The ultimate October surprise (ET crash market)

I don’t have the technical expertise to understand let alone critique what Harvard physicist Avi Loeb is arguing here. He claims on the basis of essentially statistical arguments that there’s a good probability that a newly discovered interstellar object racing through the solar system is actually an alien probe, most likely of some sort of hostile intent. I do know that there are all sorts of reasons to assume from what I daresay could be called Bayesian priors that the odds that an interstellar object moving through the solar system is an alien spacecraft — this is the third such object that’s been discovered, all three within the last eight years — are almost inexpressibly tiny.

And this right here doesn’t exactly quell my skepticism:

For now, given the small number of known interstellar objects so far, we learn something fundamentally new from each of them. However, once our collection includes a large statistical sample, some groups of objects will belong to distinct classes, providing us with population statistics. There will always be outliers that do not resemble Solar System asteroids or comets. Among them, there might also be products of alien technologies, either in the form of space trash or functional devices.

Today, I received a text message from a fan who after reading my essays on 3I/ATLAS over the past couple of weeks, decided to place an options trade on the Volatility Index (VIX) of the S&P 500 index that will expire on October 29, 2025, the date when 3I/ATLAS will arrive closest to the Sun — just in case this will turn out to be a civilization altering event. This bet against market uncertainty is the first time that my scientific research, in this case my third paper on 3I/ATLAS, affected investor trading in the stock market.

Okey dokey.

A couple of years ago I mentioned Andrew Gelman’s critique of one of the sudden upswell in credulous stories about what used to be called UFOs, and to my admittedly amateur eye Loeb’s speculations would seem to fall into this general category. But again I don’t have the expertise to independently critique his arguments.

Speaking of Harvard professors who have gotten unhinged by ET Fever, I’ll once again plug Ralph Blumenthal’s fascinating biography of John Mack, the former head of the Harvard psychiatry department — he also won a Pulitzer for his biography of T.E. Lawrence — who became convinced that his patients who claimed to have been abducted by aliens were neither lying nor delusional, so . . . (Among other things this is a classic study in fundamental questions about academic freedom).

ETA: Commenter Lee points to this piece, which provides an all too prosaic and predictable account of what’s really going on here.