cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/23487304

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?