Intentionality of the path is a good prerequisite of the object being technological, and its hostility is a possibility given the Dark Forest resolution is true (which we can't prove nor disprove). The sentence sounds a bit sensationalist but it seems scientifically valid to me, considering this is an area where we have little more than a bunch of unprovable hypotheses.

His argument regarding the trajectory into our Solar System is pretty flaky. It completely disregards Hopkin's computation of a "steep entry angle" and supposition that it comes from the "thick disk", instead assuming the incoming trajectories of interstellar objects are uniformly distributed across the celestial sphere.

Mass distribution in our galaxy is decidedly anisotropic - most mass lies in the galatic plane.

Loeb's estimate of the comet size is strange, when two observatories concur that the maximum size is around 10km.

Look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44713579 for links to real science.

"There is zero testing of the hypothesis" - He, as well as multiple unrelated others, also wrote papers detailing available options to intercept the object by re-purposing existing satellites from Mars or Jupiter, which would allow for data collection which would directly test the hypothesis.

The fact you think aliens are ridiculous in an infinite universe is more ridiculous.

> if it was framed more as fiction

At some point, however fact-based, every speculation is a form of fiction, so the line is blurry ...

> The title and the abstract suggest they take this possibility seriously, which is ridiculous.

... but I'd say it's I think the idea is to take some serious and very realistic bits that have a vanishingly low probability ...

> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%

... and then walk from there as rigorously as possible.

As they say, "largely a pedagogical exercise".

There's still a line between the hardest hard sci-fi story about a Boltzmann brain and a fact-based thought experiment computing probabilities for a giant marshmallow to spontaneously appear in the vacuum of space.

it could naturally be made of up of M&Ms

That's silly. It's made up of Milky Ways.

When and if alien life is discovered, there’s a high chance the discoverer will be someone who’s spent their career searching for it, rather than someone just stumbling across ironclad proof one fine day.

I’m inclined to let those searchers speculate in public. If society’s rule is that you can’t even speculate about X until you have proof, it will hold back science significantly. History has many such examples of forbidden speculation leading to long delays.

There's been very few interstellar objects he's claimed as alien, in fact only one - and for onomua (or however it was spelt) he also said the most likely outcome would be a natural object. His expedition to recover metal spheroids from the ocean floor was a fascinating one which garnered a lot of support and I believe still had value in devising methods to recover impact materials from underwater.

So really it's the same thing, he gets a lot of aggressive pushback online for mentioning 'aliens', but generally speaking nothing he says or does is actually that baseless.

Though we should also bear in mind that the wolf in that story eventually showed up.