I haven’t read any of Loeb’s recent anything because, and I cannot stress this enough, is a crackpot trying to sell books and get media attention. I used to follow him because I liked the idea of being open to studying more areas of astronomy with an open mind to figuring out if there are unknowns we’ve been missing like Von Neuman probes in the asteroid belts and so on.

But since those earlier days of speculation, he has gotten more and more radical and “grifty” and disrespecting his own peers like the head of SETI and declaring anything that moves to be possible signs of aliens, to say nothing of his doubling down on recovering industrial waste from an expensive mission to retrieve ocean gunk on some longshot, hyperbolic narrative that he knew where an alien ship crashed. He does nothing but media and podcast tours and doesn’t take criticism. Not a scientist.

We can do better.