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The humiliating truth behind Harvard astronomer’s “alien” spherules

Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb claimed to track down and find alien spherules on the ocean bottom. Here's the sober truth.

One of the most common, and unfortunately well-deserved, tropes is that of an arrogant physicist who shamelessly wanders into a field that’s new to them. Armed with their knowledge, experience, and problem-solving abilities, they falsely believe that their lack of familiarity with an entire field of science is no obstacle to making meaningful contributions that the “mediocre” scientists working in that inferior field would have no chance at making. It’s such a common theme that xkcd made a brilliant comic years ago whose text reads:



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Continuing the long and storied traditions of physicists without shame in exactly this fashion, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb dubiously claimed that:

an interstellar meteor struck Earth in 2014,
that meteor was possibly made of alien technology,
it landed in a specific place in the ocean,
and that his expedition recovered those fragments and determined that they are of alien origin from beyond our Solar System.

Unfortunately for Avi Loeb, actual scientists who understand how this type of science is done are on the case, and the result is clear. Loeb’s claims were baseless, and his position, on the basis of the scientific merits, is nothing but embarrassing.
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Problem #2: the spherules collected, which most certainly were not related to any recent meteor falls, show strong evidence that they not only come from within our own Solar System, but come from the most familiar source of all, the Earth itself. After leading a dubious expedition, where the bottom of the ocean was raked with a magnetic rake and numerous 100 micron-to-1 millimeter metallic spherules were recovered from Loeb’s chosen location, Loeb analyzed these spherules and determined that they were, in fact, of interstellar origin based on the different element and isotope ratios seen inside of these samples.
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Problem #3: Loeb’s claim that the presence of elements rarely found in common meteorites, like Beryllium, Lanthanum, and Uranium, as well as other rare elements, indicate not only an origin beyond our own Solar System, but a technological origin for these samples. Some of these spherules may be tektites, but perhaps others have a different explanation for their properties. The strongest candidate for being the real culprit? Believe it or not, it’s simply ash arising from the burning of coal: a very human activity that has taken place since the start of the industrial revolution, and has, in an aqueous environment, the ability to react with the spherules on the bottom of the sea floor. This was shown to be the case by Patricio Gallardo, who consulted the coal chemical composition (COALQUAL) database before finding a “smoking gun” match to the spherule contents that Loeb reported.

https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/truth-harvard-astronomer-alien-spherules/