>>Hundreds of scientists have pointed this out to Penrose — repeatedly and consistently over a period of more than 10 years — who continues to ignore the field and plow ahead with his contentions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/01/28/the-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/10/08/no-r...
But if anybody is wrong and oumuamua was in fact an alien device looking for us (intelligent life), almost certainly it has found us. What happens next is entirely out of human hands, unless we can realize that event.
Maybe is nothing more than some kind of probe or long range satellite, but it could be a scout ship, or an early warning sensor, and we're just in course to meet the rest of the hardware from where oumuamua came from.
Is really rational just plainly deny the chance of that rock being pure luck of not having found a big fleet of some interestellar things and having to figure out if they are friendly or not as they approach the planet?
Probably the space force and the whole stuff many countries are sending to all the solar system since 2018 are just a coincidence, or may be other people is also worried about what happens next if oumuamua was not just a weird rock.
We would not have been able to detect this object two decades ago. So the "event" is that our observation capabilities have grown past some threshold, not that anything has changed in our solar system. Whether rocks or alien probes, these types of objects must always have been passing through our solar system with some regularity. We'll get a a chance to study others soon enough.
Edit: this video by Scott Manley helps to get a sense of how our ability to detect asteroids has grown over time: https://youtu.be/BKKg4lZ_o-Y
This is an attack piece that targets Avi Loeb's character. It's disturbing that the author of the piece is himself an astrophycisist and I have to wonder, if Avi Loeb is calling upon the court of public opinion, what else is this piece, published in Forbes rather than a science venue, doing exactly?
Science is a debate. For there to be a debate, there have to be differing opinions. And for there to be differing opinions, there has to be the freedom of scientists to express their opinions. Even poorly supported opinions like Avi Loeb's. What hurts science is bombastic invocations of "the large amounts of research done by other professionals who specialize in this particular field" - as an attempt to stiffle an opionion the author is not fond of with an appeal to authority.