‘Oumuamua, SETI and the Media

One of the more important things about the interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua is the nature of the debate it has engendered. Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb’s paper examining it as a possible technology has provoked comment throughout the scientific community, as witness Jason Wright’s essay below. Dr. Wright (Penn State) heads the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Techologies (G-HAT) project, which he described in these pages, and is a key player in the rapidly developing field of Dysonian SETI, the study of possible artifacts as opposed to deliberate communications from extraterrestrial civilizations. Here he looks at the debate Loeb’s work has engendered and its implications not only for how we do science but how we teach its values to those just coming into the field. Jason’s essay was originally posted several days ago on his Astrowright blog, which should be a regular stop for Centauri Dreams readers.

by Jason T. Wright

Avi Loeb is the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard, a distinguished and well cited astronomer (he has an h-index of 87), and the chair of the Breakthrough Starshot initiative. He’s a strong proponent of making sure that science doesn’t succumb to groupthink and champion of outré ideas.

He also has been making headlines recently for articles he has co-authored, interviews he has given, and popular media columns he has written about the possibility that fast radio bursts, and now ‘Oumuamua, are artificial in origin. This has created a great deal of buzz in popular culture and a lot of hand-wringing and criticism on social media by scientists who find his actions irresponsible. Many have asked my opinion, so I’m collecting my many thoughts on the topic in this post.

I am happy to defend Avi on these grounds:

He is driving us to have an important conversation about what “acceptable” SETI research looks like, and in this conversation I’m mostly on his side. He’s essentially moving the scientific equivalent of the “Overton Window” towards SETI, and that’s a good thing. These are exciting and interesting questions and we should not let the face-on-Mars/Ancient-Aliens/UFOlogy types prevent us from discussing them.
He is using tenure and his stature the way we all imagine it’s supposed to be used: as a shield so that he can explore potentially unpopular research avenues without fear of retribution or ostracism. We all imagine that’s what we would do in his position (I hope!) but too often it ends up just being a club to get junior scientists to conform to one’s vision for what “proper” science looks like and what “good” problems are.
The papers he and his postdocs are writing are important first steps in making Solar System and other forms of SETI a serious academic discipline.
He is being a role model for how scientists can explore outré ideas and spend an appropriate amount of their time on potential breakthroughs.
He is putting SETI in the public eye and doing a lot of outreach.

Image: Harvard’s Avi Loeb, at the center of the discussion of ‘Oumuamua. Credit: Harvard University.

Avi wouldn’t be pushing the envelope hard enough if he weren’t getting some pushback, and indeed there is plenty of fair and good-faith criticism that can be made about his approach (not all of which I agree with):

The degree of certainty he expresses in ‘Oumuamua being artificial does seem unwarranted to me (though to be fair I’ve always been an ‘Oumuamua-might-be-artificial skeptic.)
Given the way we know the press (especially the yellow press) will handle any story about “aliens”, one can argue that the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” maxim is especially applicable to SETI (I’ve made this argument strongly when discussing my own research in the press.) Avi could hew more closely to this maxim.
The tone of his papers and his public comments are quite divergent. The body of the paper on ‘Oumuamua-as-lightsail, for instance, has a brief mention about the potential of the artifice of ‘Oumuamua at the end, but most of it is about the perfectly general problem of thin objects in interstellar space. Snopes highlights this divergence well pointing out that the paper is quite sober and restrained compared to some of the media coverage. (It’s true that the title and abstract of the paper are about ‘Oumuamua specifically, and that it serves as the case study for the whole analysis.) Avi’s public statements are much less conservative and equivocal.
He is not just quietly following the evidence; he is using his platform to have a very public and high-visibility discussion about his research. I will concede that Avi is an exception to my earlier (somewhat petulant) protest that SETI scientists are not in it for the attention. That said, I will object to anyone who would claim Avi is only in it for the attention, or that such attention is inherently a bad thing.
Many of his papers are de novo explorations of topics like the fate of comets in interstellar space, with little connection to the substantial amounts of work that has already been done on the topic, and his papers would be better and less naive if they had a closer connection to this prior work rather than starting from scratch.

Uh… I'll just say there's some relevant literature for the erosion of comets by the ISM. Also, the literature for lightcurves is pretty extensive. The paper does not attempt to show that a tumbling flat sheet is a non-rejectable fit to the available lightcurve data.

— Michele Bannister (@astrokiwi) December 26, 2018

More broadly, let’s look at two threads on Twitter criticizing Avi. I’ll start with this one by Bryan Gaensler:

New theories need to make predictions. If reality doesn’t match predictions, your theory is wrong.

The problem with aliens as a theory is that if your predictions fail, you can just give your aliens additional new powers and adjust your theory.

— Bryan Gaensler