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A Harvard professor on the extraterrestrial origins of Oumuamua

8 points by mathattack 8y ago

anoncoward111 8y ago
A very interesting article that I hope doesn't fade into obscurity because it's Sunday. The scientist who is hoping that Oumuamua is a solar sail is a Harvard scientist under the employ of Zuck et al. to make a solar sail and send it to Alpha Centauri. He does a good job of countering some of the arguments against Oumuamua being anything other than a rock. 1) Ouamuamua, according to him, is either cigar shaped or pancake shaped, based on the way it is reflecting light. He allges it is even just millimeters thick, and that we've never seen a rock naturally form this way. 2) He argues that the lack of radio activity from the object is due to the object either being inactive, or only send data back to its host system in a ray, not an omnidirectional cloud. So, Earth wouldn't detect the radio signals. 3) He argues there is nothing to gain by calling it a rock and thinks that some civilization many thousands of years ago maybe have created billions of solar sails and sent them to any and every star on a whim. He argues that the sail was deployed as a buoy that would sit in place until our system came roaring past it. We weren't targeted directly, but the object was designed to flyby our habitable zone. -- All in all I think he does an interesting job of explaining why the object is different from the thousands of rocks we have observed, but I have no way of confirming if his analysis is true. Based on the red spectral data, the tumbling nature of the light reflected at us, and the artist's impression of the 150m ish object, I thought the scientific consensus was that it was just a really weird rock formed in chaotic conditions that has drifted in the galaxy for eons. I guess we will have to start building some sails to find out :)
- diminish 8y ago
  So the alien civilization has more or less our physics knowledge at some point in time last 600K years.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Interesting question. If it did come from Vega's area 600,000 years ago, the author argues that the civilization sent out billions of these devices to every star using solar sail technology. Kind of like if we sent out billions of Voyager 1s deliberately to every star for them to be discovered upon arrival. They have our understanding of physics but seemingly way more ability to mass produce and launch these items into interstellar space in specific ways for stars to collide with them. Or it's a 2 billion year old sandblasted rock that caught some weird gravity assists :)

8 points by mathattack 8y ago

A very interesting article that I hope doesn't fade into obscurity because it's Sunday. The scientist who is hoping that Oumuamua is a solar sail is a Harvard scientist under the employ of Zuck et al. to make a solar sail and send it to Alpha Centauri. He does a good job of countering some of the arguments against Oumuamua being anything other than a rock. 1) Ouamuamua, according to him, is either cigar shaped or pancake shaped, based on the way it is reflecting light. He allges it is even just millimeters thick, and that we've never seen a rock naturally form this way. 2) He argues that the lack of radio activity from the object is due to the object either being inactive, or only send data back to its host system in a ray, not an omnidirectional cloud. So, Earth wouldn't detect the radio signals. 3) He argues there is nothing to gain by calling it a rock and thinks that some civilization many thousands of years ago maybe have created billions of solar sails and sent them to any and every star on a whim. He argues that the sail was deployed as a buoy that would sit in place until our system came roaring past it. We weren't targeted directly, but the object was designed to flyby our habitable zone. -- All in all I think he does an interesting job of explaining why the object is different from the thousands of rocks we have observed, but I have no way of confirming if his analysis is true. Based on the red spectral data, the tumbling nature of the light reflected at us, and the artist's impression of the 150m ish object, I thought the scientific consensus was that it was just a really weird rock formed in chaotic conditions that has drifted in the galaxy for eons. I guess we will have to start building some sails to find out :)

diminish 8y ago
So the alien civilization has more or less our physics knowledge at some point in time last 600K years.
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  Interesting question. If it did come from Vega's area 600,000 years ago, the author argues that the civilization sent out billions of these devices to every star using solar sail technology. Kind of like if we sent out billions of Voyager 1s deliberately to every star for them to be discovered upon arrival. They have our understanding of physics but seemingly way more ability to mass produce and launch these items into interstellar space in specific ways for stars to collide with them. Or it's a 2 billion year old sandblasted rock that caught some weird gravity assists :)