Actually yes. You'll be laughed out of the virtual room, not get funding, and potentially damage your career.
As he points out in his interview with Lex (linked elsewhere in the comments here) is fine to propose a multi billion dollar experiment to detect oxygen on exoplanets, which is not conclusive evidence of life, but to search for industrial pollution is a non starter for exactly this reason. But that would yield much more interesting results (both for negative and positive results.)
Some careers are destroyed. Some scientists are only vindicated posthumously. The process can take many decades.
Scientists, like most humans, are not that open-minded and are subject to the same group-think blind spots. I think if we could get better at being open-minded as a species, we'd make faster progress and better ideas would win out more often. This is as much true in society at large, or business, as it is in science.
My Post-doc colleague during my PhD@MIT was explaining this trick he does to get his system working that he never publishes (one very small step of 100 steps). He was concerned that if he published the step, it would hurt his chances at getting a professorship.
It’s exactly the same logic behind why code is not published.
Because ethically you can ‘hand wave it away’ as obvious to other experts and not worth publishing.
Another is recommending trans-fat based margarine over butter. That was counter-productive health advice that took decades to reverse - even although the evidence it was based on was extremely flimsy.
Once the group-think machine gets going in a direction, it has a tremendous amount of inertia.
I think this was more a case of lobbying by certain agricultural producers than ignorance. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/14823257_Food_Lobbi...
Sadly history is full of such occurrences.
https://astronomy.com/news/2020/07/powerful-eruptions-on-the...
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfi...
"Classical logic was abstracted from the mathematics of finite sets and their subsets …. Forgetful of this limited origin, one afterwards mistook that logic for something above and prior to all mathematics, and finally applied it, without justification, to the mathematics of infinite sets. This is the Fall and original sin of Cantor's set theory."
-- Hermann Weyl
1. A is not the empty set
2. A is not the set of all rational numbers
3. A is closed downwards, meaning if x is in A and y < x, then y is in A
4. A has no greatest element, meaning for all x in A, there is a y in A such that y > x.
And each Dedekind cut is in one-to-one correspondence with a real number. You can define the usual arithmetic operations on them, show that every rational number has a corresponding Dedekind cut (for any rational q, we have {x in Q | y < q } as the corresponding cut). I haven't seen a proof of the uncountability of Dedekind cuts using the diagonalization argument, but you can prove there is a one-to-one correspondence between Dedekind cuts and Cauchy sequences of rational numbers, which is another construction of the reals. And there is a fairly straightforward proof that those are uncountable using diagonalization.
But as you can see, you don't need any sort of repetition to do the construction, it's just a set of sets of rational numbers satisfying a few simple properties. For more information, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_real_numbe...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missoula_floods
Also Plate Tectonics...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_development_of...
Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends. Too much and good ideas get neglected or squashed for far too long. There is a cost to both.
> Too little gatekeeping means trouble finding the signal through the noise and time wasted on dead ends.
Much time is supposed to be spent on dead ends anyway. That's the way the corpus matures, not to mention an inevitable result of peer review (no need to review anything if all the research product is perfect). Research is a search; imagine running BFS without expecting to encounter dead ends.
Given the current scenario we are certainly not sure if we are ever going to achieve it! Though that achievement can work wonders. Any thoughts how you see that change can be made possible?
Doesn't she deserve to be heard? By labeling her a antivaxer and ignoring her based on that label you effectively are closing your mind to her.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
> Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community.
> He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it.
But MDs are more like mechanics for the human body.
It's not a homogenous demographic, and it doesn't have a substantial overlap. So there is a very large (super-majority) of medical doctors who have absolutely no training in research, statistics etc. Because it's not what they do - they are not scientists. Their training is about their obligations to follow current developments in best practice, drug prescriptions etc. (or the same but for surgical technique) and apply it. They do not do science, they don't even necessarily particularly understand the scientific method.
So it is absolutely incorrect to imply that all medical professionals are "the scientific community". They're not. Those which participate in and publish research are but that is not even a significant fraction of their population.
Comparisons about what general population surgeons and medical doctors historically reacted to changes in practice does not say anything about the idea that these people represent a peer-reviewed scientific consensus, because they didn't. They represent the equivalent of a mechanic rejecting manufacturer recommendations on fuel quality and complaining about it to their colleagues.
The nice, pretty scientific method we learn about in school is largely an idealized myth
Your statement is self-referential. If a hypothesis is "plausible" than practically by definition it is above ridicule. But how do you decide which hypotheses are plausible?
Science, at its core, is a social system. One of the key goals of that system is prioritization. There are finite research resources and it's important to allocate them to the most promising areas. Ridicule is one of the more extreme tools scientists use in that social process to reach consensus about which hypotheses are plausible.
It is also a very sinister and discrediting tool. As an example the CRU employed this tactic and set an entire area of scientific research back due to the optics of scientific politics. It can cause the tainted smell of agenda, and that is never good for enlightening people.
Agreed, but self-aggrandizement, manipulation, and outright fraud are also tools in the toolbox and if you don't have strong enough defensive tools, you are open to attacks from those. Obviously, they can be misapplied. Humans are not perfect. But without powerful social tools like ridicule and shunning, science becomes essentially a honeypot for charlatans like Andrew Wakefield.
Happens all the time. Academia is a snake pit and this is low hanging fruit.
The pollution would vastly outlive the polluters, so it would be detectable for some time after their demise, especially if anything they automated also polluted. That stuff would continue to pollute after its creators all died, at least a bit.
Also, it seems that the chance of detecting pollution would increase linearly as we continue to discover more planets.
...hopefully my point is made, now. I can't give details because they don't exist.
If a species produces sufficient pollution that it kills that species, it is a reasonable assumption that it was also produced at a rate far higher than the planets natural ecosystem could absorb it. It is also reasonable that the pollution also kills one or more species which were consuming or absorbing the pollution, slowing the rate at which it can be removed, or maybe even stopping that process completely. Pollution does not disappear at the same time pollutants stop being introduced into the atmosphere.
There will be a time after which no pollutants are produced and before no pollutants are detectable. That is a non-zero amount of time. That is why I say that pollution could one day be detected on a planet that has not had a living civilization for "a long time." "A long time" being "more than five minutes" if you really want me to nail it down.
Right. And if the argument depends on those details, then it's not a very convincing argument.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle#Capacities_and_fl...
Pollution doesn't vanish when it isn't being made anymore.
So, if there is so much pollution that it both kills life on the planet, it will take a good amount of time (millions of years? How big of a planet are we talking about?) to be cleansed back to undetectable levels.
An alien society may produce pollutants which last a million years. Plastics can last millions of years.
Sufficient pollution could cause climate change severe enough to keep all kinds of things airborne for who knows how long. We are constantly surprised by what we learn about other worlds. It is silly to me to presume that anything we know about Earth pollution will be a given on a planet from another star system.
We were able to detect dinosaurs on our own planet 65 million years after they went extinct, and they didn't even pollute anything.
To your point getting strictly negative results would not necessarily mean anything one way or the other.
What concrete experiments would prove its an alien construct as opposed to being just interstellar rock?
The scientific community isn't rejecting proposals to find more Oumuamua like objects, and has been actively trying to figure out how we could intercept another one when it turns up.
So what exactly is requiring us to start from "it might be aliens" in order to get funded?
If we aren't looking, and a chance arises, we'll miss it, and if we do spot something like it early, what are the chances we are ready with a rocket to go look?
Would be nice if humanity could pre-plan. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/01/be... is a less controversial example.
People weren't not looking for them, but by their nature no one knows a way to find them reliably (other then, find all the things, look for anything which has a hyperbolic trajectory relative to the sun).
Same problem with an intercept plan: we would like to do it, but the problem is not particularly tractable with our current space technology. Up until we saw Oumuamua we didn't even have a baseline for what we might expect the behaviour of objects to be - which is a problem when you're coming up with a propellant budget for a space mission, since you have no idea how much fuel or weight you can afford for an intercept.
As it stands, we probably need to see a couple more Oumuamua-like objects to develop a reasonable expectation of the frequency of different classes and come up with a mission-profile which we can reasonably expect we'd be able to launch at one in the next 20-40 years. Or a way of establishing a permanent capability (which is not focused research its "yes, let's build the lunar gateway station and develop a long-term La Grange point mode for the Starliner - which is also something which you'd do if you were colonizing Mars).
This is my point: nothing here benefits from "it was aliens" as a starting point. In fact, all of this useful work is pretty explicitly "it's probably not aliens". Because if aliens have gone to the expense and trouble to scout the solar system, then we basically don't need to do any of it - "it was aliens" closes research paths. If we're sure it's aliens, then a much more cost-effective strategy is waiting for them to send another probe that assuredly would move in to study the most interesting thing in Sol - us. Which will be much easier to see because we look closely for Earth-orbit objects.
This is either very obtuse or very disingenuous on Loeb's part. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to establish them as true. But that doesn't mean extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to investigate. You investigate the claims in order to see what kind of evidence there is for them. I would expect the actual peer-reviewed paper, which unfortunately this article doesn't link to (I hate when pop science articles do that), to lay out in more detail what the evidence is and why Loeb thinks it establishes his claim.
Even your former claim might not be necessarily true. What constitutes "an extraordinary evidence" exactly?
Example: imagine aliens are freely living among us but our eyes are blind to certain light frequencies (they are in fact blind to most wavelengths) and that's how aliens utilize camouflage.
Would revealing this fact be an extraordinary evidence for aliens? It's IMO extremely subjective. People might get very excited with such a discovery, sure, but the explanation does sound rather bland and super obvious (as all things in hindsight).
So this whole "extraordinary" stuff reads more like popular old men bickering in front of the media for the goals of PR coverage and, who knows, maybe that increases their odds for scientific funding. I'd always look for the financial incentive and potential conflict of interest first.
Is it a misapplication of the anthropic principle to say there are probably gazillions of advanced aliens, given that we appeared and therefore life probably is common? Or is it a misapplication to say it’s probably just another of the gazillions of non-alien things we’ve seen?
It’s all differences of opinion over which claim is the extraordinary one. It is bold to claim confidence about the impossibility of FTL travel, or bold to claim confidence about the possibility of it? Is it bold to say we’re a freak occurrence or bold to say we aren’t? Most generally, is it bold to say we know a lot or bold to say we don’t?
They're working back from the conclusion they want to be true, when they should instead start by weighing the evidence.
It is possible that it's aliens. It is possible that it's not. We don't have enough evidence even to estimate probabilities, so anything further is pure speculation. Speculation is a look that wears no better on conservatives than on radicals.
There is hardly a field to be found where young radicals are not promoting evidence for what the tenured consider anathema, waiting for the latter to retire or die and get the hell out of the way. As Max Planck said, "Science advances one funeral at a time."
It is common to insist that the right idea wins in the end, but there is no reason to believe it: every case you can cite in its favor amounts to confirmation bias. The frequency of such examples that first languished for decades, with the original proposer driven from the field, would properly make us suspect that the majority of their also-correct peers remain unvindicated, however many false leads have been exposed. (Hypotheses promoted by women driven from a field make a rich vein of ideas to vindicate.)
Loeb is right about one thing: the notion of "extraordinary evidence" is very destructive. Evidence is evidence. It is always easy to make greater demands on evidence you don't like than on evidence you do, and always easy find excuses to discount evidence incompatible with the consensus of the moment. Every field, to be considered legitimate, should maintain an officially taught compendium of "damned facts", evidence that seems to be incompatible with one or more leading theories. Even when a consensus theory is largely correct, the damned evidence will be the basis of any progress.
Nature doesn't play favorites: it is possible for a consensus theory and all its challengers to be wrong. Evidence against one of the latter is not evidence in favor of the former.
I agree with pretty much everything you're saying except this. Though I still do agree with this a bit. It seems like a shorthand for "be bayesian" that's unfortunately taken too far too frequently. But if I have a strong prior one way or another, I will need stronger evidence to turn me around.
+1 on your main point though. Why can't more people be more comfortable in a state of uncertainty ;_;
It is not at all unusual for a key measurement to be wrong, but also not unusual to trust the wrong one.
But the paper cited refers, instead, to the relative safety of the tenured professors to speak out in favor of plate tectonics, vs. the younger researchers who knew that would be, as we say, career-limiting.
If there are gazillion, at least one out of all the diversity out there should have already colonized the entire galaxy and evidence should be plentiful.
There could be a banging ET party going at the Planck scale and we would never know, they might as well be on the other side of the universe.
This doesn't mean these things are impossible because maybe there are ways around them, but it certainty shifts the probabilities by quite a bit. Given our current understanding of biology and mechanics it makes it much more probable for creatures to be within the ballpark of our size (let's say crow to elephant?).
But I see nothing preventing intelligent life from operating on massively longer timescales. This requires, of course, that you believe that intelligence (and maybe consciousness too) is substrate and timescale independent, which may or may not be a big ask depending on where you stand on these issues.
As to chemistry, if they are moving faster then that means that they have more thermal energy. That comes with radiative problems (why humans stand) and this is much more difficult the smaller you are because you have less surface area. Which then puts large energy requirements on intake. And then the inverse is true.
The thing is that aliens would still have to follow the laws of physics. There is no reason to expect that wouldn't be true and reasoning otherwise would take some pretty extraordinary evidence and probably win you several Nobel prizes.
consider the range of timescales that humans can have effective control over. We manage to organize subatomic collisions that occur in femto-seconds, and we manage to build things that last thousands of years. All this despite the fact that our own lives are measured in units that are several orders of magnitude smaller or larger.
So I can imagine (just about) an intelligent system that can also effectively build systems operating in time domains orders of magnitude from their own experience/lifetimes. If they were very "slow" then certainly launching objects into orbit may appear almost impossibly fast to them. But it wouldn't be notably different than what we do with particle physics (or even firing a gun), where the timescale of the event is essentially impercetible to us, and far beyond our ability to control with our own bodies.
The other way around is harder, because creating things that last much longer than an individual's lifetime has to fall back on culture, and that seems to evolve (change) much more rapidly. There are very few buildings still in use that are more than a thousand years old, even though the physical construction of such a thing is relatively trivial.
This isn't the problem I'm getting at. The problem I'm getting at is that it'd be highly unlikely for an intelligent lifeform (or really any) to develop under those extreme conditions. Advancing under other conditions and then developing towards extreme conditions after they have reached a sufficiently advanced state is a different issue.
For extreme conditions like operating at a speed much faster to us (imperceptible) would mean that they would be under high amounts of acceleration than compared to us. Gravity already puts major constraints on humans and for a lifeform to be operating at a rate imperceptible to us we're not talking about 10x or 100x the gravity but more like 10^10^10^10 (or more). Mind you that their internal reference frames (their internal clocks) would operate at a different speed than what we see their clock moving at. Subatomic particles have a difficult time operating at a fraction of that gravitational force. That means you have no building blocks.
What you're not considering is that I've accounted for things like chemical processes and electrical processes not being needed. The problem is that I don't know how you get two particles to change state (at least in non-extreme or destructive ways) under the conditions you're talking about. This isn't about "oh we just don't know" it is that there are some things we do know. We know that lifeforms have to be able to change their state (e.g. you can move your fingers or you can have a thought. These are state changes). We know the basic building blocks of the universe, quarks (or at best strings). There's certain rules these things have to abide by. You can let your imagination run wild but there are still limits of what you can do within this universe. And any being even visiting this universe would still be subject to these rules even if they were from a different universe that had a different set of rules. You can't just trash these rules in the spirit of imagination (which btw testing and updating these rules is what the job of a physicist or really any scientist is. But it is still a convergent process).
Creating things that last longer than an individual's lifetime isn't hard at all. We've done it by accident, they are called artifacts. Nature does it all the time, they are called fossils or just dirt. Trees last longer than human lifetimes. I know you think you're keeping an open mind but instead what you've done is limited it. Operating within the bounds of the rules doesn't have to be a limiting process. There may still be an infinite number of configurations under these rules. But abandoning them makes your search space so open (and open in a way where you wouldn't expect to find solutions) that you can never find what you're looking for. It is like if you're looking for needles in a haystack and arguing that the way to find the needle is to add more hay because the needle is inside the hay.
Some portion of this chapter is occasionally excerpted to deflate claims about extraordinarily large or small purported alien creatures, though Haldane was setting up an argument for dynamically limited systems in general.
I thought it might be an interesting skim given the similarities to your comment above.
With the material explained away, the lack signals is much easier to explain in that we haven't listened long and we can only hear very loud signals. (Or maybe advanced civs don't use light and use gravity waves or tachyon beams or whatever, but you don't even need to go that far.) The only way we hear a signal is if it's:
1. loud (high energy) and aimed directly at us, like a tight beam
2. EXTREMELY LOUD and aimed everywhere, isotropically
1 is unlikely since they'd have to know where we are; 2 is unlikely since you're talking about an insane level of energy. If it's the case that civs don't seem to be making Dyson spheres or harvesting whole galaxies for energy, being able to throw around that kind of power is prohibitively expensive. In both these cases, the inverse square law applies (for every unit x of distance, the light's x² less bright). Ironically, that means we're more likely to detect signals from an improbably close civilization (like 4 light years next door, in Alpha Centuari), than from farther away -- and even then, by a chance sweep of an umodulated asteroid scanning beam[0] or something, if we happened to be paying attention at the time.
This assumes that there are gazillons of alien civs yet somehow they all come to the same decision. That's much less likely than gazillions of alien civs all make different decisions and it only takes a single one to make the replicating probs or try to colonize.
If there were 50 other Earths scattered around the galaxy (ones that have been broadcasting like us but for longer) should the first television have imnediately picked up interstellar "I Love Lucy" or would it be faint anomalies from SETI? Somewhere in between?
So any SETI signals we might detect would almost certainly need to be intentional. That doesn't mean they would need to be responses to something we've broadcast just the sender was aiming their transmitter towards the solar system and sent a signal.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140719094337/http://www.comput...
For the Fermi paradox, the paradox is that the immensity of the universe leading to life seems obvious, yet the complete absence of that life around us seems to show it's not there. So it disproves nothing, but actually highlights the difficulty of disproving either claim given the other.
Of course, it's also possible for civilizations to be so far away that we will like never detect them due to the inverse square law. They could even be in parts of the universe we can't observe.
It's an interesting idea, but it raises the reasonable (IMHO) question, "Why would they bother?"
It seems like an awfully big investment of resources for actions which wouldn't be of real benefit to them.
The theory has catchy name, but even the earth's nature disproves it.
I feel like a lot of so-called solutions to the Fermi paradox fail when they speculate on what "aliens" would do. Would they seal us off and make a zoo, or find it morally wrong to contact us, etc, etc. It's bold to assume a single policy, since there would likely be multiple alien civilizations, or multiple factions even if there is only one.
So I give this one more credit in that once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true and it more or less dictates that you answer it if it is true. However, I'm not convinced that with 100% knowledge of physics you would find yourself so vulnerable. And even if you were, it still seems various forms of containment would be just as effective as a genocidal attack.
This one kind of works because it only takes one civilisation to block us and keep the others out.
> once you have reached 100% understanding of physics, you will know whether this premise true or not true
How does understanding physics give you the certainty?
As a solution to the paradox that would assume that all civilisations are extremely xenophobic and also always assume that collaboration is impossible.
BTW: my current belief is that most likely life is just super-rare (phosphorus problem, and way too many required variables) and also that colonising a galaxy is probably a sub-optimal solution for overpopulation.
Applied to a forest on earth, you'd have to make the animals are extremely slow.
Nature doesn’t care if we think there should be aliens or FTL travel. Nature doesn’t like casualty violated and that means we’re all going to be following its rules on the speed of causality. There are no cosmic-scale sentient forces that can shape space-time near us or else we would have noticed in observations decades ago.
Sadly, I could see it. Some billionaire somewhere wants "The Best" latency numbers and wants it on their yacht...
I think what he's trying to convey is that thinking of this object under the assumption of "aliens" pushes us to develop experimental technology to prove it. This could then lead to future advances (whether intentional or accidental) potentially helping us detect alien technology where we otherwise wouldn't be able to had we not begun that pursuit. He's looking at it from a very long-term perspective.
For those out there who, like me, don't know these acronyms:
GRBs == Gamma-Ray Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst
FRBs == Fast Radio Bursts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_radio_burst
Listen to his interviews, he is talking about his colleagues at Harvard, not the general public. They are the ones saying things like "I wish it never existed because we can't explain it"
>>it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens".
Again, this is not at all what he is saying. Read his paper and listen to his interviews. It exhibits the signs and being an artificial construct, and he even points to a similar object that was detected that turned out to be a booster launched back in the 50s. You can't easily explain the acceleration of the object with known natural entities like comets and asteroids. It showed no plume nor ejecta, yet seemed to gain speed equivalent to 10% of its mass being ejected. The reason the booster did this was due to the push of solar winds on a thin shell of a hollow object. Hence the theory that this may be some kind of alien solar sail. It does have an extremely odd geometry. The renderings of it being a large turd of an asteroid is pure speculation. There is no clear picture of it. I bet if Voyager 1 made it to another star system it would accelerate also due to its thin surfaces and exhibit the same profile, albeit smaller. And we left a gold disk with our address on it. What if it has technology that we haven't even conceived of? It actually would be worth while for our species to mount an expedition to catch up with it and turn it around. Sounds expensive but wow would it be huge if it was an alien craft.
The big unknown for me about the object is that we don’t actually have a good idea about its shape. Drawings show it has a cigar shaped rock, which is only one possible configuration compatible with the radio reflections. If only we could have actually seen the object, a lot of this uncertainty would have been eliminated.
After ruling out solar-radiation pressure, drag- and friction-like forces, interaction with solar wind for a highly magnetized object, and geometric effects originating from 'Oumuamua potentially being composed of several spatially separated bodies or having a pronounced offset between its photocentre and centre of mass, we find comet-like outgassing to be a physically viable explanation, provided that 'Oumuamua has thermal properties similar to comets. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29950718/
PDF: https://csnbiology.org/rw_common/plugins/stacks/armadillo/me...
PS: At to extreme velocity, something large traveling 0.1+ c or even 0.01c is very likely to be aliens. This was fast, but a long way from those kind of speeds.
The model predictions for the magnitude and temporal evolution of the non-gravitational acceleration are within a factor of about 2–3 of the observations (see Methods) for a water production rate of QH2O = 4.9 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 1.5 kg s−1) near 1.4 au and an addi- tional contribution from QCO = 4.5 × 1025 molecules s−1 (or 2.1 kg s−1). Outgassing at this level does not conflict with the absence of spectro- scopic detections for outgassing of OH, because the values quoted are well below the spectroscopic limits on production rates16. However, the inferred upper limits for water production at 1.4 au, which are based on the non-detection of CN7 and assumed Solar System abundances for QCN/QOH17, show that ‘Oumuamua would need to be substantially depleted in CN (by a factor of more than about 15) relative to water.
And:
However, if the grains are predominantly larger than a few hundred micrometres to millimetres, they would not have been detected at optical wavelengths (see Methods). In the Solar System, comet 2P/Encke is noteworthy for its lack of small dust near perihelion18. Cometary behaviour implies that ‘Oumuamua must have some internal strength, at least comparable to Solar System comets19, because asteroid-like densities are ruled out (see Methods).
It’s an interesting read, suggesting interstellar space as being significantly different than what you see inside solar systems.
Chicken and egg problem. We won't know until people are with unconventional ideas are free to try pursuing them without being mocked as "tin-foil hats" or "conspiracy nutjobs" or whatever.
Let's take a moment to remember how many similarly not-at-all-related-to-space travel inventions have been made due to fighting the space race (who gets first to the moon) (like the CDs).
I believe the quote is not a specific evidence for anything. It's a call for us to adhere to a slightly different principle:
"Let's explore, for we are far from knowing everything and we shouldn't mock people who investigate things that to the majority look absurd. They might indeed be absurd but every now and then we make interesting discoveries".
Uh... this isn't at all clear to me. I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be, its just that it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Recall that the scientific community has gotten its hopes up about aliens several times in the past with scientist proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few.
If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?