David Kipping

Welcome to London!

“Carl… Carl…”

YouTube video by Cool Worlds Podcast #26 Will Kinney - Before the Big Bang, Inflation, Infinity of Worlds

#26 Will Kinney - Before the Big Bang, Inflation, Infinity of Worlds
youtu.be/HSZtn0yKPBI

Oh my God this made my day…

Tolkien’s writings give me a lot of hope here. He argued that evil is its own undoing, it can’t help but destroy itself through its arrogance and pride. I believe that too, dark chapters in human history are always just that - chapters.

They’re all the same, there are no ethical CEOs in this space

I did a double take on that because I don't remember his original article saying this and fortunately I had printed it out. Indeed, it looks he has edited the blog post, so he is responsive! I would of course prefer a clear bold erratum at the top conceding the original version's issues.

I actually wrote to Avi a couple hours ago about the fact I disagreed with his assessment that the Perseverance Navcam images were indeed 3I/ATLAS, and more likely to be Phobos. He responded quickly and "Yes, I have the same doubts about the Navcam images" and his essay had text accounting for that.

Arecibo was destroyed in a storm and then the US declined to rebuild it, so no

👍 I’m going to leave my video unedited but add a comment about Phobos and link you. I think it’s good to leave it as is because it shows how someone can work through the problem even without an ephemeris to challenge a media narrative.

Quel surpris! As I suspected, the Navcam “cyclinder” image bombarding social media, and subject to Avi’s last blog post, is not 3I/ATLAS, it’s Phobos.

Lastly, that bright streak in the Navcam images is actually Phobos. See below for a short analysis of this image.

It's very sad that NASA isn't able to put the record straight with the current political chaos.

bsky.app/profile/stim...

Thanks for that! Ye I strongly suspected it was Phobos too but didn’t have a chance to work through ephemerides. Good to hear about your stacking, makes sense, so your 3I/ATLAS position is a 10-minute average?

I’m sorry to hear about that. I’ve been called everything under the Sun, trust me. I hope I’m wrong, really, but I have a dark foreboding that history is playing out again - that silence is all that’s needed for it to reach a terrible zenith.

If we get through this, I predict that we’re going to look back at these days with confusion. How did anyone go along with all that? It will feel like a terrible and confusing nightmare, one we can hardly believe took hold as firmly as it did.

When trying to address his claims in my videos & seeking quotes from relevant astronomers and planetary scientists, I’ve often been met with “I don’t engage with him” as a terse response. I get it. But this shit is out of control, if the community stays silence he fills the vacuum. We need pushback.

3I/ATLAS, a quick update.

Be sure to follow @stim3on.bsky.social

Stunning if confirmed…

Do cats also think that aliens will look like them?

YouTube video by Cool Worlds Is the Sun Unusual?

youtu.be/TAQKJ41eDTs?...

It’s a combination of their numbers (>80% are M vs 2.5% G) and their longevity (10,000 Gyr vs 10 Gyr). I explicitly calculate the odds is just “luck” in the paper and it comes out at 1600:1, which is outrageously high for a Bayes factor.

Solar Hegemony: M-Dwarfs Are Unlikely to Host Observers Such as Ourselves With no firm evidence for life beyond our solar system, inferences about the population observers such as ourselves rests upon the Earth as a single input, at least for now. Whilst the narrative of ou...

Here’s my new paper which our last #CoolWorlds video discussed. Paper tackles two existential puzzles: why don’t we live around the most common star type, an M-dwarf, and, why do we live so early in cosmic chronology?

arxiv.org/abs/2510.01215

I have been in the UK a couple of months now. Perhaps I was naive but I’m shocked how universal hate-fueled politics has become. I want to live somewhere that values compassion, tolerance and treating others with dignity. How did these messages of hate gain so much traction?

Yes I think a theory being excessively flexible is a flaw. “God did it” can explain everything but that’s actually what makes it impotent

“If an explanation could easily explain anything, then it actually explains nothing. When theories are variable, experimental testing is useless. I call such theories bad explanations. Being proved wrong by experiment and changing to other bad explanations does not get one jot closer to the truth.”

New studies used JWST to probe TRAPPIST-1e, the most accessible potential Earth-like exoplanet. Data reveals the atmosphere is

1) Not hydrogen dominated (unsurprising)😌
2) Unlikely to be Venus-like🧐
3) Compatible with N2-rich😎

arxiv.org/abs/2509.05407
arxiv.org/abs/2509.05414

YouTube video by Cool Worlds Podcast #25 Matt O'Dowd - PBS Spacetime, Science on YouTube, Quasars

#CoolWorlds Podcast Episode 25 just dropped with PBSSpaceTime's very own Matt O'Dowd

youtu.be/V7QjrsadlKQ

“It is fundamentally impossible to ever establish alien life at some threshold odds ratio, Ocrit, unless we deem the prior probability that some as-yet-undiscovered natural process could explain the event is less than 1/(1+Ocrit).”

iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3...

At the end of the day, there’s only one identity that matters - human.