It turns out that there are countries whose entire raison d’etre is to set up legislation and regulations to attract gobs of largely unscrutinised wealth from foreigners and then to obstruct any attempts by anyone, including superpowers, to get at it.
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What interests me about Loeb s work is not the specifics of his case for the artificial origin of the Oumuamua object. (See Avi Loeb: Nature Does Not Produce Such Things. ) I don t know enough observational astronomy and physics to have a decent opinion about that.
ID in Mainstream Science
Rather, I am VERY interested in the logical structure of Loeb s argument, as it currently represents the most salient example of risky intelligent design reasoning in mainstream science. Risky is the appropriate adjective here, because while design inferences are commonplace throughout science, where any human activity is concerned (e.g., remote sensing of industrial pollutants, archaeological discovery, cryptanalysis), they are exceedingly rare or non-existent when the intelligence in question is not human. (I am excluding animals, such as crows, chimps, or octopuses.) Loeb s inference is risky because he is pushing against conventional wisdom, extending intelligent causation as a hypothes