nobody can prove with 100% certainty X is true, so therefore X is false".
> Loeb never claimed what the materials are, at most he's theorized different possibilities that fit with the current data. But there are no quotes of him claiming what they are
He did so in no unclear words: see titles The IM1 Spherules from the Pacific Ocean Have Extrasolar Composition and Reconstructing the First Interstellar Meteor, IM1 in my other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38483438
* Critique of arXiv submission 2308.15623, "Discovery of Spherules of Likely Extrasolar Composition in the Pacific Ocean Site of the CNEOS 2014-01-08 (IM1) Bolide", by A. Loeb et al by Steve Desch, Alan Jackson https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.07699
>Other authors have concluded there’s less than a 50% chance that CNEOS 20140108 was interstellar
Lazy research. The linked article is just a simple "doubt paper" questioning the error bars of the raw data, published prior to the DoD releasing information about the error bars.
To give such an outdated paper the last word (and even use the loaded word 'conclude') makes everything the author writes highly suspect.
Where is the cited paper outdated? It's from 2014, is it that what makes outdated being from 9 years ago? And then you jump from "hey this guy in an article with like two dozens external links has one link to a paper that is slightly too old for my taste" to "lazy! just doubts! highly suspect!"
> And then you jump from "...a paper that is slightly too old for my taste" to "highly suspect!"
It's worse than mere age.
The paper he chooses to "conclude" a major section is cherry-picked from the middle of the story, within a highly-publicized drama within the academic field. It's unlikely that anyone even casually following could be unaware of the real ending to the story.
The author is either incompetent at research or deceptive. Either way, "highly suspect" is warranted.
