Lex Fridman
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2021–2023
2:43:51 · 6M views · Jan 14, 2021
Lex Fridman interviews Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb about the interstellar object Oumuamua, aliens and black holes. Loeb lays out his argument that it may be an artifact rather than debris.
HN recommends it as a good, non-sensational presentation of Loeb's actual argument, usually linked in Oumuamua threads.
5 comments from Hacker News
Lex Fridman had a really good interview with Avi Loeb about Oumuamua, among other things, about a week ago. Highly recommend! this video
There's a good interview with Avi Loeb on the Lex Fridman podcast about this very topic. His actual argument is fairly compelling and doesn't really sound sensational at all, IMO. this video
For context, this is a paper by Avi Loeb [1,2], the "Oumuamua is an interstellar spaceship" researcher. In this paper, Avi explores a possible interstellar origin meteorite. He used data from US air defence senors that had tracked a highly unusual atmospheric entry nearly a decade ago. This object was theorized as a possible extrasolar trajectory meteorite when it had entered the earth's atmosphere. [3,4] Avi recently chartered a research expedition in an attempt to dredge up samples of this meteorite from the sea floor. [1] [LINK] [2] this video [3] [LINK] [4] [LINK]
He has an interview with Lex Fridman here: this video I haven't listened to the whole thing, but he seems to think that aliens visiting our solar system is likely enough that it makes sense to look for. He falls short of the confident certainty I usually expect from cranks though, he's talking about investigating possibilities. I think he's eccentric, but I wouldn't call him a crank.
The author of this article has been on several podcasts including Lex Fridman's, where he has discussed these issues further: this video .