This is not the quality of pseudoscience infotainment to which I have grown accustomed | by Steve Desch | Aug, 2025 | Medium
Teasing the public with fraudulent or self-deluded promises of aliens used to mean something. It took work. It meant slapping together ropes and planks of wood and trampling miles of barley in the dead of night, hundreds of times, over 13 years. It meant riveting 1/8th sheet steel into a 3 m-high monolith and depositing it in the Utah desert. Even theoretical works used to require huge leaps of logic and real effort: to turn 1I/’Oumuamua — a building-sized chunk of nitrogen ice — into a defunct solar sail from a network of interstellar buoys emplaced by a Galaxy-spanning civilization, or to misinterpret common seafloor iron-rich spherules as “steel-titanium alloys” likely from an “alien gadget”. In contrast, the latest release from Avi Loeb and collaborators — that maybe the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is alien technology — feels phoned in, like they’re just going through the motions. Where, I ask, is the dedication to the craft?
A hastily written article on a clickbaity topic, posted to arXiv by Loeb and collaborators, used to be something we could look forward to. ‘Oumuamua was discovered in 2017; within the year, Loeb was claiming it was an alien solar sail. Phosphine gas was tentatively detected in Venus’s atmosphere in September 2020 and got a lot of press; not a month passed before Loeb was speculating on the biomass and claiming bacteria could be “scooped up” and carried by meteors between Earth and Venus. If astronomers made a catalog of objects, you just knew he was going to see spaceships in them — whether an interstellar solar sail probe for the 2014 meteor in the CNEOS (Center for Near-Earth Object Studies) database, or the lost Venera 2 spacecraft for a dark comet. We’ve come to count on Loeb to turn legitimately exciting space discoveries into aliens, aliens, aliens with the regularity of movies in the Spider Man franchise.
