The Data of the "Starship Smithereens" Paper Shows That Nothing Very Odd Was Found

Harvard astronomer Avi 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 looking like a spaceship or any of its parts. Loeb claims to have found tiny round specks only about a millimeter in size. All that he recovered were some tiny metal specks. The metal specks he found are just like metal sea specks found all over the world.  But it seemed like Loeb was trying to convince the press that he discovered smithereens of a starship. 

 The result was stories such as a CBS News story story entitled "Harvard professor Avi Loeb believes he's found fragments of alien technology." Analyzing such stories it seems hard to pin down Loeb as explicitly stating that he believes the sea specks he found are starship smithereens, specks of an extraterrestrial spaceship. But clearly Loeb was doing very much to raise such an idea in the minds of the press, and he was doing nothing to correct story titles like the CBS News story title.

Now finally Loeb's team has released a preprint of a scientific paper on the tiny sea specks that were dredged up.  It seems that Loeb's grand claims have been ramped down very much. The paper makes no explicit claims to have discovered any traces of an interstellar spaceship. It merely claims that traces were discovered that "likely" have some interstellar origin.  The paper mentions a purely natural origin, saying, "We suggest that the 'BeLaU' abundance pattern could have originated from a highly differentiated magma ocean of a planet with an iron core outside the solar system or from more exotic sources." The first part refers to a purely natural origin (such as a meteor from another solar system), and the "more exotic sources" may refer to all kinds of other possibilities, such as an extraterrestrial spaceship.

Is there any justification for these claims that the sea specks recovered by Loeb's expedition likely came from beyond our solar system? There is not.  The paper presents no good evidence that the dredged-up sea specks came from beyond our solar system. The paper is also guilty of a "hide the bad news" presentation, where it's like the authors are trying to make it very hard for readers to discover the relevant facts behind their central claim. 

Referring to the path of a meteor that exploded in the sky, and referring to "spherules" that are tiny round specks dredged up from the ocean, the paper claims this: "Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path reveals a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules have abundances consistent with a solar system origin." This claim about a special status of 5 of the 47 speck-sized spherules is false, and we should immediately be suspicious upon hearing this claim of "a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern." Humans have not well-studied the compositions of objects known to have entered our solar system from beyond the solar system. So there could never be a match in which someone found some particular chemical composition in a rock or sphere or spherule, and said, "Yes, that matches the characteristics of interstellar objects."  In fact, the five supposedly special speck-like spherules Loeb refers to have the same composition as countless other such spherules scattered all over the world. 

In Section 7.6 of the paper, the authors make this incorrect claim: "The spherules with enrichment of beryllium (Be), lanthanum (La) and uranium (U), labeled 'BeLaU', appear to have an exotic composition different from other solar system material." To try and back up its claim about five of its tiny sea specks, the paper refers us to its graphs 12, 13 and 14. Those are extremely confusing graphs that use a logarithmic scale, and fail to tell us what is the elemental composition of the five supposedly special specks.  

It is as if the paper was tying to prevent us from easily discovering the composition of these five supposedly special specks. To clearly display their composition would be very easy to do. The paper could have had five nice clear pie charts, that anyone could have easily read to discover the composition of these  five supposedly special specks. Instead we have graphs that seem like that they were designed to be as confusing as possible. The appendix of the paper reveals the composition of the these  five supposedly special specks, but in a way that is hard to decipher. There is a table that gives the data. The table appears in landscape mode, meaning you have to tilt your head to read it.  Also, violating the rules of clear data presentation, each column of element abundances is stated using a different scale.   

             Part of Appendix A,  rotated to make reading easier

Laboriously jumping through hoops to read this data, you can get to the bottom of the matter. The six supposedly special specks (labeled with a subclass of BeLaU) appear at the top of the Appendix 1 table, on page 28 of the paper. At first it looks like some of these specks have lots of Beryllium, but that isn't the case. If you look at the Beryllium column header (labeled Be), we see that the Beryllium numbers are stated in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .025 parts per million. So when we see 4587 as the  Beryllium abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest Beryllium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a Beryllium abundance of 4587 times .000001 times .025, which equals a Beryllium abundance of 0.00011, about 1 part in 10,000. 

Similarly, if you look at the Lanthanum column header, on page 29 of the paper, you see that the Lanthanum numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .235 parts per million. So when we see 1108 as the Lanthanum abundance of one of the BeLaU specks, the biggest  Lanthanum abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a  Lanthanum  abundance of  1108 times .000001 times .235 which equals a Lanthanum abundance of 0.00026, only about 2 parts in 10,000.

Similarly, if you look at the Uranium column header on page 30 of the paper, you see that the Uranium numbers are in fractions of parts-per-million, fractions of .0081 parts per million. So when we see 1892 as the Uranium abundance of one of Loeb's specks, the biggest Uranium abundance of any of the specks Loeb dredged up from the sea, that merely means a  Uranium  abundance of  1892 times .000001 times .0081 which equals a Uranium abundance of 0.000015, only about 15 parts in a million. 

The table below summarizes the data, showing the strangest things Loeb was able to find in his little specks, after exhaustively looking for any strange thing. The fractions displayed are simple abundance ratios (so, for example, .000001 means 1 part in a million, and .0001 means one part in 10,000). 

Element	Highest amount in any of  Loeb's spherule specks	Amount in meteorite (reported before 2023)	Amount in rocks (reported before 2023)	Amount in tiny spherules (reported before 2023)
Beryllium	.00011	.000000386	.000003 .000049 to .000200	Never reported?
Lanthanum.	.00026	?	.0000038 .0000095 .000297 to .000920 (in Finland)	Never reported?
Uranium	.000015	.00000017 .00000022	.000090   (in Chinese phosphate rocks) .000090   (in rocks from various countries)	Never reported?

Two papers I link to in the last row refer to uranium levels of about 90 milligrams per kilogram in earthly rocks, which is an abundance of about .000090.

The results shown above are the strangest bit of strangeness that the Loeb "starship smithereens" expedition has to report. And it's nothing very strange at all. It is merely that in one of the 70+ tiny spherules that were analyzed, there was maybe a tiny bit more beryllium and  maybe a tiny bit more lanthanum than you might have expected to find, based on previous analytic reports analyzing these elements in meteorites and rocks.  The reported Beryllium level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Beryllium did not even match the highest level of Beryllium reported in igneous rocks, being only half of the Beryllium  level of 200 parts per million reported in the paper here. The reported Lanthanum level of Loeb's sea speck with the most Lanthanum did not even match the highest level of Lanthanum reported in Finnish rocks, being three times smaller than the Lanthanum level of 920 parts per million reported in the paper here. The uranium level of the spherule with the most uranium is not even remarkable, and many earthly rocks have uranium levels far greater.  Does that mean something very  remarkable was found? No, it doesn't. Traces of rare elements are found in various concentrations that may easily vary by a hundred times from sample to sample. You could explain the whole difference under the simple idea that Loeb was using state-of-the-art equipment that is better at finding trace concentrations than the older equipment used to get the numbers in the right column above. 

A story in the tabloid press is claiming this about Loeb's spherules: "The lanthanum and uranium were 500 times more plentiful than in earthly rocks and beryllium hundreds of times so."  That is not at all correct. My table above shows that the highest level of lanthanum in any of Loeb's spherules was three times smaller than a level reported in Finnish rocks (920 parts per million), and that the highest level of beryllium found in any of Loeb's spherules was only half of a level of beryllium reported in some igneous rocks. There was no real uranium anomaly, since earthly rocks mined for uranium have even higher levels of uranium than in any of the specks (in parts per million). The average amount of lanthanum and uranium and beryllium found in the full set of Loeb's spherules was not more plentiful than in earthly rocks. 

Nothing very unusual has been found from Loeb's million dollar expedition. Loeb's paper has made the groundless claim that five of the tiny specks gathered by the mission "reveal a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern."  The data gathered by Loeb does not even suggest that the specks came from outer space. 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%)." 

When science is done properly, you wait for a decent amount of data justification before you go announcing grand conclusions such as visitations from outside of the solar system. You don't go drawing conclusions based on tiny irregularities in only five speck-sized things. And it's pretty ridiculous to take something that's probably the result of mere pollution and to claim that it came from another solar system. It's rather like someone in Los Angeles saying today's smog came from Alpha Centauri.  

Loeb recently made the groundless claim that some of his tiny sea specks came from the 2014 CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor, which has been inappropriately given a name of IM1, standing for "interstellar meteor 1." We do not actually know that this meteor came from beyond the solar system.  Referring to the sea specks I discuss above, on his blog Loeb recently made this groundless claim: "Five of these millimeter-size marbles originated as molten droplets from the surface of IM1 when it was exposed to the immense heat from the fireball generated by its friction on air on January 8, 2014."   At www.space.com we read some reasons for rejecting all such claims:

"Matthew Genge, a planetary scientist at Imperial College London who specializes in meteorites, said that connecting the spheres with the 2014 fireball — or any meteorite fragments with any other meteor — is impossible. 'Meteorite ablation debris has been found, but not from an instrumentally observed fireball,' Genge told Space.com via email. 'There never has been a micrometeorite derived from a specific fireball event, and never will be, since it is an impossibility.' Peter Brown, an astronomer at the University of Western Ontario, agreed with Genge. If the meteor did in fact enter Earth's atmosphere at the speeds reported, Brown said, it would have been vaporized into fragments much smaller than the spherules Loeb's expedition discovered.  'There has never been a meteorite recovered from any object that hits the atmosphere moving at more than 28 kilometers a second [62,600 mph],' said Brown, who studies meteors and small solar system bodies such as asteroids. 'Any solids that would remain would be essentially aerosol-size.'  (In a 2022 paper in The Astrophysical Journal, Loeb claimed that IM1 was moving between 52 and 58 km per second, or 116,000 to 130,000 mph.)"

In the same blog post Loeb makes this simply untrue claim: "Five unique spherules... showed a composition pattern of elements from outside the solar system, never seen before." No, there was nothing very unusual about the element composition of the five strangest of Loeb's spherules, and the main irregularities are those I list in the table above, which are unimpressive. 

In a NY Post article we seem to have Loeb trying to create the misleading impression that the government estimated something with 99.999% confidence. We read this: "No less an unimpeachable source than the US Space Command went on to confirm, with '99.999 percent confidence' that the tiny spherical objects were interstellar, he said."  The government has said nothing at all about Loeb's sea-speck spherules.  Loeb is referring here to a letter from a government official who cited a '99.999 percent confidence'  estimate made by Loeb himself, not by the government. That estimate wasn't about any spherical objects Loeb recovered, but about whether the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar.  No one at the government made any confidence estimate about either Loeb's IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor or Loeb's recovered spherical objects.  The letter from someone in the government is shown in Loeb's post here.  When that letter refers to a 99.999 percent confidence estimate, it is merely referring to Loeb's own estimate, not a government estimate. 

In that NY Post article Loeb says, "The composition of uranium is 1,000 times what you find on earth.”  This is very untrue. The spherule speck that had the most uranium of all the sea specks Loeb recovered and analyzed had a level of uranium of 0.000015, several times less than the level found in earthly rocks mined for uranium. Such rocks have a level of about 90 milligrams of uranium per kilogram, as reported here, which is a level of 0.000090.

A very recent article in Science magazine gives us this quote about the paper I analyze above:

"But others are dismissive of the preprint, which has not been peer reviewed. Although the geochemical analysis of the debris is solid, the conclusions that Loeb and his colleagues hang on them are 'nonsense,' says Martin Schiller, a cosmochemist at the University of Copenhagen. 'I’m surprised anyone would take it seriously.' Larry Nittler, a cosmochemist at Arizona State University (ASU), calls it 'very weak sauce.' "

In the same Science article we read a reason for doubting Loeb's continued claims that the IM1/CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor was interstellar, based on supposed confirmation from a government satellite: 

"A new study out this month in The Astrophysical Journal examined 17 known fireballs captured by both classified U.S. sensors and independent observations. The study showed that the government sensors often overestimated speed, with the errors getting worse the faster things got. 'A third of the time, the numbers are just way off,' says Steve Desch, an ASU astrophysicist."

During the Middle Ages for centuries there was a great enthusiasm for collecting the relics of saints. For centuries people would dig up bones or teeth (often just little bits of bone), and claim that they had magnificent healing powers on the grounds that they belonged to a canonized Catholic saint. Such relics would be displayed in churches, and people would make pilgrimages to see them. Such relic pitchmen remind me of Loeb's antics in trying to glorify his tiny sea specks that are probably mere specks of pollution. The difference is that the medieval relic stories actually seemed to do some good. Possibly because of a placebo effect, countless people would report cures after touching or seeing the alleged relics of some Catholic saint. But Loeb's sea speck antics seem to do very little good other than help sell more copies of his latest book.  

Here is the latest tabloid headline sounding like something that we might hear from a carnival barker:

"EXCLUSIVE: Truth about my 'alien' encounter... How I found bombshell interstellar objects a mile beneath the sea - and their limitless potential for life on Earth, by scientist AVI LOEB."

If you gave some specks of smudge pried from the bottom of your shoes the kind of "royal treatment" given to Loeb's sea specks -- that of analyzing the abundance of all of their elements -- you would probably be able to find some tiny bit of strangeness somewhere about as impressive as the strangest thing reported in the "starship smithereens" paper I discuss above. There no evidence of "starship smithereens" in Loeb's paper and no evidence of anything from beyond the solar system, but merely evidence of pareidolia in which a scientist claims to see some trace of something he is longing to see. No strong evidence has been provided that Loeb's spherule specks even came from beyond Earth. It reminds me of things I mention in my post "When Scientists Claim to See Things They Never Saw." 

Postscript: A co-author of the paper  (Charles Hoskinson) issued a tweet claiming, "We discovered spherules that appear to be from a different solar system due to their ultra high abundance of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium (thus BeLaU)."  But as shown above, none of the abundances were greater than 2 parts in 10,000, and all of the levels were similar to previously reported levels of such elements in some earthly rocks.  So what on Earth was Hoskinson doing using the phrase "ultra high abundance"?  Another scientist points out that 67 atomic bomb tests were done by the US between 1946 and 1958 within a few hundred kilometers of where Loeb's spherules were recovered, a fact that could account for minor element irregularities in such sea specks. 

In an October, 2023 paper Avi Loeb repeats his untrue claim that the US government made a  99.999% estimate about the likelihood of an interstellar origin of a meteor. In the paper he incorrectly states, "In 2022 the US Space Command issued a formal letter to NASA certifying a 99.999% likelihood that the object was interstellar in origin."  This statement has a reference to the document here, which merely mentions a 99.999% likelihood  made by Loeb himself, not the US government. The careless repetition of this misstatement by the press is an example of the kind of "hook, line and sinker" science journalism that goes on these days. 

Loeb states this:

" Mass spectrometry of 47 spherules near the high-yield regions along IM1’s path revealed a distinct extra-solar abundance pattern for 5 of them, while background spherules showed abundances consistent with a solar system origin. The unique spherules showed an excess of Be, La and U, by up to three orders of magnitude relative to the solar system standard of CI chondrites."

The claim of a "distinct extra-solar abundance pattern" for five of the tiny specks is groundless.  In the second sentence Loeb gives us two  examples of objectionable speech. First, he makes a comparison between his metal specks and "CI chondrites," which are primarily stony meteorites. Of course, if you compare two types of different things, there will be some discrepancy in the elemental abundances.  Also Loeb engages in the trick of claiming a difference of "up to three orders of magnitude,"  a very imprecise phrase that could refer to any difference between about 10 and about 1000.  The use of imprecise,  vague or misleading language such as this is an indication that we do not have an example of robust science, which is characterized by precise and accurate statements. 

In his latest October, 2023 paper Loeb suggests a non-technological explanation for his little sea specks, coming up with some wild speculation of weird natural events in some other solar system. But since the element content of the sea specks is not very unusual, and since there's no reason to think that specks have anything to do with CNEOS 2014-01-08, and since the case that CNEOS 2014-01-08 was from another solar system is weak,  this wild speculation has little credibility.   

With his typical dogmatism, Ethan Siegel has an article entitled "Harvard astronomer’s 'alien spherules' are industrial pollutants." It would have better to say that the stranger spherules have an element abundance similar to those of industrial pollutants.  Siegel mentions the new paper here, finding that the levels of Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium in Loeb's strangest spherules are similar to those in coal ash pollutants. A later article by Siegel has more debunking of Loeb's spherule claims. 

Starship Smithereens? There's Nothing Special About Loeb's Spherules

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. 

False Alarms Are Bad for Firemen, But Can Be Great for Scientists

Misstatements by the mainstream press about the search for chemical precursors of life in space have included the following:

• An article on the web site of Air and Space magazine with the phony title "Fingerprints of Martian Life," one merely reporting some observation of biologically irrelevant molecules. Not even the simplest molecular components of life (amino acids) have ever been discovered on Mars. 
• Another article of the major newspaper The Independent with the misleading title "Best evidence yet for alien life on Saturn's moon found by scientists." one not reporting any evidence for life because it merely reported molecules with a molecular weight of 200, which is a molecular weight 50 times smaller than a typical molecular weight of a protein molecule.
• A story on the scitechdaily.com site entitled "Astrophysicists Identify 'Significant Reservoirs' of Organic Molecules Necessary To Form the Basis of Life."  The molecules discussed were biologically irrelevant molecules found only in the tiniest trace amounts, not in "reservoirs."  
• A NASA announcement that a gigantic "reservoir" of water had been discovered in space, a statement extremely misleading because the water was scattered over so many hundreds of cubic light-years that the density of water was not even the water density in the air above the Sahara Desert. 
• A June 2023 press release from the University of Illinois claims a detection (by 30+ scientists) of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) chemicals in distant space, and incorrectly claims that such chemicals are "considered the basic building blocks for the earliest forms of life."  None of the PAH chemicals are such things. 
• At the major website www.salon.com, we had a very recent article claiming a "recent study in the journal Nature revealed quite significant evidence for life on the distant moon" Enceladus. No such thing was found. The study merely reported the existence of phosphorus, one of the elements used in living things. Claiming that phosphorus is "evidence for life" is as silly as claiming that trees (something that can be converted into paper) are evidence for book-writing. The amount of purposeful work that must be done to make even the simplest living thing from mere elements such as carbon, oxygen, hydrogen and phosphorus is comparable to the amount of purposeful worked needed to make a 200-page well-written book from a tree.
• This week the hype-heavy scitechdaily.com site has a breathless headline of "Foundation of All Known Life: Webb Telescope Makes First Detection of Crucial Carbon Molecule." The molecule in question is a biologically irrelevant methyl cation molecule that is in no sense whatsoever a foundation of any kind of life. 

Also recently we had a press release from EurekAlert!, a source that  often recycles misleading or dubious press releases from various institutions and universities. The press release was entitled "An amino acid essential for life is found in interstellar space." The press release refers to a paper "A search for tryptophan in the gas of the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus molecular cloud." In the paper the lone author of the paper (Susana Iglesias-Groth) makes no confident claim to have found tryptophan in interstellar space; and the title refers to a search, not a finding. She merely claims to have got some spectrum readings that she claims are compatible with tryptophan. Spectrum readings from very distant space are very often subject to multiple different interpretations. The Perseus molecular cloud is 1000 light-years away, and trying to use spectrum readings to detect a molecule existing only in trace amounts is a dicey business with a large chance of error. 

The Perseus molecular cloud (credit: NASA/JPL)

Interpreting spectroscopic readings can be as subjective as interpreting the ambiguous Rorschach ink blots once used by psychologists for psychological testing. Using a much closer target (Venus), a team of scientists previously announced spectroscopic readings they claimed were evidence of the gas phosphine. But later there followed four papers saying that there is no phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. One paper by a single author states, "There is thus no significant evidence for phosphine absorption in the JCMT Venus spectra." Another paper with many co-authors is entitled, "No phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus." A third paper states there is "no statistical evidence for phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus."  Another paper says, "These findings, along with the recent papers by Encrenaz et al. (2020), Snellen et al. (2020), Lincowski et al. (2020), and Villanueva et al. (2020) undermine the reported detection of PH3 [phosphine] by Greaves et al. (2020a,b) and its possible biogenic origin."  A news account of this paper says, "The team concluded that what the scientists probably saw was just sulfur dioxide, which is a common gas around Venus and would not indicate the possible presence of life."

The paper "A search for tryptophan in the gas of the IC 348 star cluster of the Perseus molecular cloud" is now behind a paywall, but when I read it before it was paywall-blocked, I could find no plain assertion of a detection. The author merely claimed to have seen some sort of something that she claimed was compatible with tryptophan, and noted that future investigations could determine whether tryptophan really existed at the investigated location. The abstract is not behind a paywall, and that abstract makes no claim to have detected tryptophan, but merely a claim to have searched for it, and to have found something that could be tryptophan. The abstract estimates a particular sparse amount using the phrase "assuming that the detected emission lines are due to tryptophan," as if the author was not sure such an identification is correct. 

The author (Susana Iglesias-Groth) published in 2021 a preprint on this topic, "A search for mid-IR bands of amino acids in the Perseus Molecular Cloud," which can be read here. In that preprint, referring to spectral lines and using the royal "we" she stated, "We tentatively identify 14 lines for tryptophan, 12 lines for tyrosine, 7 lines for phenylalanine and 5 lines for isoleucine and glycine, respectively."  This kind of tentative identification business sounds like very iffy guesswork, rather like trying to guess what type of people are passing by your basement window when you can only see shadows cast upon a wall. The "Data" section mentions "image cleaning to remove bad pixels," and some averaging to produce a "combined spectrum," and we may wonder whether artifacts may have arisen from such debatable manipulation. Figure 4 of the preprint looks unconvincing. We see a bunch of wavy lines, looking rather like brain waves lines or lines of a graph plotting ups and downs of a Dow Jones stock; and above some of the up-blips in the line (up-blips which have varying shapes) we see "Trp," which looks like a guess that the blip was caused by tryptophan. It all sounds terribly tentative and subjective. Interstellar clouds such as the Perseus molecular cloud are hard to reliably analyze, because there is so much signal contamination from a variety of chemical sources. 

It seems rather that people have long been claiming to see interstellar tryptophan that was not actually there. A 1984 paper noted that "Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and their associates have examined interstellar (IS) absorption features in the ultraviolet, visible and infrared" and claimed to see a variety of things including  tryptophan. The paper states, "We conclude that the identifications claimed by Hoyle, Wickramasinghe and their colleagues are unwarranted."

Similarly, in the 2006 paper here we read about an apparent false alarm regarding the detection of the amino acid glycine in interstellar space:

"The early searches for glycine were all negative, but two years ago Kuan et al. (2003) reported detection of a number of glycine lines, some 27 in several astronomical sources. Unfortunately, this claim has not been confirmed. The amount of glycine claimed by Kuan et al. is in conflict with previously published upper limits (e.g. Combes et al. 1996; Ceccarelli et al. 2000), and glycine lines which should have appeared were not found. In a detailed analysis of the evidence, Snyder et al. (2005) recently concluded that few, if any, of the lines attributed by Kuan et al. to interstellar glycine were actually from that molecule. The spectroscopic data on which the claim of Kuan et al. was based have not been published or made available to other workers, and there is now a fairly wide consensus among radio astronomers and laboratory spectroscopists that glycine has not yet been found in space."

A more recent 2022 paper tells us this: "The simplest amino acid, glycine (NH2CH2COOH), has been searched for a long time in the interstellar medium, but all surveys of glycine have failed." 

We do not yet have any robust or replicated evidence for the existence of tryptophan or any other amino acid in interstellar space. The recent press release announcing a discovery of tryptophan in interstellar space seems like another case in the science press of premature overconfident boasting, and people claiming to have seen something when the evidence was all blurry and similar to a tiny hazy blip seen on the far horizon, something that could have been a hundred different things.  Very many or most of the interesting-sounding announcements you read these days in the science news are false alarms, and in fields such as neuroscience, false alarms are strongly incentivized. 

Spectrographic analysis of deep interstellar space seems to be a kind of "wild, wild West" in which there are few or no standards to minimize false alarms. In many cases it seems like subjective squinting at tiny lines, rather like the work of some palm reader looking through a magnifying glass to study tiny lines on someone's palm. In the 2021 preprint "A search for mid-IR bands of amino acids in the Perseus Molecular Cloud" by Susana Iglesias-Groth, published in 2021, which can be read here, we have no mention of statistical significance, no mention of an effect size, no mention of a p-value, no mention of blinding, and seemingly no mention of any observational standard that was met. Such subjective one-person classification guesses mean little until they are replicated by multiple independent observers. 

Consider how unreliable is Case 1 compared to Case 2 below:

Case 1: Scientist gets money to search for chemical X in deep space. Scientist examines thousands of little spectroscopic lines looking for something he can say looks like chemical X. He knows that if he doesn't report finding such a thing, he won't get his paper published, because of publication bias which favors positive results. Scientist then reports seeing some little lines that he thinks looks like chemical X. 

Case 2: Scientist X is given some spectroscopic readings provided by Scientist Y, who says, "Tell me what this looks like to you." Scientist X has no idea what answer is expected, or what Scientist Y was looking for. Scientist X identifies the reading as chemical Z, and Scientist Y, "Yes, that is what I was looking for, and what I thought it was." 

Case 1 is not compelling at all, but Case 2 is much better evidence. 

False alarms are bad for firemen, but can be great for scientists. False alarms can mean more fame for a scientist, more grant money, and more of the cherished paper citations. A scientist can pay the rent for years or decades by milking false alarms. And false alarms can be great for the person trying to show evidence for some untrue dogma that is close to his heart, or the person trying to show that he and his colleagues are making progress when they are mired in the mud, and going in the wrong direction. 

One of the ways in which scientists have milked false alarms is by making dubious reports of an association between a gene and some trait. A 2012 paper tells us that most of the reports of genes claimed to be associated with general intelligence are probably false positives. In their paper "Empirical assessment of published effect sizes and power in the recent cognitive neuroscience and psychology literature," Denes Szucs and John P. A. Ioannidis state "False report probability is likely to exceed 50% for the whole literature," and "In light of our findings, the recently reported low replication success in psychology is realistic, and worse performance may be expected for cognitive neuroscience." 

I predict with only medium confidence that the recent claim about tryptophan in interstellar space will not be well-replicated.  I also predict with medium conference that in the next few years some scientist will capture global headlines by claiming he saw "chemical signatures of life" at some other planet, by analyzing ambiguous hard-to-interpret spectroscopic data from the James Webb telescope. But it will probably be a false alarm. It will probably be another case of some scientist looking at little lines that could be caused by many different things, and making an interpretation of this hard-to-interpret reading that will allow him to say he saw what scientists have been hoping to see for so long. A Harvard astronomer (Avi Loeb) has shown that making a headline-grabbing dramatic-sounding subjective interpretation of some ambiguous marginal observational data can be very profitable. His "interstellar spacecraft" speculations about a strange object named ‘Oumuamua resulted in a lucrative book deal. 

After trying to suggest that another space oddity (the CNEOS 2014-01-08 meteor) was a crashed interstellar spacecraft, Loeb has recently finished his million-dollar oceanic expedition looking for what he hoped would be remnants of a crashed extraterrestrial spaceship (an idea that is implausible for reasons I discuss here).  The expedition seems like a bust, as I predicted it would be.  All Loeb has to report finding are tiny scarcely visible specks and tiny metal scraps. We can imagine what derisive laughter would come if some person without Loeb's following were to try to pass off such measly things as evidence of extraterrestrials. We are apparently expected to think the makers of the ET spaceship were so incompetent that they let their ship get instantly blown up upon entering Earth's atmosphere, so that only the tiniest smithereens remained. Meanwhile 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.