Our news media shows the most enormous bias in its skepticism. When covering observations that conflict with the cherished dogmas of materialism, our science media get hyper-skeptical. But when discussing the claims of its favored priesthood, the science professors of academia, the science news media shows gigantic levels of credulity.
Consider the case of Avi Loeb's recent expedition to try to search for evidence of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship. A Harvard astronomy professor, Loeb somehow got the idea that a 2014 meteor (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) may have been an interstellar spacecraft that blew up high in the sky. Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship, an expedition he organized. He found no sign of anything like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a tenth of a millimeter in size. Loeb says (incorrectly, as I will show) that there's something unusual about such specks. He apparently wants us to believe that the specks are from an extraterrestrial spacecraft that blew up into smithereens after entering the Earth's atmosphere in 2014 (or so many recent news stories have suggested).
Before discussing how there's nothing at all unusual about the unimpressive specks Loeb has collected from the ocean, let us consider how preposterous the underlying theory is.
(1) The universe is believed to be about 13 billion years old, and if intelligent life were to arise on some other planet, such a thing might have occurred at any time in the past billion years. Human civilization is less than ten thousand years old. So mathematically it seems far more likely that civilized life arising on some other planet would have arisen very many thousands or millions of years before civilized life first appeared on planet Earth. Since a billion years is a length of time 100,000 times longer than 10,000 years, it would seem to require about a 1 in 100,000 coincidence for Earth to be visited by some extraterrestrial civilization that was only a few thousand years more advanced than ours. It would seem to be vastly more likely that a visiting spacecraft would come come from a civilization very many thousands or millions of years older than ours.
(2). Any type of travel between stars would require technology vastly greater than anything humans have. While the distance to the planet Saturn is almost a billion miles, the distance to the nearest star is about 23 trillion miles, a distance 25,000 times farther than the distance to Saturn. Traveling such a distance would require some technology vastly beyond what humans have. Moreover, there is every reason to suspect that travel between two different solar systems that independently evolved intelligent life would require journeys many times farther than the distance between our solar system and the nearest solar system. There are all kinds of reasons for thinking that the appearance of life and intelligent life should be rare blessings rather than something we would expect to find in every solar system. So a spaceship from another solar system would probably have to travel a distance many times greater than 23 trillion miles. This would be all the more reason for assuming that such a journey could only be made by some civilization vastly more advanced than ours.
(3) Since it is known that the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor exploded very high in the atmosphere in 2014, Loeb's theory requires us to believe that the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was an extraterrestrial spaceship that exploded into the tiniest smithereens the instant it entered the Earth's atmosphere. Can you imagine how bad rocket engineers would have to be to make an interstellar spaceship that blew up into the tiniest pieces the instant it entered Earth's atmosphere? Believing in such a thing is like believing that someone made an ocean liner ten times bigger than the Titanic, and that such a giant ship blew up into a billion tiny pieces on the first day that it was launched into the ocean.
A dialog like the one below fits the scenario Loeb asks us to believe in:
Helmsman: Oh no! Even though we just entered the upper atmosphere of this planet, the whole ship is about explode into tiny pieces!
Captain: This is horrible. It seems that our vast godlike minds never anticipated that a planet with intelligent life would have exactly the kind of atmosphere we would expect such a planet to have, and that we built a starship that blows up as soon as it makes contact with such an atmosphere! The explosion will be so bad that only the tiniest speck-like traces of our mighty starship will be found!
Loeb's theory about the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor makes not the slightest bit of sense. If an extraterrestrial civilization had the technology to accomplish the incredibly hard feat of traveling between inhabited solar systems, it would surely have the ability to create spacecraft that could enter the atmosphere of a planet without blowing up into the tiniest smithereens upon first entering into such an atmosphere.
The coverage of Loeb's latest claims by the science press has been almost uniformly credulous. An example is a CBS News story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology." I don't think Loeb believes any such thing, given that his results are about as unimpressive as results could be. The first sentence of the article shows what a clickbait lie the headline is, for it immediately changes the claim to be merely that "Loeb believes he may have found fragments of alien technology."
Nothing in the article gives any justification for such claims. The article incorrectly tells us "The U.S. Space Command confirmed with almost near certainty, 99.999%, that the material came from another solar system." No such thing occurred. An example of Avi Loeb making a similar incorrect claim is his post here, where he states this about about the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, "Its interstellar origin was formally confirmed at the 99.999% confidence in an official letter from the US Space Command under DoD to NASA on March 1, 2022." Loeb gives a copy of this letter, and in the letter someone mentions that Loeb wrote a paper claiming (with 99.999% confidence) that the meteor was "from an unbound hyperbolic orbit (defined as interstellar space hereafter)." The paper then merely says that "Dr. Mozer confirmed that the velocity estimate reported to NASA is sufficiently accurate to indicate an interstellar trajectory." No one at the US Space Command or US government made any determination (with 99.999% confidence or any high level of confidence) that the meteor was interstellar or from another solar system. The statement by someone at the US Space Command has no accuracy estimate and no estimate of a degree of confidence. Deplorably, Loeb has inaccurately represented his own 99.999% confidence estimate as being some estimate of the US Space Command, which was not the case. Particularly appalling is the untrue CBS News claim that the US Space Command said the meteor came from another solar system. The memo in question cited by Loeb does not even use the phrase "solar system." Coming from interstellar space is not the same as coming from another solar system.
Two other scientists recently published a paper saying that the simplest explanation for the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor is that it was not from some other solar system, and that its speed was simply overestimated. Beware of anyone ever claiming something with a 99.999% certainty, as such claims usually involve debatable assumptions; and when you remove one or more of those debatable assumptions, the certainty may fall to below 50%.
In the CBS News story we have a quote from Loeb:
" 'We found ten spherules. These are almost perfect spheres, or metallic marbles. When you look at them through a microscope, they look very distinct from the background,' explained Loeb, 'They have colors of gold, blue, brown, and some of them resemble a miniature of the Earth.' "
What imagination! The photos show some tiny specks, none of which resembles a miniature of the Earth; and they are all much tinier than marbles. And since Loeb is insinuating such specks are wreckage, resemblance to the Earth is irrelevant. We read, "An analysis of the composition showed that the spherules are made of 84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium, plus trace elements." Is there anything unusual about that? No, there isn't.
A 2001 scientific paper ("Magnetic spherules: cosmic dust or markers of a meteoric impact?") reports that tiny magnetic spherules have been found all over the world:
"In the past hundred years, magnetic spherules were found in various geological environments, namely in the Antarctic and Greenland ice and glacial sediments, in deep-sea floor cores, in meteorite fall areas...in volcanic and ..metamorphic rocks. Magnetic spherules found in recent sediments and oceanic floor around the industrial centers may also be the products of air pollution (probably over 99%)."
The paper reports that these magnetic spherules were more than 80% iron, with additional amounts of aluminum and silicon (a few percent each) along with phosphorus and titanium. The element composition sounds very similar to what Loeb has reported.
In a June 21st post, Loeb attempts to make some big deal of the fact that some of his specks are missing the metal nickel:
"We found a composition of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium but no nickel. This composition is anomalous compared to human-made alloys, known asteroids and familiar astrophysical sources."
No, in its Table 2 the paper cited above tells us no nickel was found in 16 of the speck-like spherules it examined (consisting of mostly iron with some magnesium and titanium). The paper tells us this:
"It is widely accepted that Ni [nickel] content of magnetic spherules indicates extraterrestrial origin, although opposite views are also known. The so-called fission crust, which can be found on the surface of micrometeorites and impactite spherules, does not contain Ni [nickel]."
So there's nothing anomalous about finding spherules like this without any nickel and with the composition Loeb reports. There's apparently nothing special or anomalous about Loeb's specks. They're very much like specks already detected in a variety of places around the world.
The paper "Morphological aspects, textural features and chemical composition of spherules from the Colônia impact crater, São Paulo, Brazil" shows pictures that look like the spherules found by Loeb. We read this:
"Using morphological, textural and compositional variation parameters, four types of spherules can be identified: (i) iron spherules and (ii) silicate-iron spherules, both dominant, and scarce (iii) titanium-silicate-iron spherules and (iv) copper-nickel-iron spherules. The spherules range in size from 0.1 mm up to 0.5 mm, and exhibit noticeable splash kinematic shapes with variations for spherical, oval, prolate and droplets."
The paper on these Brazil spherules gives us this visual, which shows some spherules with the same shape and size reported by Loeb:
The 2021 paper on Brazil spherules reports "the main variations are usually the high Ti content (>4 wt%) and the significant presence of Si (5.4–24 wt%), Al (0.9–5.2 wt%) and Mn (2.1–3,9 wt%)." What that line is saying is that some of the spherules it found have more than 4% titanium, some have more than 5% silicon, some have more than 5% aluminum, and some have up to 4% magnesium. So there's special about the element composition reported by Loeb of "84% iron, 8% silicon, 4% magnesium, and 2% titanium." Table 1 of the paper tells us very many of the spherules lack nickel, like Loeb's spherules.
There's nothing special about Loeb's tiny spherules, and they are just like similar spherules found in many other places around the world. A scientist cited here says pollution is the most likely source of Loeb's spherules. There's not the slightest reason to suspect that they are smithereens of a starship.
A July 3 post by Loeb has the title "Summary of the Successful Interstellar Expedition," and the subtitle "Diary of an Interstellar Voyage, Report 35." The sea expedition Loeb organized was merely a sea voyage, not an interstellar voyage; and there's no reason to believe it recovered anything interstellar or even anything new. There is something pathetic about the attempts of the science news media to squeeze a little clickbait voltage out of these lackluster results.
Postscript: Just after publishing this post, I read the following in a LiveScience.com article by Joanna Thompson entitled " 'Anomalous' metal spheres unlikely to be alien technology, despite Harvard scientist's claim."
"However, many scientists harbor doubts about the spherules' origin. In fact, they say these particular pellets might not be associated with the 2014 fireball at all. 'It's been known for a century that if you take a magnetic rake and run it over the ocean floor, you will pull up extraterrestrial spherules,' Peter Brown, a meteorite specialist at the University of Western Ontario in Canada, told Live Science. Such debris has accumulated worldwide on the seafloor over millions of years from meteors dropping tiny bits of molten metal as they pass overhead, Brown added. Factoring in shifting ocean currents and sedimentary movements, 'it essentially would be impossible to say that this particular spherule comes from a particular event.' "
Cosmologist Ethan Siegel has written a post disputing Loeb's claims. Siegel states this:
"None of Loeb’s prior 'aliens' claims have held up under scrutiny, and as many others have pointed out, there is no evidence for an 'alien technology' explanation for these spherules, either. Furthermore is there no good evidence to support that what Loeb recovered is part of the bolide that fell on January 8, 2014, nor is there good evidence that this object was even of interstellar origin."
Postscript: See my post here analyzing the preprint of Loeb's paper on the findings of his sea expedition.
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