Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua (newyorker.com) 583
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red and extremely elongated asteroid." It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it 'Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard's astronomy department, co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that examined 'Oumuamua's "peculiar acceleration" and suggested that the object "may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth's vicinity by an alien civilization." Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate with the civilization that sent the probe.
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as 'Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.
[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.
Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as 'Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.
[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.
Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.
So.... (Score:5, Funny)
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There is absolutely no evidence of it being a comet, nothing new revealed there. They determined that it had to be propelled by gas and therefore declared it a comet but there was no evidence uncovered, they simply assumed this was the case despite lacking any tail or coma.
This is more a case of how they want to label it than any sort of explanation or debunking.
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:5, Informative)
The opposite of science is believe. You can believe all you want, but to know something objectively you need science. Science is the method to develop hypotheses, try to falsify it, and improve your theories. What we know is the potential weight of the object, the shape -- well only very, very roughly -- all the drawings are artistic, so it looks most likely differently. Therefore, science concluded that it is an extra solar object, which is most likely not artificial. We do not know enough to come to another conclusion. We can believe of course that it is something else, but that is believe and speculation.
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:4, Funny)
Clearly, you believe in science. :-D
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:5, Insightful)
To explain the world we have either 1) Science; 2) Solipsism; or 3) Magic. Choose your poison, or some combination of all three. According to my senses and IPU (Information Processing Unit, i.e. brain), hard science has a pretty good track record at explaining the mechanisms of observed phenomena.
One problem is that advocates can pervert the umbrella of science to peddle "advocacy science" or "junk science", where studies based on statistical analysis, improperly used, can yield spurious correlations to support a [social | legal | political | economic | scientific] position. Like the growing sugar revelations [npr.org], which could be flat out lying for money.
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecome (Score:4, Interesting)
Only those three, huh? Prove it scientifically.
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"The opposite of science is believe. You can believe all you want, but to know something objectively you need science."
This "science" is speculation. The evidence wasn't there to support the hypothesis that it was a natural comet. They worked from the assumption it wasn't artificial and it being a comet despite the lack of a required tail or coma is what they determined was the default. That isn't based on observation or evidence and therefore is not science no matter who says it.
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Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:5, Interesting)
> The opposite of science is believe.
*Facepalm*
The opposite of Belief (Faith) is Gnosis (experiential Knowledge) -- in contradistinction to intellectual knowledge.
The opposite of Science (process of removing falsehood) is Intuition (process of adding truth)
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:4, Interesting)
Loeb is not saying we should "believe" anything. He is just saying that we shouldn't rule anything out, and we should lookout for similar objects in the future.
And that we might want to think about chasing this one down. While it's hauling ass (sorry for the technical term), it's going to be in our relative vicinity for thousands of years or so before it leaves the solar system. So...
Within a few years, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will become operational and be far more sensitive to the detection of ‘Oumuamua-like objects. It should therefore discover many such objects within its first year of operation. If it does not find any, we will know that ‘Oumuamua was special and that we must chase this guest down the street in order to figure out its origin.
And...
But since it would take ‘Oumuamua thousands of years to leave the solar system entirely, getting a closer look of it through a flyby remains a possibility if we were to develop new technologies for faster space travel within a decade or two.
This is all exciting. His first point was that, if this thing is not really all that special, then there should be a ton of them, and the LSST will be better at detecting them. If that fails to detect any others like it, then maybe it IS special, and maybe we should chase it down for a close-up. We still have time. That's pretty exciting.
I realize a lot of people want all the answers now today, but we don't have them now. We have the possibility of getting them in the future.
Re: It is a fucking cIt is not an alien spacecomet (Score:4, Insightful)
Let it just be said that the only reason we can't is because of cowardly, disempowered, disempowering, unimaginative, hopeless statements like yours, and the inaction that that engenders.
Technologically, we are 90% there.
Economically, a rapidly increasing carbon fee and dividend is a simple and non-market-tampering measure that can greatly accelerate the transition in the most cost-effective way.
General intelligence / education wise, and political will wise. That's where we're completely f**ked, which is why statements like yours are actively and probably intentionally destructive to the needed energy transition.
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I'm not sure you realize how big the Solar System is.
Throw away probes (Score:5, Informative)
All those probes that we send to planets should be designed with a longer operational life.
Yup, that's actually already the case. How do you think the mars rovers managed to stay so long in operation ?
Engineer plan for the worse, put as wide margin as possible, and try to manage to meet the primary mission even in the case of giant string of unluck and problems.
(Everything redundant, and other such backups - well within the limits of weight of what the launcher can put into orbit up there, of course).
Often, mission gets lucky, there's no catastrophic event happening and the probe turns out to be useful for much longer than initially planned (there are still at least 1 backup/redundant part working even after the end of the primary mission.
When the primary mission is over they start a secondary mission:
That's already the case : as long as it's still miraculously working, keep using it!
See: New Horizon's recent flyby of Ultima Thule, and the pictures of it that the probe will be uploading to Earth over the next couple of years. (Interplanetary bandwidth sucks...)
The existence of that object wasn't even known back when the mission was planned, but once it turned out that New Horizon successfully completed its primary mission (Pluto) and still had enough functional systems to continue, it turned out the contact binary (that was discovered a couple of years ago) was a perfect target that happened to be within reach of the probe.
long term observation which includes special unexpected things like oumouamua
Planning specifically for extra planetary things like 'oumuamua is asinine :
- You can't *plan* for *unexpected* object. See Ultima Thule above, it's wasn't even known until recently. You usually have a more opportunistic approach: given the remaining capability of the probe at the end of its primary mission, what are the possibility that present themselves ? Are there targets that are on the trajectory of the probe (baring some micro correction that could still be achieved with whatever left-over capability is available) ? :
What you're basically asking is aiming a probe 15 years in advance at some empty spot, and hope that 11 years later an unexpected extra solar object will suddenly pop-up and luckily happen to go through said empty spot at the exact right time....
and speaking of time
- Space is extremely vast and mostly empty (on a human scale. Of course on the grand scale of a galaxy we're still a pretty busy sector). You might be launching thousands to hundreds of thousands (*) of probes before another such extra solar visit even happen. ...and the probes that happen to be space borne at the moment might be at the wrong place, which leads to :
- Extra solar objects are weird (simply because they didn't form together with our solar system, by definition) and thus will have completely weird trajectory not even in the same rotational direction and not in the same plan to begin with (See 3d tracing of the path 'oumuamua. It's almost perpendicular to the plan of our solar system).
Also, changing trajectory costs big amount of energy and fuel/mass, which in turn is heavy and would require even more prohibitively powerful rockets to launch. To be launchable with currently existing rocket technology, probes end up limited to only small corrections/burns (and use free gravity assistance as much as possible), they can only change trajectory slightly.
Life isn't like in a video game where space ship can jump hyperspace portals all-over the place.
Thus, there wouldn't be a practical way to ask a probe to veer completely of course and head for a completely different and unusual spot where a recently spotted extra solar object is expected to show up.
With the current state of tech (only relatively short distance at which we can sport interesting targets, limited range of probes, etc.) we can't do much for ob
Interstellar probe? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course when you think about the fact that less than 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something you had to draw it, it's hard to pontificate on what a civilization tens of thousands of years ahead of us could accomplish
Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe this civilization takes a long view.
So they have not invented Quarterly Results and Agile? That IS advanced.
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Maybe this civilization takes a long view.
So they have not invented Quarterly Results and Agile? That IS advanced.
A truly advanced race if they have outgrown or avoided inventing MBA's.
I wish to subscribe to their newsletter. (As long as it's not focused on dinner prep)
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Perhaps. Perhaps not... Maybe this civilization takes a long view. The probe could have been sent thousands, or even millions of years ago, at some fraction of C.
At least it won't be able to report back until we're long gone.
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if you're going to get snarky, better make sure the facts are on your side. The Apollo Astronauts way back in the 60s were traveling at about 39,000 km/h, and the New Horizons spacecraft topped 56,000 km/h.
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Ooops. My mistake. 56,000 km/h. That is .000051887748 the speed of light, instead of .00000389158 the speed of light. My mistake. Must be the aliens.
I'm not siding with those that say this was aliens... but from 56,000 kmh to 10,800,000 kmh is only a 190x increase. I'm sure at some point in human future history we will get to 10,800,000 kmh if the species lasts long enough.
However- for the record, I am fully in the "this almost certainly wasn't aliens" camp.
Why even launch something that big? If you have the technology to send something that big though? If you have the technology to launch something that big; you probably have the technology to buil
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Room for spare parts and enough stuff on hand to change the mission on the fly?
Already did the port-a-potty size exploration eons ago and now sending something bigger with more monitoring capabilities to the spots that looked interesting?
Not saying I don't disagree with the port-a-potty size being best (and launch lots of them) instead of one big probe. But governments seem to go for the one big probe that everyone can have a part of building philosophy here. That's why we have so many cost overruns and
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Agreed on all points.
My issue: maybe it is a probe sent by gigantic aliens, so it's normal size for them. But as far as we know, C is a universe constant, so they're not going to hear back from the probe for a very long time, assuming they're as far away as they'd likely have to be. Yes, maybe it's off course from a civilization from long long ago far far away.
Or maybe it's just one of the infinite possible formations left over from a supernova which blew away all of its planets, asteroids, etc.
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You are an extremist. You're not interested in an intelligent discussion. You've made up your mind, incorrectly, about what other people believe, and you're too busy setting up and knocking down strawmen to have anything meaningful to say.
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No, that's not why you're an extremist. You're an extremist because your views regarding technology are extreme.
How many times do I need to ask you to produce your evidence to support your conclusion that this is a comet before you admit that no such evidence exists? You seem to keep dodging that point. Show your evidence for your conclusion and make sure you rationalize that with the facts that we are not seeing comet traits associated with this object.
Everyone is on the same page with this object being
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You don't understand interstellar travel. Speed is a result of acceleration over time. If you have very long time, even modest acceleration can get you there. More relevant question is how long a probe could sustain acceleration as that would ultimately determine speed. Our current best designs could accelerate for mere hours, you need to be able to do this for years. This doesn't mean it can't be done.
Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Not to mention 10,000 years isn't really even the metric to be using. We have been watching the skies now with advanced instruments longer than 4 light years. If there was alien activity on the scale required to launch a giant probe like this in one of nearest neighboring systems you also have to factor in the probability that we will have failed to observer any other indications of advanced life there, through radiation etc.
Either we are talking about some pretty stealthy aliens, which raises the question how come the prove isn't stealth too, or if it is an alien probe it came from some place much further away.
Assuming it came from further away, it would have to be (I suspect) an order of magnitude older still; which makes it even less likely some alien culture sent it.
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Really? Which advanced civilization do you know of that can create a probe that can last 10,000 years (and travel at 0.01%C) to get here? 0.01%C is 10793000 km/h. The fastest we have ever sent a probe is 4200km/h. What technology exists that would allow 0.01%C travel?
Something with a constant acceleration. Ion drives etc. Getting something to that speed really isn't problematic so long as you can keep pushing it. If you want specific examples pick up basically any scifi book for all kinds of wonderful examples. What technology exists that we have? None really. What potential technology exists? Who knows. It's just a rock though so it's moot.
By the way voyager is currently going along at a fair clip of 62,000km/h so you estimation is a bit off unless you mean rocket l
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Getting something to that speed really isn't problematic so long as you can keep pushing it. If you want specific examples pick up basically any scifi book for all kinds of wonderful examples
Thats true. Getting a probe to go to 0.01% c isn't a problem. We can just build them from the examples from scifi books.
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I'll tell you what: you build an ion drive that can launch me into space and I will do it. Let me know when you are done.
You are intentionally confusing reaching orbit and interstellar travel. These are different problems that require different solutions (engine designs).
A car analogy: To reach orbit you need a dragrace car but to reach nearby star you need a car that has the best possible mileage. Maybe it is possible to have the same engine to do both, but it is very unlikely.
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C is a fancy, unamerican way to measure temperature. Speed of light is c.
You must be American.
1: C is Coloumb, the SI unit for electric charge. (Degrees Celsius always needs the degree sign.)
2: It's not c, it's c.
3: It's not the speed of light, it's the speed of light in vacuum. The "in vacuum" part is very significant.
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Yay, a pedantic thread!
Actually, it is the posters who are pedantic, not the thread.
Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Insightful)
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but still, YOU are right, it's easy for a hairless ape to comprehend what a civilization 1000's, or perhaps millions of years ahead of us could or could not, do.
I wonder what that mold on that loaf of bread thinks about differential equations....
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So some civilization created a probe that can last in interstellar space for thousands, or even millions of years?
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe go fuck yourself.
Seriously, no one is drawing conclusions, that is very premature. Read his list of facts [scientificamerican.com] to understand why we're not sure. It didn't help that the object was already well past us by the time we thought maybe we should study it.
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but have latched on to the idea that it is an "alien probe"
Oh, did I? And where did I do that? Go ahead and give me a link and quote where I said "it's an alien probe."
instead of thinking "gee, it could be a comet"
Literally everyone studying it has considered this. Asteroid also. All of these remain possibilities, too. I don't think anything has been ruled out. I don't know why you're ruling things out.
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I am not ruling anything out.
You are. Obviously. You have repeatedly asserted that it is a comet, and that it is not artificial. I've asked you for your evidence that it's a comet considering the inconsistencies we think we should see with a comet. Maybe that evidence is in another reply, but I won't hold my breath.
Oh by the way: the guy who discovered it said it wasn't a probe, and it was a small comet. But keep on believing!
I don't have any conclusions about this. I'm not fantasizing about some alien world it came from. I'm reading through the article where the guy lists his facts, and trying to understand what he's talking about, and why
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Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:4, Funny)
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Sadly, all these great insights tend to vanish for me when the blood-alcohol level drops again...
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Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:4, Insightful)
The more we explore the universe, the more we'll see things unlike what we've seen before. It wasn't that long ago that there was a debate as to whether planets even existed outside of our solar system. I've lost count of how many we've found since then, but the first few were definitely "like nothing we've ever seen before." That didn't mean OMG ALIENS! It meant that our understanding of reality had to be tweaked to accommodate this new data, In other words, science.
Trust me, I'd love if the answer to "what is Oumuamua's origin" was "aliens", but it's more likely something else. Might it cause us to rethink some previously held beliefs? Sure, but it doesn't mean that little green men are going to be zipping by to follow up on their probe's findings.
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How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away. Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light?
Why would they need to suggest that? Perhaps it was sent on its way tens of thousands of years ago.
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So some civilization created a probe that can last in interstellar space for tens of thousands of years? Wow. I would like to meet them. Do they make cars?
Yes, but the cars were all built so long ago they still come equipped with 8-track players.
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How about... (Score:2)
How about it came in through a worm hole, natural or artificially made, just outside our solar system?
I'm not convinced that was an alien probe or anything but I don't think known travel speed restrictions disprove it being an alien probe. It only disproves it having come to our solar system by any means we currently use to move about which is a pretty easy conclusion to come to.
In other words, if it's an alien probe of course it didn't travel here at sub light speeds.
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How about it came in through a worm hole, natural or artificially made, just outside our solar system?
That would be pure speculative science fiction at the moment. There is no evidence that such a thing as a worm hole that can provide a passageway of matter over distance even exists, or COULD exist. Wormholes like that are purely fiction at the moment and anything that could transmit something like Oumuamua through it aren't even in the speculative sciences.
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Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Insightful)
How did you make the leap of logic that if it was sent, it must have been sent at a point in time requiring a significant speed to reach us at the time we observed it? Is it not plausible that a civilization sent one or perhaps many probes to nearby stars in the distant past in an effort to gain local observational data? The fact that we were here and had the technology to witness it could be complete coincidence.
I've listened to Dr. Loeb a few times; he's the real deal, publishing much well-regarded scientific work that isn't remotely sensational or controversial. All he's saying here is that so far, alien technology cannot be ruled out and that more mundane models to explain all of our observations have yet to be identified or seem less likely than alien technology.
Aliens should never be the first thing people run to when facing the unexplained, but it also should not be dismissively ruled out either; unless you are one of those people that deeply want to believe we are all alone in the universe. I would say this falls into the "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." category, and as the data on Oumuamua is sifted through, there is mounting evidence that it appears to have been designed. However, it also entirely possible that more data will come forward pushing the needle back toward the mundane, and that's fine too.
Re: Interstellar probe? (Score:2)
Obviously we don't know; obviously that's the point; more than a little is going to slip through our incomplete and inaccurate models of physics, leaving lots of possibilities.
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How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away.
Our civilization was potentially detectable for at least last 10,000 years and feasibly detectable during technological civilization of 3000 years. For example, widespread cultivation of plants (i.e. agrarian civilization) potentially can be detected by analyzing light spectrum reflected by the planet. Our technology can't do that right now, we don't have good enough optics or historical data to ran models, but considering that we developed ability to detect plants in the past couple decades, it only makes
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Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Insightful)
How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away. Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Laws of physics suggests "no". You haven't "seen anything like it before" because we have barely "seen" anything.
Wait, why do you think it is hard to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Even a constant acceleration of just 1g would get you to relativistic speeds during interstellar travel. In fact, if we put a significant part of our money/resources on it, the tech to visit a star 4ly away at a reasonable time-frame is within reach (e.g. nuclear pulse propulsion). But to actually have a serious chance of finding the right star system, AT THE RIGHT TIME to come upon an alien civilization would probably require us to visit at least a few hundred thousand stars (still nothing compared to just our own galaxy), so that would take pretty much "forever" (in human time scale terms) even at relativistic speeds (well, OK, Von Neumann probes would be faster, but still...).
And this object wasn't even fast (0.008%c or something like that). There don't have to be aliens to explain interstellar objects just because we don't get to see them all the time. Just a rock passing by...
Of course it could always be a moon with an alien starbase propelled by a nuclear storage accident...
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I think we should start broadcasting messages asking in pictographs whether anyone out there is missing a probe.
Re:Interstellar probe? (Score:5, Interesting)
Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light?
That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying the objects motion is statistically unlike anything else in our part of the Milky Way. [wikipedia.org] It's essentially stationary with respect to the rest of the galaxy. A large amount of energy would be needed to achieve that relative velocity. He also notes that it has several characteristics, including acceleration, that are similar to current solar sail technology. It's a statistical anomaly.
I may have missed something, but he also doesn't mention it being uses specifically to study Earth. His hypothesis is that its use is to mark a specific reference point in the galaxy. Our solar system passed by it, not the other way around.
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That's assuming that other lifeforms perceives the passage of time the same and lives a similar lifespan. Without any frame of reference other than humans on earth we have no way to know. It's entirely possible that other life could live millions of years and perceive a hundred years as a day.
What's the lifespan of a single-celled organism?
It's entirely possible that "aging" doesn't exist for species outside our solar system (if such aliens exist). That said why send individuals at all if they're not going to stop? And if you're not sending individuals why send something so large?
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Anonymous Just Uploaded An "Expose" As Well (Score:2, Insightful)
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You are correct of course, sir. Earth MUST be the only inhabited planet with intelligent life in the huge motherfucking universe we exist in. The radio signals clearly came from a farting Pulsar. The pulsar had too much Diet Coke with the burger and fries.
I think you are putting words in 110010001000's mouth. He didn't say anything about there not being aliens. I think it's more that he is suggesting that if you are getting archeological/cosmological information from Anonymous in a random youtube video, you might as well be getting that info from this guy [wikipedia.org].
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Explain - with mathematical proof please - the repeating radio signals from space that are being reported everywhere. Go on. Explain them right under this post, Mr. I-Know-Everything!
Pulsars? [wikipedia.org]
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So you cannot calculate where a certain point on a rotating earth will be on a certain date
Yes, you can.
and aim a signal at it?
With existing technology and knowledge of physics, no. As far as I am aware there is nothing that could maintain a pinpoint directional beam over interstellar distances. Anything "aimed" at that precise point would be indistinguishable from something "aimed" anywhere else in the solar system.
He seems a bit salty (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:He seems a bit salty (Score:5, Insightful)
He seems a bit salty that people don't want to just agree this was aliens.
I think it's a bit more complicated than that. I think he is upset that his hypothesis isn't being given any credence, even at the level of hypothesis. Which, I think, might be fair.
It is also entirely reasonable that the scientific community is extremely reluctant to be seen giving the hypothesis any real credence. Unfortunately, UFO and panspermia crackpots have poisoned that well.
Re:He seems a bit salty (Score:5, Insightful)
Have Aliens Found Us? (Score:2)
Have Aliens Found Us? Maybe, but if they have Oumuamua has got nothing to do with them in all possibility.
Any species capable of sending Oumuamua towards us would almost certainly have the means to send a more efficient craft towards us. Unless they were trying to hide from our detection; and if they were trying to hide from our detection they would have had a better means of hiding from us.
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Any species capable of sending Oumuamua towards us would almost certainly have the means to send a more efficient craft towards us.
They may *today*. They may not have when this was launched. My 100 year old grandmother remembered when the first car came to her town. In her lifetime people went from literal horsepower to walking on the moon. Pretty sure we are going to one day think "I remember when..." in reference to some technology about which we currently have no clue.
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They may *today*. They may not have when this was launched. My 100 year old grandmother remembered when the first car came to her town. In her lifetime people went from literal horsepower to walking on the moon. Pretty sure we are going to one day think "I remember when..." in reference to some technology about which we currently have no clue.
My point is, if you can launch something the size of Oumuamua, you're likely to have the technology to send something smaller. Something smaller would be less likely to have collisions with other objects, and use much less energy to launch at such speeds.
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Perhaps Loeb read the books (Score:2)
It's not like this wasn't foretold. All Loeb had to do was read the three books by Arthur C. Clarke (two co-written with Gentry Lee).
The problem is, we didn't have any spacecraft able to intercept the object and have people land on it when they found the docking port. We missed our first opportunity with alien technology.
Now we'll have to wait until the next one comes round and answers some of our questions. We need to get ready now so when the next opportunity presents itself, it won't be wasted.
Ancient Sumerians believed their gods were aliens (Score:2)
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Ancient Sumerians believed their gods were aliens. https://youtu.be/L3ogy-pqvKQ [youtu.be]
Modern day Scientologists do too (no surprise there since the religion was created as a get-rich-quick scheme by a Science Fiction author).
One could possibly interpret God as being an "alien" in the Mormon branch of Christianity too- although I don't think Mormons like that analogy.
Idiots (Score:2)
The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand.
That's because it's bullshit.
We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
It's a single event. The error bars around any single event are enormous if you are going to use it to infer a population. Additionally these sorts of objects are rather hard to see so it's hardly shocking that we haven't seen a LOT of them. Furthermore there is a lot of stuff in our solar system we know we cannot yet see and we're discovering new stuff all the time.
When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as 'Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from.
Self defeating argument. Even if we take his 1/500 number at face value (we shouldn't) there are literally bil
Proof it wasn't aliens (Score:2)
It didn't hit Buenos Aires. /s
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It didn't hit Buenos Aires. /s
The Bugs are still bracketing Earth. If there's another one that passes to the other side, then we are in trouble and they know where we are.
The investigated planet earth (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not scientific because it's not repeatable. (Score:2)
The big difference between his theories on dark matter cooling space gas and this rock being an interstellar probe is that one makes potential hypotheses that are testable and the other does not.
The former is fine theoretical science -even if it's largely speculative. The latter is just speculation, even if it's backed up by some data.
This discussion is very similar to people that look for the star of Bethlehem using computer software. They have certain facts from the bible, and then scour the ancient sky u
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This discussion is very similar to people that look for the star of Bethlehem using computer software. They have certain facts from the bible, and then scour the ancient sky using powerful astronomy software looking for events and things that they think match up with the facts. That's not science, even though it's "backed up by fact", so to speak.
So the star of Bethlehem was basically Oumuamua's launching lasers? Illuminati confirmed!
Occam's Razor (Score:3)
Multiple things that have at first looked "suspiciously artificial" turned out to be natural. The consistent pulsing of pulsars is one of the most common examples. Occam's Razor says Oumuamua is probably natural in ways we didn't anticipate.
However, it was a curious object that did deserve more inspection even if natural, and hopefully if another one buzzes by, we'll be more ready.
A whole lot of gaps in reasoning. (Score:3)
From TFA https://blogs.scientificameric... [scientificamerican.com]
Of his 6 "odd facts" about the object, at least 4 aren't persuasive at all:
1) They did a paper projecting the estimated population of interstellar ejecta. They assert that 'stumbling' onto this implies a much higher population - how do they conclude that from a sample size of one? Even if the odds of running into such an object are astonishingly low, because they're non-zero the presence of ONE sample means nothing. His conclusions all flow from the assumption that the object was statistically common; I'm not sure that is much of a springboard for all of his other conclusions.
2) it's moving very slowly - essentially we raced past it. He observes that only one in the neighborhood of 500 stars is moving that slowly. (And then opines that this would be 'optimal to camouflage the origin of a probe' and 'it's like a buoy we raced past, could it be part of a communication net work'? Anthropomorphic tinfoil hat, anyone? Of course, again: single sample. It could be BILLIONS of years old, from well outside the local 500 star group, to say nothing of the literally-infinite number of possibilities of caroming around bouncing off crap or (my guess) slowing due to passing through any number of dust/debris clouds.
3) ejecta from planetary systems would likely have high energy vs local rest frame, this was barely moving. See points 1 and 2 above.
4) the inferred geometry from the 10:1 brightness curve variation observed only sustains if you assume its homogeneous or at least its reflectivity is. While not a bad GUESS to suggest it's a tumbling needle-shape, there are also a LOT of other explanations for such variation (to use only my example above, it could be an icy object (high albedo) that's passed through heavy carbon dust clouds (very low albedo to the surface that's facing such clouds). It wouldn't take an oddly proportioned object nor much spin to result in a highly-fluctuating brightness.
5) lock of heating even though it passed close to the sun (inside orbit of mercury)
and
6) slight deviation from the predictable Keplerian gravity-calculated path, comparable to the shift from outgassing (but there's no evidence/suggestion that this happened, and in fact some evidence it DIDN'T happen)
5 & 6 are IMO meaningful. I fully agree with him that we should both a) work on very high speed probes that COULD in fact catch it before it leaves the solar system (by God yes!) and b) look for more high-inclination objects around our large gas giants to see if we can find anything 'caught' by their wells historically (he doesn't mention that chronology is against us here; if they were caught, they would be high-off the ecliptic, wouldn't be very stable, and would likely either impact one of the Jovian moons or ultimately end up in Jupiter itself relatively quickly).
I strongly doubt (though I certainly wish it were true) that this is an artificial object of extra-solar origin. There are too many other more-reasonable explanations. The breathlessness and hand-waving of the SA article are unworthy of an actual science publication.
Then again, the fact that this was published in SA doesn't shock me, it's 'standards' over the last 20 years have dropped to about that of Reddit.
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It WAS an alien probe.
And it will report back that no intelligent life was found on Earth.
Could it not detect the Whales?
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It's very easy to imagine other intelligent life in the universe. What's hard, given our understanding of physics, is imagining a plausible way for them to be involved with us. The easiest way would be to believe that Earth had a prior technically advanced civilization, but that's hard to swallow as well. They would likely have left evidence in the form of artificial stone, if nothing else. Interstellar distances are perhaps not an insurmountable obstacle, but everything we know says that they effectively a