Oh, so as part of your concern that it shouldn't be "improper" to think about, discuss, or enjoy Loeb's ideas, you suggest that the author of that video should "feel bad" about criticizing it? Nice, that's really cool of you. Loeb is allowed to enjoy the ideas of it being an alien spaceship about to Dark Forest us, but no one is allowed to push back against it.

There's no such thing as a "dispute" about what ideas are proper to discuss and enjoy. There might be a dispute concerning leveraging Harvard credentials and a Harvard domain name to distribute playtime fun math with no basis in observational reality, because the first thing every article written about this paper will now say is "Harvard researcher" [1]. That's academic misconduct. Go start a substack; I'm sure Joe Rogan would love to have you on a guest, and you might even get Netflix to give you a show [2]. Three beautiful avenues available to even the most crackpot individuals; way more profitable, too.

Loeb states "there has been to-date absolutely no sign from spectroscopic analysis of cometary activity on 3I/ATLAS." A week later: Look at that, its ejecting water and is almost definitely a comet [3].

If you walk into a doctor's appointment with a tummy ache, and the doctor says "well, its probably just food poisoning, but wouldn't it be a fun exercise to pretend its stomach cancer?"; be serious, do you believe that is an appropriate way for a doctor to behave? Why would anyone think that any professional in any field, most of all at a respected institution like Harvard, should be held to such low standards of behavior? Discussion and postulation is awesome and fine, but if you can't consider the implications of your authority and the choice of medium, you won't have either for very long.

[1] https://www.wionews.com/trending/when-will-alien-invasion-on...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Apocalypse

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14916

So you're feeling like some sense of propriety of being violated? I think they are doing great work.

We probably have very different expectations. Why do you care and what is the perceived harm?