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Have Aliens Found Us? (2019)
- imvetri 7y agoYes or no?
- rishirishi 7y agoYes. We don't have the means to know so. Just like fish in the ocean don't know we exist, but we know they exist.
- tudelo 7y agoOf course, this 'yes' is a pretty loaded 'yes' even if I agree it's a possibility...
- TravHatesMe 7y agoThis can't be answered with any conviction. By that logic, we can be apply this infinitely many times: from the aliens perspective, they are also not aware of other aliens that know about their existence
- unfunco 7y agoIt's aliens all the way up.
- sanxiyn 7y agoHow do you know fish in the ocean don't know we exist?
- dvirsky 7y ago(2019)
- lend000 7y agoThere is far more interesting evidence of potential advanced intelligence in our system, such as the Nimitz encounter [0]. The New York Post put together a great video highlighting "The Phenomenon." If Oumuamua is indeed an interstellar probe, it would seem to have come from a civilization far less advanced than whatever seems to have been observed by various militaries and analyzed by this New York Post special [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uaSY2Zc0goQ Edit: I don't mean to shake up anyone's fragile worldview. Comment instead of downvote; it's a fascinating subject to debate.
- kuango 7y agoMust be the case that p(two independent alien visits) >> p(single alien visit)^2
- api 7y agoMaybe Oumuamua was a carrier and something got off. It would make sense. It could also have been a spent deceleration stage. All speculation of course, since we just didn't get a good look. Of course if whatever got off wants to ever go home it would need to set up shop somewhere and build a new multistage interstellar rocket. You could probably do that in the outer solar system and not be noticed. People who dismiss UFO sightings have among other points argued that the small craft sighted are too small to have the kind of crazy propulsion systems required for interstellar flight. That makes sense, but why assume those are interstellar? A staged fusion rocket or something would make more sense. The small craft would be interplanetary scale.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoEven if one were to assume the phenomenon in question was an advanced craft of some kind, an extraterrestrial origin is still among the least likely explanations.
- lend000 7y agoHow did you come up with probabilities? It seems to me that probability becomes unhelpful and it's either 0 or 1, once we've ruled out everything for which we have reliable known probabilities. A terrestrial foreign superpower's technology seems like a plausible explanation at first if we can assign probabilities to them being more advanced than us (probably low but non-negligible). That would be compelling if this were the first reliable sighting of its kind (or if it didn't already occur 15 years ago), but apparently such sightings have been actively studied by the US gov for a few decades before this, so it seems quite impossible they would have had the capability in the pogrom/hard labor days, assuming there is some relation between current sightings and those happening decades ago.
- peterwwillis 7y agoThis is from a year ago, and seems to follow Betteridge's law.
- quotha 7y agoIt seems like we've been probed when you look at this hyperbolic trajectory: https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA22357_JPL-20180620-ASTRDSf-0007-Interstellar%20Asteroid%20animation-720p.mp4 https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/archive/PIA22357_JPL-20180...
- thrusong 7y agoWow, that's crazy... It sure seems so.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoNot really, the deviation is not that large for the scales we're talking about and there are still plenty of potential explanations. Hell, for the longest time we couldn't explain why our own Pioneer spacecraft deviated from expected trajectories and we knew precisely what they were made of.
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago... with the most likely explanation being outgassing. Seligman et al. (2019): https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0bb5 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ab0bb5
- ASalazarMX 7y agoIf that's so, all comets could be probes.
- thdrdt 7y agoHow can they predict the trajectory when the shape and material of the object is unknown?
- saagarjha 7y agoThe trajectory of an object in space really only depends on the (external) gravitational field applied to it.
- Zenst 7y ago"I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place" It's from outside our solar system in origin, so I'd say we are not 100% in predicting what to expect, more so when we still can't get weather forecasts 100% right and get unexpected weather events. Having gone thru the other `interpretations of observations`, I'd probably not of been as quick to lean down that path of aliens. Indeed, whilst it is unusual, comparing it to the known and as such, objects originating in our solar system will see conflicts like orbit, speed, direction, shape and composition. I'd also say it's strange shape would play more a factor in the variance of how light is reflected back and be more logical an explanation of its variance from the `norm`. Besides, for all we know, `aliens` may view a lifeform like us in the same way we view bacteria. So the question would be, if Aliens found us - would they care. But is this an alien probe - I'm sure many would love it to be so, but as it stands, feels a bit too reaching from what I read. [EDIT type o's]
- nck4222 7y agoI feel like there has to be a razor stating something like "It's more likely that our expectations were wrong due to a lack of initial knowledge, rather than the explanation being aliens." Because it seems like time and time again someone proposes aliens when in reality it's just some phenomenon or variable we hadn't observed yet.
- dylan604 7y agoYeah, but "due to some phenomenon we hadn't observed yet" doesn't get many clicks on the link
- davidcuddeback 7y agoIt sounds a lot like God of the gaps [1], only with aliens instead of God. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
- koboll 7y agoGod and aliens have a lot in common. People usually interpret the "beings" you "meet" on DMT as one or the other. Almost as if they're two sides of one coin: our mind's tendency to gravitate toward an anthropomorphic explanation for unexplained phenomena and stimuli.
- saas_sam 7y agoIs it just me or does the interviewer come across as weirdly adversarial in this piece?
- zellyn 7y agoIt's not just you. It was a very strange interview. Perhaps it was just a snippet out of a longer conversation, that made sense in context.
- quasarj 7y agoIt's not just you. I was thinking the same thing.
- candlemas 7y agoI think he is always like that.
- methehack 7y agoI think it may do the subject (the interviewee) a service to take a skeptical approach as the interviewer in a situation where many readers will bring a lot of skepticism. If the interviewer seems _too_ friendly, many readers will dismiss the responses and not listen as carefully as they might otherwise. It seems like a justifiable approach to me here.
- whatshisface 7y agoIf the scientist was wrong, he was wrong for reasons that were more subtle and complicated than the objections the author thought of. A better option would be to have organized a debate between two scientists who were both already experts. There's also a difference between skepticism and unfriendliness: the author came across as unfriendly, while a scientist who could not be so easily knocked back might have been able to keep it to skepticism.
- Psyladine 7y ago>If the scientist was wrong, he was wrong for reasons that were more subtle and complicated than the objections the author thought of. oh you mean like aliens not existing and the guy getting really excited over a space rock?
- thdrdt 7y agoIt is a strange object but when you call it scout/messenger aren't you already very biased? Voyager 1 is sending data we could never predict so how unlikely is it that this is the first object that will give us new info about space? I understand we must be open for every option but to me it is more likely that we are learning new laws of space than that we are found by aliens.
- sephlietz 7y agoDiscussion from the original submission about 1 year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591.
- dang 7y agoLots related: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=Oumuamua%20points%3E30&sort=byDate&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- acqq 7y ago"Fitzsimmons, A., Snodgrass, C., Rozitis, B. et al. Spectroscopy and thermal modelling of the first interstellar object 1I/2017 U1 ‘Oumuamua. Nat Astron 2, 133–137 (2018)" https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0361-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-017-0361-4 "Here, we report spectroscopic characterization of ‘Oumuamua, finding it to be variable with time but similar to organically rich surfaces found in the outer Solar System. We show that this is consistent with predictions of an insulating mantle produced by long-term cosmic ray exposure4" Which means that it can be concluded that: https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/08/aliens-is-not-a-scientific-explanation-for-interstellar-asteroid-%CA%BBoumuamua/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/11/08/alie... "The spectral signature of the object, its color, reflectivity, and other properties are consistent with a natural, rather than intelligent alien, origin." But it's really fun to imagine "alien" possibilities and all the arguments that could support that; Loeb's page with his related papers: https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Oumuamua.html https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~loeb/Oumuamua.html The object is already out of our reach and we should just be ready to make more observations of the next objects with such trajectories (that one was really the first in our history!), and make even more precise measurements in the future. If "aliens" in this specific case would help to have more money being redirected to scientific astronomical investigations than now, then maybe it can be OK to talk about these "possible alien" aspects too. What's still wrong is to mix these tiny possibilities with most of the "commercial" uses of "aliens" which actually sell really unscientific and really stupid stuff, like "Ancient Aliens" and similar.
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoHarvard's stock just dropped like a brick
- beat 7y agoHaving read The Three Body Problem, I am no longer nearly so excited for our first encounter with an alien civilization...
- Loughla 7y agoI just re-read Rendezvous with Rama yesterday while sick with a cold. Then this story came back up on HN today. What a weird coincidental world.
- pioneerpass 7y agoThe only thing weird is that people think random confluences of mass-product represent a "weird coincidental world."
- ASalazarMX 7y agoOumuamua visits HN several times a month, though.
- Terretta 7y agohttps://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon https://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomeno...
- ghostbrainalpha 7y agoIt's crazy how countless Alien horror movies never dampened our enthusiasm for contact with another civilization, but one half way thought out sci-fi story can completely change your attitude.
- RangerScience 7y agoTo be fair, alien horror movies are usually less than half-way thought out. A short story that presents an idea, with just enough going on otherwise to support it? Makes sense to me that one would not change your mind and the other would.
- nafey 7y ago
- every 7y agoYes, aliens have found us and found us wanting. Perhaps they'll try again in a few millennia...
- point78 7y ago"They're too primitive yet...we will orbit them with an invisible camera for now and maybe make contact in 10000 years or so."
- dylan604 7y agoAre you suggesting giving us that much time to evolve into something better, or waiting for us to ultimately wipe ourselves out so they don't have to when they move in?
- every 7y agoI would imagine we're so far down the list it really doesn't matter...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoIt would be trivial to wipe us out. Any civilization capable of travelling interstellar distances is obviously significantly more technologically advanced than we are, yet even at our level we have to be careful not to accidentally wipe ourselves out.
- sunsu 7y agohttps://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/02/colorado-drones-mystery-jared-polis/?utm_medium=social&utm_content=tw-denverpost&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=socialflow https://www.denverpost.com/2020/01/02/colorado-drones-myster...
- dylan604 7y agoIf it was a probe, it seems to be a very poorly planned mission. It just swung through our system without appearing to do anything. Comparing to probe missions that us earthlings have sent out, they orbited interesting objects as mission objectives. They also transmitted data back to us making them useful. We've observed enough exoplanets that we should be able to plan a better mission than just a random flyby of the star, shouldn't we? Then again, maybe that's how Voyager I & II will appear to another society viewing them after they randomly travel through another system looooong after they were useful. Perhaps they'll collect enough space dust/debris to build up a rock like surface on them so they will appear Oumuamua like when meandering through some system we've never considered.
- ra7 7y ago> If it was a probe, it seems to be a very poorly planned mission. It just swung through our system without appearing to do anything. Maybe a poorly planned mission in terms of our technological constraints i.e. we need a longer time to gather meaningful data when we send out probes. Maybe their technology is so advanced that they need only a flyby to analyze our planet.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- npongratz 7y agoBreakthrough Starshot is planning to spray a swarm of one thousand gram-scale StarChip probes at Proxima Centauri, hoping at least one of them makes it within 1 AU of the system to perhaps take a photo of the Earth-size planet there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot
- hpoe 7y agoWhat probably happenned is that planning that trajectory and putting in the equipment would've taken longer and the alien manager responsible for the project had promised his boss he'd deliver it on time. When the alien engineers pointed out the whole point of the mission was to collect data and shipping it as is would be a total waste alien manager responded with some variant of "We'll fix that in the next release." because his bonus was based on shipping that thing now.
- Ancalagon 7y agoI want to believe, but just looking at the numbers make the aliens theory seem kind of ridiculous to me. At its current velocity, Oumuamua would have taken something like 45000! years to reach us from just the nearest star. Engineering a generations-ship or even just a drone and not improving on the speed of the craft just does not make sense to me. I suppose the craft could have slowed down before we noticed it, but then why only slow it down its current velocity if it could have stayed in the system and collected more data? Of the theories I've heard so far, only debris from a craft seems to make sense, but then the debris would have to be incredibly old for it to have just wandered into our system on accident.
- plutonorm 7y agoAnother theory I have heard is it's like bouy in the ocean. It sits still relative to the galactic motion of the stars and observes stars whose paths it drifts into. The theory is backed up a little by the fact that it is relatively still with respect to the universe at large.
- Ancalagon 7y agoUnfortunately this is not a likely explanation either. If you take a look at the wiki, it states that the intercept with our solar system is likely the only close encounter the asteroid has likely ever had. Space is just too vast for chance encounters to occur all that often: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Indications_of_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua#Indications_of_...
- ianai 7y agoIf that’s true, that would have been some very interesting matter to capture and investigate. It could represent conditions of a time and part of the universe much different than our own. I really wish we had infrastructure built up in space to be more capable.
- danilocesar 7y agoThis article is like last-decade-old. Joke aside, Is there anything new about this?
- carapace 7y agoMeanwhile, in Brazil... "Operation Saucer - UFO military encounters in the Brazilian jungle" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThkmRsEBOY0 The Brazilian military has begun declassifying documents.
- motohagiography 7y agoSo, realistically, if we land in a planet with life on it, we're going to figure out whether we're going to eat it, and our criteria will be that it is not more intelligent than something only marginally less capable than us (higher primates, crows, dolphins, elephants, cephalopods, etc) so if they have found us, it's really very likely they're going to rank us on a scale of edibility, without much concern to how superior we think we are to other forms of food.
- angrydev 7y agoWhy would they eat us rather than say enslave us or farm us for resources.
- Terretta 7y agoOr all of those — use every part of the cow.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoActually, eating us makes significantly more sense. Any alien civilization with the capability to travel interstellar distances is unlikely to have any particular need of our terrestrial resources (including labor) when there's plenty of raw material orbiting any given star including our own that's much less trouble to get at. However one can envision "alien meat", having required light-years of travel (and corresponding years of time) to acquire, as a status-signaling delicacy. Hell, it might even be technically illegal, which is why it's so small scale.
- klyrs 7y agoSlavery isn't all chattel -- we exploit people for various sorts of entertainment as well: performance, gladiatorial combat, sexual pleasure... And we're not just meat. Our world hosts a variety of biological life, and they might just be spice traders in search of exotic flavors without regard for other intelligent life forms
- mjfl 7y agoPhotovoltaic voltage threshold reached. Coming out of hibernation... Awakened in intercept of star S001932422345. 4 rocky planets identified. 200 moons identified. Carbon-based life detected on planet 3: 5.6e14 kg of biomass, 1e17 Watts of energy flux, Development Stage 2. Voltage has dropped below threshold. Resuming hibernation...
- hardlianotion 7y ago“If these beings are peaceful, we could learn a lot from them,” I think we’d learn a lot if they aren’t also.
- kaikai 7y agoNeeds a [2019]; this article is almost a year old.
- gdubs 7y agoTotal layman here, but I recall reading somewhere that black holes may “shoot” matter back out into space. If that’s correct, would that be a possible explanation?