His battle is only partly about Oumuamua. That is just a vehicle for his arguments. The real issue is the bias against life detection experiments generally. Want to sample soil on mars and measure oxygen absorption? Great. We will put your sensor on the next rover. Want to pour nutrients on that soil and see if anything eats it? Go away you crazy person. Want to detect methane in an exoplanet atmosphere? Here is your telescope time. Want to detect CFCs, a likely technosignature? Good luck getting them to return your emails. That bias against definitive binary life detection efforts, solid yes/no answers, underpins Loeb's points on Oumuamua. If we are serious about life detection we should be looking for indisputable artifacts of both primitive and complex life, the later of which includes technological life.

Loeb must also fight against widespread public assumptions about the hunt for life, specifically that people think SETI is a giant organization always scanning the sky. The public thinks the scientific community is actually putting in a solid effort to look for aliens. They aren't. We as a society spend more on candycrush than the entire SETI project. Want a definitive answer on whether the next Oumuamua is a light sail? Cough up the money so the scientists can buy the telescope time.

Science money is very limited. Space science money more limited. Space science money to get components on rovers yet more limited. Telescope time is also limited. Mission time on remote probes is also limited.

So you devise an experiment to measure oxygen absorption that uses a probe's existing mass spectrometer. Your experiment doesn't cut into the probe's mass budget so it basically is just a scheduling issue. If your experiment is bumped from the mission schedule there's not compromising the probe or total mission. You've got a pretty good chance of getting that experiment on the docket.

This is contrary to a nutrient experiment that eats into the probe's mass budget and mission time. If the sensors are dedicated to the experiment that's less mass for other sensors. Even if you got approved if you can't built the experiment to be reliable and survivable it won't get approved.

Similar is true for trying to measure CFCs on exoplanets. There's a handful of instruments that can even get spectra from exoplanets and even then only from transiting ones and even then only has giants so far. Even if we could detect CFCs in terrestrial planet atmospheres, CFCs do not stay in the atmosphere very long so you'd only detect them (from a technological civilization) for a very short window of time. The odds of finding them are vanishingly low with current instruments. No one is going to return your e-mails if you propose observations of CFCs because it's a snipe hunt wasting valuable and limited instrument time. If you're a serious researcher you'd know this already and wouldn't waste people's time. Methane is a general purpose biomarker and is something far more likely to be found. Since you've got a limited stars you can even gather information from the time is better spent on the more likely observation.

>> if you propose observations of CFCs because it's a snipe hunt wasting valuable and limited instrument time.

That's what they said about hot jupiters. Exoplanets could have been detected decades earlier had there not been a consistent bias against the idea of large objects orbiting so near host stars, a bias based on a single data point (our solar system).

It's unlikely many types of exoplanets could have been detected "decades" earlier. Transit and Doppler detection methods require good seeing power and accurate intensity measurements. It takes large mirrors with good optics for good seeing power and sensitive electronics for the spectral/intensity measurements. Those two things weren't readily available until the past few decades...which surprise is when exoplanet discoveries started happening.

Hot Jupiters and CFCs are very different things. Hot Jupiters were puzzling but something that could be readily detected by existing instruments. Once discovered solar system development models were improved.

CFCs in a planet's atmosphere is something current instruments can't detect. Even if they could the number of observational candidates is limited. The only way we could detect CFCs is if some civilization was actively producing them at the time that light left the planet. So even if there's millions of CFC producing civilizations in the galaxy the odds of detecting those CFCs in candidate systems is extremely low. Even if those civilizations produced CFCs for millennia the odds are against ever seeing them. So it's pretty wasteful to use valuable telescope time for that rather than something that has a higher probability of giving some results.

It's not about solar system chauvinism or biases. There's not infinite amounts of science money or science time. No one is writing off unlikely events, it's just breathless searches for those unlikely events has a huge opportunity cost. And talking about biases, assuming technological civilizations will produce CFCs is a very Earth/Human biased assumption. CFCs were/are produced on Earth for market reasons that don't necessarily apply in any circumstances except those that worked out on Earth.

>> It's unlikely many types of exoplanets

Ya, but if people were allowed to look for hot jupiters in the 70s/80s they would have found the first exoplanet far sooner.

Allowed? No one was banned from looking for Hot Jupiters. They weren't an expected phenomenon. The instruments to detect them also didn't/barely exist in the 70s and 80s and they're some of the easiest exoplanets to detect.

Fun fact. Amateur astronomers can use photometry to detect some transiting exoplanets using as small as a 4'' telescope on a night with good seeing. Atmospheric composition is a different matter.

> Those two things weren't readily available until the past few decades...which surprise is when exoplanet discoveries started happening.

I think the other poster might be alluding to a chicken-and-egg situation: could a stronger theoretical basis for the existence of 'Hot Jupiters' have driven development toward the goal of their detection 20 years earlier?

Hot Jupiters were unknown until they were discovered once instruments were sensitive enough to detect them. No major planetary development models predicted them. The current best explanation for them is they formed much further out from their parent stars and migrated inward. The migration phenomena is still poorly understood, it wasn't on anyone's radar in the 70s and 80s.

So until Hot Jupiters were discovered they were not predicted. No one even thought to look for them. No one was thinking about Hot Jupiter detectors that just didn't get funding.

Had billions of dollars flowed into astronomy instead of particle accelerators exoplanets (of all types) might have been discovered earlier. Then again they may not have. It's a pointless "what if".

Is methane really a general purpose biomarker? I thought methane ice was pretty common on astrological bodies, and thus vast majority of methane in the universe is not created by biological processes.

Atmospheric methane on a terrestrial planet would be a biomarker. Bio-suggestion maybe. Free methane in the atmosphere of a planet anywhere near the habitable zone of a star would be readily broken down. If there's a good amount detected it suggests replenishment by biological processes. Biological processes are definitely not the only source of methane. It's enough to warrant more observations or even new instruments.

I mean, you're just reciting the arguments that the science establishment generally recites.

We have spent tons of money on particle accelerators to no clear benefit, either to science or to society. If a similar amount of money had gone to SETI, many of the above objections would have been addressed and resolved, with the advantage that science is being done which the average person paying for it is likely to a) understand what is being asked and b) be interested in the answer.

I did pull my arguments out of the "Big Astronomy: Let's Keep Down The Little Guys" playbook. Come off it. The "science establishment" repeats things because there's compelling evidence and scientific rigor supporting those things. It's not some "Big Science" conspiracy.

Particle accelerators have exploratory experiments like hunting the Higgs boson with LHC but they run lots of other experiments as well. There's also lots of particle accelerators (of varying capability) around so if you devise an experiment needing one you likely have several options unless you literally need the LHC.

With large telescopes there's far fewer available and the sky is pretty big. Radio SETI is a long shot search and optical SETI even more so. It's not that they lack merit but getting funding for telescope time is a lot harder when the chance of any positive finding is very remote. A lot of SETI funding actually piggybacks on other research using the same telescopes.

The chances of SETI finding positive results isn't necessarily from a lack of things to find but from physical limitations. Our best radio telescopes could only detect Earth's more powerful radio emissions from a few light years away. Broadcasts like TV and radio wouldn't be detectable outside the solar system. The inverse square law is a stone cold bitch for interstellar communication. SETI's best hope of finding signals are ones intentional ones.

Even with billions of dollars SETI would have similar chances of detecting an ETI as without. It's a needle in a haystack search with warehouse sized haystacks. More money doesn't necessarily get it done much faster or better. There's a limited number of sites for large radio telescopes and they have limited fields of view and stars are only in that FOV for a limited time. More money might let you search the warehouse sized haystack a few times faster but it's still a vast search space.

You’re putting a lot of words in his mouth. He did an AMA on reddit yesterday where he had every chance to say such things if that’s what he thinks, but he did little more than list his accomplishments and link to his books and articles.

https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/l6xl3d/askscien...

Or you just has not listened to his conversations with Lex Fridman, Sean Carroll and Joe Rogan among others.

Note that I said "his battle" rather than "his words". He is but one voice in the fight against the particular scientific bias I described. Had Oumuamua not come along, he would have attached to any number of other vehicles (eg BLC-1) to make basically the same points.

At least one Mars lander has discovered ice and evidence of briny water beneath the soil. The fact that we have not sent a microscope just baffles me.

I do get the sense that for whatever reason there is a bias against explicitly looking for life. I don't think there's a big conspiracy explanation. I personally think it's what I call the "boring universe brigade," the skeptic ideology that came to dominate science starting in the 1970s that treats fascination as a contrarian indicator. "If it really fascinates people it's probably bullshit."

If there's anything beyond that bias it's probably a fear of triggering fundamentalists.

Edit:

Here's one bit of evidence for possible near surface water at a landing site:

https://www.space.com/209-life-mars-scientist-claims.html

Astronomers are extremely interested in detecting biosognatures in exoplanet atmospheres. This is one of the hottest topics in astronomy right now. They're just not interested in idle speculation about whether or not Oumuamua is a light sail. If there were some measurement that could be done to learn more about Oumuamua, then astronomers would do it, but it's a tiny object that's quite far away now. Most astronomers simply believe that the most likely explanation for the anomalous acceleration is that there was some undetected outgassing from the rock. That's much more plausible than the idea that this one particular object is an alien spaceship - not because there couldn't be alien spaceships somewhere out there, but because there are so many rocks floating around in space.

The one thing that you really can't get funding for is SETI, but that's not the fault of astronomers. That's the fault of congresspeople who ridiculed the search for "little green men" in the 1990s and barred NASA from funding it. Almost all astronomy funding comes from governments, so a government ban on funding a particular line of research means that that research basically won't happen.

I listened to Avi on the latest Mindscape podcast. I'm 99% on his side but I would have loved to hear responses to the idea, how do you distinguish this from hunting for ghosts, souls, E.S.P., telepathy, etc... Someone who believed in those things would pretty much make all the same arguments (eg, have an open mind).

I'm sure there are good arguments to distinguish why searching harder in the directions Avi wants things to go is different from searching for ghosts. It would be nice have heard them.

It's a political problem because basic research on these matters still requires money that mostly comes from the US government.

Space stuff exists because it's a jobs program in the South. The search for life starts crossing lines because it raises awkward questions that challenge politically meaningful people.

End of the day, you don't bite the hand that feeds.

> I'd gotten the impression that Loeb isn't trying to convince the public and scientific community that it was an alien probe so much as is he trying to show it could have been.

That was also my impression. A lot of scientists (rightfully) make fun of the dogmatic view that it must have been an alien probe, but fail to realize their view -- that it must have been _anything but_ an alien probe -- is just as dogmatic.

>I'd gotten the impression that Loeb isn't trying to convince the public and scientific community that it was an alien probe so much as is he trying to show it could have been.

Same, he even went on Planetary Radio on January 27th and said something to the effect of "show me a plausible model that shows this wasn't some sort of craft using a solar sail to accelerate out of the system, I'm happy to be proven wrong".

https://www.planetary.org/planetary-radio/0127-2021-avi-loeb...