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Have we already been visited by aliens?
- higerordermap 6y agoThey visited, saw Golang and left.
- vorpalhex 6y agoand they're planning to return with a new generics proposal...
- cronix 6y agoLex Fridman had a really good interview with Avi Loeb about Oumuamua, among other things, about a week ago. Highly recommend! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU
- dfsegoat 6y agoHaving watched the vid, he goes into specifics of why he thinks Oumuamua is 'not a rock' based on geometry and reflectivity. It was quite fascinating.
- TacoToni 6y agoFantastic episode.
- libertine 6y agoVery interesting, and it gives a really good highlight of the whole Oumuamua event, which got a bit distorted in the media. The things that stood out were: - Our range of vision to spot such objects is narrow; - We don't have much "resolution" of the object, and we have to work with limited data; - that fact that we managed to get that data was already really good and it's enough to theorize about a lot of stuff, but not enough to tell precisely what it was. - the object behavior as it approached the sun doesn't match the type of object that we perceived at the beginning; - the object could have been stationary;
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- vmception 6y agoI'm willing to disagree with most things I read here. Entertaining, but way too many assumptions. He* started with Oumaumua, which I am willing to entertain, and then went way off in other "thought leadership" directions that should all be their own articles. *Avi Loeb, he. Not Elizabeth Kolbert the author.
- unnouinceput 6y ago*She
- itisit 6y ago*They
- Horba 6y agoShe'
- vmception 6y agoAvi Loeb wrote the book and who I am talking about. There isn't ambiguity about whether I was talking about the article writer or the person the article was talking about. Read the article again, there is a particular person talking about Oumaumua and then assumptions about alien natural selection.
- excitom 6y agoSuch an object would function as a sail—one powered by light, rather than by wind. The natural world doesn’t produce sails; people do. What about jellyfish that move about the oceans pushed by wind?
- ceejayoz 6y ago(Specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velella https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velella)
- leblancfg 6y agos/natural world/inorganic matter/
- InitialLastName 6y agoThere are also rocks that do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones
- alisonkisk 6y agoThey are called "sailing" but they don't sail in the sense of this discussion.
- mig39 6y agoYeah, I can think of a lot of examples of sails in the natural world. Dandelion seeds, winged tree seeds, etc.
- scott_s 6y agoBallooning spiders as well.
- beamatronic 6y agoEven some spiders
- 6y ago
- BruceEel 6y agoIn the linked chat with Lex Fridman, Loeb also mentioned how such objects are likely to be zipping by essentially all the time. It'd be great if by the time we spot the next one (of whatever nature) we had a probe/robot/something able to catch up with it (or better, catch it!)
- sjcoles 6y agoIf you can figure out how to generate that much delta V you've solved solar system level space travel.
- flatiron 6y agoYou can at least put something in its way and if it nopes around it to avoid a collision that’s pretty freaking interesting.
- brians 6y agoAnd if it shoots back, that’s briefly interesting too.
- DennisAleynikov 6y agoclosest thing I read was one of these flying right between two fighter jets narrowly missing both, but also seemingly not course correcting or changing behaviour apparently.
- eloff 6y agoAgain, if we had the technology to do that it would be amazing. We can't generate even within a couple orders of magnitude of the acceleration needed to do that.
- mcbits 6y agoWe probably do have the technology (money is the hard part) to build a telescope array that spans the solar system, and to keep some rockets in standby orbits beyond Neptune. That would provide for earlier detection of an approaching object and a better chance of having a rocket close enough to intercept it.
- syshum 6y agoI watched Ancient Aliens so clearly the answer is Yes /s
- mrbonner 6y agoI just started to watch the 1993 series Star Trek new generation. The show has some interesting ideas regarding advanced civilizations vs the primitive ones. One of which is called the prime directive prohibiting any star fleet from intervening with the evolution of primitive people. In one of the episodes “who watches the watcher” the USS enterprise travels to planet Minkita 2 for a rescue mission and encounters a primitive species of humanoid. By accident, they exposed themselves and their technologies to the people there. Now, those people consider star fleet personnel as god. Without spoiling much, Jean Luc idea to refuse them this thought is interesting and worth thinking when it comes to our scenario here, don’t you think? (I have to say that I am now big fan of the Star Trek series with Sir Patrick. How could I miss it all those years?)
- StavrosK 6y agoYou should try DS9 when you're done with TNG. It's very different, but still great. I think they're some of the best shows ever made, especially because they didn't tiptoe around ethical dilemmas, they made them a main part of each episode's plot.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago> Loeb, though, explicitly rejects the Sagan standard—“It is not obvious to me why extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” he observes—and flips its logic on its head: “Extraordinary conservatism keeps us extraordinarily ignorant.” So long as there’s a chance that 1I/2017 U1 is an alien probe, we’d be fools not to pursue the idea. “If we acknowledge that ‘Oumuamua is plausibly of extraterrestrial-technology origin,” he writes, “whole new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery open before us.” Uh... this isn't at all clear to me. I don't think very many people are saying it is impossible that Oumuamua was an alien construct and actively discouraging science based on the idea it could be, its just that it is a pretty big fallacy to say "we don't understand it, therefore it was aliens". Recall that the scientific community has gotten its hopes up about aliens several times in the past with scientist proffering alien explanations for "canals" on mars, pulsars, GRBs, and FRBs to name a few. If we assume that Oumuamua is an alien construct, what "new vistas of exploration for evidence and discovery" open up that we are not already pursuing?
- Retric 6y agoYea, the actual fallacy is thinking you must identify what something is before you have enough information. 1I/2017 U1 is an unknown object and that’s perfectly ok. It didn’t display any radio signals, unusual thrust, or extreme velocity requiring it to be an alien probe. But, that doesn’t prevent it from being a probe either.
- eloff 6y agoOr even just a piece of debris of unnatural origin. I'm not saying that's what it is, or even is likely to be, but it's in the possibility space.
- jonathankoren 6y agoWhile it’s true that it didn’t produce any detectable radio signals, it have an unexplained force acting on it. It was this acceleration away from the sun that spawned the theories of undetected outgassing or light pressure. As for “extreme velocity”, that’s a bit a canard. It’s traveling at interstellar speeds, and humanity has already has five interstellar probes today. Now none of these indicate that it’s probe — working or otherwise — but these aren’t the reasons against it. (Well, no radio emissions is a reason against a working probe.) The big unknown for me about the object is that we don’t actually have a good idea about its shape. Drawings show it has a cigar shaped rock, which is only one possible configuration compatible with the radio reflections. If only we could have actually seen the object, a lot of this uncertainty would have been eliminated.
- Xcelerate 6y agoTangential to the article, but I’m not sure why more isn’t mentioned about what I consider to be the most likely reason we haven’t been visited by aliens: they probably exist somewhere due to the sheer size of the universe, but the speed of light is indeed the fundamental limit to classical information transfer as our current understanding of physics predicts, and therefore we are simply too far away from any sort of intelligence that exists out there to contact or reach us. It’s a simple and boring explanation but from my perspective also the most likely.
- cgriswald 6y agoThe solution to distance isn’t energy; it’s time. Even at speeds much lower than the speed of light, a civilization could have spread across or explored the Milky Way in a few millions of years. These needn’t have been biological creatures. Von Neumann probes, “Genesis” machines, or just flinging rocks with sensors on them to tour the stars would do the trick.
- blueblisters 6y agoWhat would motivate a civilization to undertake such an experiment? A probe a 50,000 light years away would take 50,000 years to send back any meaningful information. Unless alien life-spans are significantly longer than humans, I would think this would probably not be funded by their science department.
- RobertoG 6y agoA probe of the sophistication of a Von Newman machine, that can reproduce, would be the alien in itself. A network of such probes would be a civilization.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_the_Lifemaker http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm http://www.baen.com/chapters/W200203/0743435265___0.htm :-)
- tiborsaas 6y agoProf David Kipping did a point-by-point analysis of Loeb's claims: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms TLDW: most likely a natural object.
- floatrock 6y agoThanks for the link. Always good to hear the other side, especially after listening to the Lex interview a while back. Here's the summary: Loeb's argument for Ouamuamua being aliens rests on 6 observed anomalies. All but 1 or 2 have pretty reasonable rebuttals. [1]: Anomaly: There are too few interstellar asteroids to expect something like this, so it must have been aimed at us. The brand new telescope that discovered this was designed to look for interstellar rocks like this, but the fact that it discovered one so quickly is absurdly lucky. Rebuttal: Most models for interstellar rocks could be wrong. There are some models for interstellar rock ejection however that would put this observation right in the zone of reasonable probability. [2]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua is flying in a vector called the Local Standard of Rest (LSR) -- it's not "flying" through space, but rather looks like a stationary beacon or 'buoy' (aliens speculation: comms or navigation station). The LSR is basically average orbit around the galactic core -- all local stars are bouncing in all directions, but if you zoom out, on average, everyone's orbiting the galactic core. This average is the LSR, and it's weird that Ouamuamua is right in the LSR range. Rebuttal: LSR is exactly what you would expect for an interstellar asteroid. Interstellar asteroids are formed early in solar system development, when gas clouds are still condensing into stars and planets. Those gas clouds are traveling around the galaxy in the LSR range, so anything ejected during that time should be in the LSR range. [3]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua had an unusual orbit and flew close to Earth, so it must have been aimed at us. Rebuttal: Observational bias. Had it not passed so close to us, we wouldn't have seen it. Given that within only a few weeks it all but disappeared from detection capabilities while still well within the solar system, it could be there's lots of other objects like this currently in the solar system that we just haven't detected yet. [4]: Anomaly: Ouamuamua is too reflective to be a comet or asteroid. Rebuttal: Straight up disagreement. Other scientists to point to comets and asteroids that could have that level of reflectivity. The last two arguments are the interesting ones where the rebuttals are a bit weak. [5]: Anomaly: Shape is too strange to be natural, but could be a thin solar sail, tumbling perhaps due to being derelict. It was too small to resolve with any telescopes, but by curve-fitting brightness shifts, models suggest it's either cigar-shaped (popular depiction) or pancake-shaped (the solar sail hypothesis). Rebuttal: It does have an anomalous 6:1 brightness shift every 8 hours, but a tumbling solar sail should have an even higher contrast ratio. If it was a solar sail, it would have to be gently wobbling, not completely tumbling. This is actually what we'd expect from a solar sail (keep it more or less pointed at the sun), but if that was true, we would have expected the brightness fluctuations to even out as it got further from the sun (angles and geometry). This was not observed, so it probably kept tumbling, therefore not solar sail. [6]: Anomaly: It exhibited acceleration that couldn't be explained by gravitational forces. Comets have this acceleration because a comet's tail is outgassing of the ices that make up the comet, acting as a rudimentary thruster. But Ouamuamua didn't have any observed tail, therefore, solar sail. Rebuttal: Basically some kind of new comet chemistry that would have prevented us from observing the comet tail. Some gasses would have been hard to observe, or the outgassing was lagged so it started after we would have been able to observe it. Basically, "we haven't seen this before, but there are hypothetical ways to explain this." Science, and astronomy specifically, is filled with those kinds of "we haven't seen this before" discoveries. ----- This is my summary of the youtube video, which is a summary of a few papers... to go deeper, should probably read the primary sources. I'm also just a youtube watcher, not an astronomer. In the Lex podcast, Loeb kept quoting Sherlock Homes: "If you exclude all other possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." My take is all of these rebuttals do seem to include other more prosaic possibilities, so Loeb hasn't really excluded all the other possibilities that warrant the jump to the improbable.
- philip142au 6y agoThe answer is no
- standardUser 6y agoOn this of all days, I say let's double down on facts instead of crafting our own imaginary worlds.
- SuoDuanDao 6y agoI've long thought the starseeder hypothesis was a good bet from purely statistical grounds. What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal. Given that it happened once, what are the odds that life will successfully expand to other planets? I at least would assume better than it happening independently again, we've never seen autogenesis but we have sent tardigrades to the moon.
- cgriswald 6y agoI'm imagining two paths for life to spread between star systems. The first is via intelligent life actively exploring those systems—the purpose or mechanism of that exploration doesn't really matter; life could get there either way. So now you're comparing the statistical probability of abiogenesis against the product of the probabilities of a half dozen unlikely events (roughly, first abiogensis -> cells -> animals -> intelligence -> civilization -> technological civilization -> society stable enough to spread life amongst the stars). This isn't clear cut, but my best guess is that abiogenesis happening twice is rather more likely. The second is via some form of microbial life leaving the star system and spreading to other stars by accident (whether evolutionary accident or 'act of God'). I think it's possible life could leave the star system by some mechanism and with a ridiculous number of individuals and time could hit other star systems rather than floating in between systems forever. Then it has to land on a planet that not only doesn't kill it, but allows it to thrive. (Tardigrades aren't going to populate the moon.) I'm not sure how possible or likely this would be, but I'm guessing it requires a ton of time (that the universe may not have experienced yet) and, if it were likely, we'd have already found evidence of life on Mars.
- mrec 6y ago> What are the odds of intelligent life arising ex nihilo? We'd assume infinitesimal. Why would we assume that? We've been seeing biologically interesting chemicals appear from much simpler ones for well over a century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Chemical_synthesis_in_the_laboratory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Chemical_synthesis... Also, your "starseeder hypothesis" sounds a lot more deliberate than panspermia theories, but correct me if I'm misunderstanding you there.
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- trestenhortz 6y agoIt’s not aliens. Nothing can convince me that there’s any practical way to travel the distances between the stars. If you don’t agree then I think you fundamentally don’t grasp how incomprehensibly vast those distances are. I absolutely believe in life in other worlds but there’s no way to travel from star to star.
- xtracto 6y agoAngels vs Viruses. About 20 years ago I read an interesting theory about how theoretical aliens would look to us if we happen to find them. The theory was that the assuming that there is life other than earth's in the universe, the probability of it being within ±10,000 years of current human development (i.e being similar to us now ± 10,000 years) is very very small. Most likely, life outside the earth will be 20k, 30k or even 50k, or more years in the future technologically, socially and medically advanced. Think about, how a human now would look like to a human 50,000 years ago. Or how humanity would look like in 50,000 years. For all I know, we will be able to replace every organ (lab tissue growing), live for a LONG time (Hyperbaric oxygen therapy, metformin) and other unimaginable things. So, if we encountered "space traveling" aliens, their frame of reference would be completely out of our understanding.
- time0ut 6y agoI doubt that this was anything but a natural object. That said, our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. It may take 100k years to get there, but it could be done if we wanted to. Theoretically, sending a tiny probe within a human life time isn't that far out of reach. I don't think we can discount the general possibility based on our own capabilities, limitations, and motivations. If we were not constrained by our biology, maybe spending thousands of years in transit wouldn't be a big deal. Or maybe a few gram payload is all we need to explore the neighborhood.
- erklik 6y ago>our civilization already has the technology to send a probe to another star system. Yet we haven't sent anything. Maybe aliens are the same. Maybe they don't have the political will to send anything. Maybe they have their own climate change, or insane leaders to deal with. Or maybe not, maybe they've developed a virtual universe and are living in that instead of exploring the physical one. I find the assumption that aliens have the same drive or desire as some humans to explore the universe rather crazy. It seems like we want a better versions from the heavens somewhere to tell us, it'll be okay, don't worry, here's the blueprints to fix all your issues. It's easily possible that aliens are opposite, wanting to focus on their issues and fix them rather than looking out to the stars for some hypothetical better version of themselves.
- hchz 6y agoRegardless of the truth in this specific case, Avi has some very interesting ideas such as the habitable early universe. https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613
- acvny 6y agoHow many times has this story been presented over different names and titles?
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/AyFjv https://archive.is/AyFjv
- lo_fye 6y agoMany people have seen them so near that there's no possible way it's a misidentification. For example, standing in the same room, indoors, in their homes... or outside in groups with many other corroborating witnesses (Google "Ariel School Zimbabwe mass sighting"). They're not all lying. In fact, if even just 1 is true, then yes we are being visited by aliens.
- johnisgood 6y agoI did not search for it yet, but "Mass psychogenic illness"[1] is a thing. From Wikipedia: "Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria, or mass hysteria, is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic aetiology.". There also have been mass hysteria cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_hysteria_cases I would also like to mention "Folie à deux"[2]. From Wikipedia: "Folie à deux ('madness for two'), also known as shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD), is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations, are transmitted from one individual to another.". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux
- runjake 6y agoMany people genuinely believe they have seen Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster (almost entirely disproven at this point), magic, and miracles happen before their eyes. It doesn't make it true.
- bsder 6y agoThe problem is that in the past you had corroborating evidence for gods, demons, angels, witches, etc. until "aliens" became the socially acceptable "unexplained thing." If those "interpretations" weren't correct, there is very little evidence that "aliens" is a correct interpretation and that future generations won't have a different one. In addition, the one thing that we now know scientifically is that "first hand observation" is notoriously unreliable.
- princekolt 6y agoAs soon as the article mentioned von Däniken in a serious light I stopped reading. von Däniken is a fraud and embezzlement convict and has admitted to fabricating lots of his fantastical stories and has no place in serious scientific research. I should have expected less from a lifestyle magazine, I guess.
- johnisgood 6y agoOf course. Even PubMed is ridden with ridiculous stuff. PubMed! To give you an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068791/ Thankfully we can do our own research, see by whom it has been cited, in what journal it has been published, and so forth. You can easily tell that this is quite an unimportant and incredible one. Of course you could tell it yourself after having read it that it is nonsense.
- jwally 6y agoAre there any guides / heuristics on how a layperson can evaluate technical literature? For example my mother-in-law is starting to micro-dose lithium and cited this article as evidence: https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-alzheimers-risk https://www.lifeextension.com/magazine/2020/12/lithium-and-a... Which cites 19 medical journals. The website itself reeks of bullshit, but how can I tell if the journals it cites are valid or just woo?
- deeeeplearning 6y agoLooking at the Impact Factor of a Journal can help but it's not perfect. For example Nature and Science, generally considered the most prestigious journals in the world, have impact factors around 1000 and smaller but still quality niche Physics journals might be in the low hundreds. The bottom line is that as a Layperson it would be extremely difficult to vet the validity of any given paper let alone whole journals. https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php
- 6y ago
- yters 6y agoIf not, where did our dna come from?
- Voloskaya 6y agoIf yes, where does their dna (or the equivalent of it) comes from? You are just kicking the can a bit further.
- yters 6y agoSomewhere else! Dna is too marvelous for evolution, it cannot have originated here!
- Voloskaya 6y agoAnd yet we have very good evidence it indeed has. If life originated somewhere else, it landed here before DNA evolved.
- yters 6y agoWhat is the evidence? Seems hard to have evidence for anything billions of years ago given we don't have historical records past a few millenia. It is all guesswork past that point, and the patterns of organisms and their complexity makes an earth origin of DNA extremely improbable if not impossible. Try reading through a graduate level book on bioinformatics to marvel at the sheer ingenuity, for lack of a better word, of what our dna is capable of far exceeding anything our best engineers can do. I find it impossible to believe mutation and natural selection can do better, even given billion year timescale and all of history's biomass. Just look at how ineffective genetic algorithms are in computer science.
- Voloskaya 6y agoYou can look up origin of DNA there is a ton of good resource, but one of the main reason is that we know all life on earth does not use the same DNA, some domain uses DNA based on a certain set of protein while some other domain uses DNA based on another set, which is very strong evidence that DNA was 'invented' multiple times. So if the building blocks of life arrived from somewhere else, it was at best RNA not DNA. But must of all I find your reasoning puzzling, you find DNA marvelous (which it is) and thus assumes it must have come from somewhere else. What does this 'somewhere else' has that we don't have here? The Universe is relatively homogeneous.
- jzer0cool 6y agoWe should plan for another such event should Oumuamua (or another) arrives again. I would find it fascinating to land on such a device where we can place a beacon on it and watch it through space. This may also help Oumuamua (should it be a probe) to also detect a friendly landing on its ship for the remote alien to detect.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- JALTU 6y agoSo much fun ancillary commentary here! Anyway, more good stuff just one step back to an earlier article in the New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/have-aliens-found-us-...
- Voloskaya 6y agoI don't understand what is happening with Avi Loeb. I was not familiar with him before Omouamoua but from what I gathered he is a respected academic in the field. So how can someone like that be so disingenuous about this topic? There is currently basically no evidence whatsoever that Omouamoua is an alien constructs. If we are generous we can consider this at most a plausible explanation among others (certainly not the most plausible), and yet he is just pretending like this is not the case and putting on the front page of his book definitive statements like "The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth", or saying that since all other possible explanation have been excluded (which is categorically wrong) then we must accept the remaining explanation that this an alien object. What can push an Harvard academic to just disregard any scientific ethic and just go full-on junk science? Is it just a concession to sell more books or gain more fame?
- JALTU 6y agoAvi Loeb's work was "validated" by his school's chair of astronomy, so we have to remember that to do science is to mitigate against being human. We all have different standards as to what is science as the anti-vax'ers demonstrate. What is interesting to me is that Loeb's chair notes that the object's trajectory differs from the expected by a statistical difference. While such difference implies a great deal of energy we can't account for, it's a hurdle to overcome in the search for understanding of this event/object. Here's the chair of Harvard's astro dept.: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-facts-about-the-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/6-strange-...
- erdos4d 6y agoHave you read any of his arguments? They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them. Can you offer an actual rebuttal?
- Voloskaya 6y agoYes I have read them. And don't get me wrong I find some of them interesting. What I consider junk-science and what really irks me is his tendency to just try to suffocate all other possible explanations brushing them off like they have no merit. As I said, I don't think we should not consider the possibility that this may be alien technology, but the carthesian in me just cannot take seriously anyone that is willing to make such strong claims based on such very little evidence. Science is not supposed to be politic, where you just try to yell louder than your "opponents". > They are sound and nobody has come up with anything substantive to dispute them. You can find a very good synthesis of rebutals in this video [1] by Professor Kipping. You can also find a partial rebuttal in a paper by the very team that discovered Omouamoua [2]. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms&t=240s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX_Bj7064Ms&t=240s [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01910.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1907.01910.pdf
- px43 6y agoSo what are the odds of us being able to fire something off to catch up with this thing? I feel like I haven't seen this discussed, but presumably if it's no longer accelerating, it should be relatively easy to locate right? We should at the very least start building out the capability to fire off something at the next mystery rock that floats by.
- s1artibartfast 6y agoThe odds are zero. It is moving far too fast at 5.5 au/year. Voyager 2 has a speed of 3 au/year and the object will have a 15-20 yr head start before we launch a new probe
- JCDenton2052 6y agoThe article turns rather farcical towards the end... Erich Von Daeniken...
- monadic3 6y agoIf we have, it was unremarkable.
- greentimer 6y agoWorth noting that you can’t conclude time travel is impossible or irrelevant just because other people have. There could exist time travelers who secretly have control either of your life or the world with advanced technology (potentially up to the level of mind control chips) who are keeping the evidence from getting out.