The article really falls down at the end where the conclusion is basically, "I don't care about people's privacy concerns and discomfort because I like street photography and enjoy making it." With a hint of, "and other people like to look at it, too. (Ignoring the uncomfortable people who would immediately refuse to have their photograph displayed, if asked)". So the author is basically arguing that they know better than their subjects and think their favorite hobby is good for society. That's not a very convincing justification.
As others have mentioned, being surveilled for specific purposes which we can generally assume will be viewed by one or zero people is different than being frozen in time for many people to dissect and judge.
The success of Xbox resulted from what was essentially an internal con job. It survived to launch and succeeded because the team responsible managed to keep a straight face about several important lies about what Xbox would be to the rest of the company's leadership and BG himself.
After reading more of "Harvard astronomer"'s comments, I think "paid us a visit" is a bit pointed and unfair.
Considering the unknown odds and likelihood of life/ intelligent life in the universe, ranging from nil to high, it isn't unreasonable to propose that exceptionally unusual space junk is just that - flotsam or jetsam from others. We're certainly on track to be discarding large amounts of our own across the universe. Compare to the amount of plastic in the ocean - it has to go somewhere.
Even if it acted under its own power, that doesn't mean that "it came here to spy on us", or that it noticed us at all. Even speculating on the purpose and function goes beyond reasonable, and Loeb doesn't.
He doesn't claim it's self powered. He claims that it may have the form of a sheet instead of the form of the cigar. This shape is similar to a solar sail[2], and the shape cause a small acceleration by the solar light.
[1] Every time this is repost, I'd like to repost an angry rant about pushing the "alien" solution for a problem where we clearly have not enough data.
OTOH, his claims have actually probably made him the most famous Harvard astronomer. I pay little attention to astronomy, and I certainly can't name any other Harvard astronomers.
He was on Sean Carroll's podcast and he sounded pretty reasonable to me. He clearly doesn't think "aliens" is the only or necessarily even the best explanation, just one that can't be eliminated and it's worth thinking about.
One thing that I'm curious about. Where and when did it come from?
(A) Assuming sub-light travel, (B) no energy/mass-intensive interstellar major course corrections, (C) planetary origin... shouldn't we be able to work out where and when it was last in the vicinity of a viable source?
And at the distances (and therefore timescales) we're talking about, we might also hit low-metallicity systems... which would make intelligent, space-faring life less likely.
(Not impossible, but getting around convenient chemistry at a civilization-scale seems unlikely)
It’s hard to tell since it’s velocity is very close to the mean of the velocities of systems in our local neighborhood. We do know that it probably passed close to another system (Oort cloud distance) but no exact origin has been identified.
The article really falls down at the end where the conclusion is basically, "I don't care about people's privacy concerns and discomfort because I like street photography and enjoy making it." With a hint of, "and other people like to look at it, too. (Ignoring the uncomfortable people who would immediately refuse to have their photograph displayed, if asked)". So the author is basically arguing that they know better than their subjects and think their favorite hobby is good for society. That's not a very convincing justification.
As others have mentioned, being surveilled for specific purposes which we can generally assume will be viewed by one or zero people is different than being frozen in time for many people to dissect and judge.