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How likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope ar
by grues-dinner 1y ago
How likely is it that a random alien object does a wellness check on a barren planet in the same decade the humans happen to turn on the big survey telescope array?
- baggy_trough 1y agoPretty likely if there are a lot of them!
- grues-dinner 1y agoThen I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!). Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.
- 827a 1y agoIn fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its name.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThe other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)
- ceejayoz 1y agoShuffle a deck of cards, and statistically no one has ever shuffled the same sequence in all of human history. It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards. Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.
- grues-dinner 1y agoThat's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hammering in all the time, not that the first ones you see are particularly special, even if one of them seems to be making a statistically unlikely near approach to Mars.
- ceejayoz 1y agoYeah, like exoplanets. When I was in middle school there were none. Now there’s 6,000 confirmed ones.
- onion2k 1y agoSurely no one was actually thinking there weren't exoplanets though. We didn't need experimental proof that they exist to be reasonably sure that they do.
- dhosek 1y agoThe existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians are pretty sure it is, but they don’t know for sure.
- baggy_trough 1y agoI’m curious how unlikely it is. Seems very, very unlikely to pass by 2 major planets.
- ceejayoz 1y agoIt is. It’s similarly unlikely that I win the lottery. But someone always does!
- mytailorisrich 1y agoAliens have been doing this every few years for 250,000 years but we've just only managed to build barely decent telescopes ;)