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Thread: What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

  1. #331
    Quote Originally Posted by Cracky View Post
    Such a satellite would have to be enormous. Much bigger than any ever launched.
    It'd be big when its unpacked, but it could be pretty compact when launched.

    I'm not really expecting this to happen. China makes a lot of announcements of grand large-scale tech projects, but they always either never materialize or the reality is far less impressive than the claims.

  2. #332
    Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
    It'd be big when its unpacked, but it could be pretty compact when launched.

    I'm not really expecting this to happen. China makes a lot of announcements of grand large-scale tech projects, but they always either never materialize or the reality is far less impressive than the claims.
    I don't either. But I really really want them to try!

    I wonder how big it would actually need to be? The deliverables are 8X moonlight over a 5 to 50 mile area. Let's call it 20 mile diameter circular area and keep the 8x moonlight. Considering light diffusion, how big does the mirror have to be to end up with a 20 mile wide beam at ground level? I suppose it depends on how high the orbit is - does it have to be geosynchronous - 22k miles - would that dim the light because the orbit is at the equator, or is it so far out, it doesn't really matter much? And considering the intensity of sunlight, how reflective does it have to be to get 8x moonlight at the surface? Is the ideal 100% reflective enough - if not, it's a moot point. Half that acceptable?

    Do we have any physicists in the community?
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  3. #333
    There were a bunch of scientists interviewed when this story first came out a few days ago. Most of them thought it was technically feasible, though challenging and maybe a bad idea (and probably not a chance it would get done in the timeline).

    The moon is pretty darned bright and it's not made of particularly reflective material. Going with a very reflective material that's much closer to the Earth means you can get away with smaller size than might be obvious. There's a lot of engineering details, and I suspect they'd have to think carefully about their fuel costs for stationkeeping (they'd essentially be building a lightsail). But feasible? Probably.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  4. #334
    It would make the place a tourist destination, I bet. Nothing else like it in the world.
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  5. #335
    Sweet photo survey of the ISS found here. Very nice. Need to find higher rez versions for my PC background.

    https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/11/0...ions-exterior/
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  6. #336
    This launch tied SpaceX's record 18 launches set last year. I'm expecting at least one more launch this year to beat that record, maybe more. Looking forward to their attempts to land the second stage. There's been talk, but I haven't seen anything beyond that. I know they've been trying to catch the farings, though with not much success....


    A Used SpaceX Rocket Just Launched a Satellite for Qatar, Then Aced a Landing

    https://www.space.com/42446-spacex-r...adline+Feed%29
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  7. #337
    Huh. Looks like SpaceX is giving up on landing the Falcon 9 second stage, directing resources to BFR development instead.

    Also, they're getting ready for a first ever 3rd launch of the reusable booster. This will be 2 records - the third use of a booster and 19 launches in one year. I read that the SpaceX goal is to achieve 1 launch/ week, so not quite half way there. I wonder, is there enough business for that rate?

    SpaceX Delays Historic Third Launch of Used Rocket (and Its Flock of Satellites)
    https://www.space.com/42479-spacex-r...adline+Feed%29
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  8. #338

    Default So, Did We Just Get Scouted?

    If you're not familiar with the Harvard scientists' argument that Oumuamua is artificial, it's worth reading through this article. To my limited expertise, it's compelling.

    I'd welcome any wet blankets from the Wiggin types on the forum.

    Because, if this thing actually is artificial, it means one of at least two things: Either the galaxy is so filled with the debris of civilizations that this sort of encounter isn't that uncommon (WOW!), or we just got intentionally scouted by an alien civilization, and all that that implies (Holy Shit!).

    Given how odd Oumuamua is, and given there's still a window of time to send a spacecraft for a fly-by, I think we absolutely should do so. Right?


    6 Strange Facts about the Interstellar Visitor 'Oumuamua

    By Abraham Loeb on November 20, 2018

    On October 19, 2017, the first interstellar object, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered by the Pan-STARRS survey. The experience was similar to having a surprise guest for dinner show up from another country. By examining this guest, we can learn about the culture of that country without the need to travel there—a good thing in this case, given that it would take us a hundred thousand years to visit even the nearest star using conventional chemical rockets.

    Surprisingly, our first interstellar guest appeared to be weird and unlike anything we have seen before. By the time we realized it, the guest was already out the door with its image fading into the dark street, so we did not have a chance to get a second look at its mysterious qualities. Below is a list of six peculiarities exhibited by ‘Oumuamua:

    1. Assuming that other planetary systems resemble the solar system, Pan-STARRS should not have discovered this or any other interstellar rock in the first place. In a paper published a decade ago, we predicted an abundance of interstellar asteroids that is smaller by many (two to eight) orders of magnitude than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua, assuming it’s a member of a random population of objects. Put another way, ‘Oumuamua implies that the population of interstellar objects is far greater than expected. Each star in the Milky Way needs to eject 1015 such objects during its lifetime to account for a population as large as ‘Oumuamua implies. Thus, the nurseries of ‘Oumuamua-like objects must be different from what we know based on our own solar system.

    2. ‘Oumuamua originated from a very special frame of reference, the so-called local standard of rest (LSR), which is defined by averaging the random motions of all the stars in the vicinity of the sun. Only one star in 500 is moving as slowly as ‘Oumuamua in that frame. The LSR is the ideal frame for camouflage, namely for hiding the origins of an object and avoiding its association with any particular star. The relative motion between ‘Oumuamua and the sun reflects the motion of the sun relative to the LSR. ‘Oumuamua is like a buoy sitting at rest on the surface of the ocean, with the solar system running into it like a fast ship. Could there be an array of buoys that serves as a network of relay stations or road posts, defining the average galactic frame of reference in interstellar space?

    3. Most interstellar asteroids are expected to be ripped away from their parent star when they lie in the outskirts of their birth planetary system (such as our solar system’s Oort cloud, which extends to 100,000 times the Earth-sun separation), where they are most loosely bound to the star’s gravity. At these outskirts, they can be removed with a small velocity nudge of less than a kilometer per second, in which case they will maintain the speed of their host star relative to the LSR. If ‘Oumuamua came from a typical star, it must have been ejected with an unusually large velocity kick. To make things more unusual, its kick should have been equal and opposite to the velocity of its parent star relative to the LSR, which is about 20 kilometers per second for a typical star like the sun. The dynamical origin of ‘Oumuamua is extremely rare no matter how you look at it. This is surprising, since the first foreign guest to a dinner party should be statistically common (especially given the larger than usual population inferred in the first point above).

    4. We do not have a photo of ‘Oumuamua, but its brightness owing to reflected sunlight varied by a factor of 10 as it rotated periodically every eight hours. This implies that ‘Oumuamua has an extreme elongated shape with its length at least five to 10 times larger than its projected width. Moreover, an analysis of its tumbling motion concluded that it would be at the highest excitation state expected from its tumultuous journey, if it has a pancake-like geometry. The inferred shape is more extreme than for all asteroids previously seen in the solar system, which have an length-to-width ratio of at most three.

    5. The Spitzer Space Telescope did not detect any heat in the form of infrared radiation from ‘Oumuamua. Given the surface temperature dictated by ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory near the sun, this sets an upper limit on its size of hundreds of meters. Based on this size limit, ‘Oumuamua must be unusually shiny, with a reflectance that is at least 10 times higher than exhibited by solar system asteroids.

    6. The trajectory of ‘Oumuamua deviated from that expected based on the sun’s gravity alone. The deviation is small (a tenth of a percent) but highly statistically significant. Comets exhibit such a behavior when ices on their surface heat up from solar illumination and evaporate, generating thrust through the rocket effect. The extra push for ‘Oumuamua could have originated by cometary outgassing if at least a tenth of its mass evaporated. But such massive evaporation would have naturally led to the appearance of a cometary tail, and none was seen. The Spitzer telescope observations also place tight limits on any carbon-based molecules or dust around ‘Oumuamua and rule out the possibility that normal cometary outgassing is at play (unless it is composed of pure water). Moreover, cometary outgassing would have changed the rotation period of ‘Oumuamua, and no such change was observed. Altogether, ‘Oumuamua does not appear to be a typical comet nor a typical asteroid, even as it represents a population that is far more abundant than expected.

    The extra push exhibited by ‘Oumuamua’s orbit could not have originated from a breakup into pieces because such an event would have provided a single, impulsive kick, unlike the continuous push that was observed. If cometary outgassing is ruled out and the inferred excess force is real, only one possibility remains: an extra push due to radiation pressure from the sun. In order for this push to be effective, ‘Oumuamua needs to be less than a millimeter thick but with a size of at least 20 meters (for a perfect reflector), resembling a lightsail of artificial origin. In this case ‘Oumuamua would resemble the solar sail demonstrated by the Japanese mission IKAROS or the lightsail contemplated for the Starshot initiative. An artificial origin offers the startling possibility that we discovered “a message in a bottle” following years of failed searches for radio signals from alien civilizations. Reassuringly, such a lightsail would survive collisions with interstellar atoms and dust as it travels throughout the galaxy.

    In contemplating the possibility of an artificial origin, we should keep in mind what Sherlock Holmes said: “when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” The Kepler satellite revealed that about a quarter of all the stars in the Milky Way have a habitable planet of the size of the Earth, with the potential to have liquid water on its surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. It is therefore conceivable that interstellar space is full of artificially made debris, either in the form of devices that serve a purpose on a reconnaissance mission or in the form of defunct equipment. However, to validate an exotic artificial origin for ‘Oumuamua, we need more data. As Carl Sagan said, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

    In fact, the possibility of a targeted mission adds some explanatory power. It is unlikely that 1015 solar sails are launched per star to make up a random population of ‘Oumuamua-like objects. This would require the unreasonable rate of a launch every five minutes from a planetary system even if all civilizations live as long as the full lifetime of the Milky Way galaxy. Instead, the required numbers could be reduced dramatically if ‘Oumuamua-like objects do not sample all possible orbits randomly but rather follow special orbits that dive into the innermost, habitable regions of planetary systems like our solar system.

    ‘Oumuamua moves too fast for our chemical rockets to catch up with it now without a gravitational assist from planets. 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. Interestingly, some interstellar objects that pass close to Jupiter can lose energy and get captured by the solar system. These are dinner guests who bumped into a wall on their way out and stayed around after dinner. The Sun-Jupiter system acts as a fishing net. If we can identify trapped interstellar objects through their unusual bound orbits with unusually high inclinations relative to the solar system plane, we could design missions to visit them and learn more about their nature.

    Alternatively, we can wait for the next interstellar guest to show up. 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.

    Studying interstellar objects resembles my favorite activity when walking along the beach with my daughters. We enjoy picking up seashells that were swept ashore and learning about their different origins. Every now and then, we find a plastic bottle that indicates an artificial origin. Similarly, astronomers should examine any object that enters the solar system and study its properties. There is no doubt that the six peculiar features of ‘Oumuamua have the potential to usher in a dramatic new era in space science.
    https://blogs.scientificamerican.com...itor-oumuamua/
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  9. #339
    That is a list of compelling arguments for why Oumuamua is unusual and should be studied if possible—neither more nor less. The first part consists of some pretty tenuous inferences afaict. But yes, we should pursue
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  10. #340
    Quote Originally Posted by Aimless View Post
    That is a list of compelling arguments for why Oumuamua is unusual and should be studied if possible—neither more nor less. The first part consists of some pretty tenuous inferences afaict. But yes, we should pursue
    They are not arguments for why it's unusual - they are the facts that make it unusual. They are arguments for why somebody should spend a few bucks to go take a close look at it.

    Oh, and it's a fucking alien probe and now that they've taken a closer look at us, we are clearly....? What? Quarantined, most likely, because, you know, we're a cluster fuck. Unless they're xenophobes, and in that case we'll be scheduled for elimination, because, you know, we're a possibly dangerous cluster fuck. I doubt any aliens would bother trying to talk to us, and the idea of invasion is just stupid.
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  11. #341
    If it is a probe, that's a pretty fucking big time scale the aliens are operating on.

  12. #342
    As for the No 1 on that list, I don't quite understand how they can imply anything about the population of such objects from a single data point.
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  13. #343
    Baltic, I think the theory is that they have a model about how often objects of this size/etc. are ejected from a system, and based on the length of time we've been observing, seeing something this big is either incredibly unlikely to happen naturally or maybe it wasn't natural. The big problem with their reasoning is twofold:

    First, they pay lip service to the idea that their model is wrong, but they jump pretty quickly to an explanation of deliberate action when - let's be honest - it's far more likely that our understanding of how star systems is incomplete than it is that an alien probe happened to whizz through our system just when we start noticing. Second, there's stretching some very thin data into a very big story. The fact of the matter is that all of this data is a single pixel on a telescope that's varying position and brightness. You can learn a lot about an object from this kind of information, yes, but even the estimates for things like size and aspect ratio have pretty big uncertainties. A lot of their analysis rests on certain assumptions about where in that range the object actually fits. Lastly, they make a big case of this being a 'stealth' probe that masks its origin intentionally by being relatively motionless wrt the local frame of reference. But a much simpler explanation is that it was just ejected a really long time ago, which has given it time to reach that state naturally.

    Might it be worth a look just for scientific curiosity? Sure! Is it technically feasible? Probably not. The crazies who tried to figure out whether it was feasible suggested building an entirely new vehicle combining a number of different technologies to just get close to the rock... and launching by 2021. It ain't happening.
    "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: Why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." - Werner Heisenberg (maybe)

  14. #344
    Quote Originally Posted by BalticSailor View Post
    As for the No 1 on that list, I don't quite understand how they can imply anything about the population of such objects from a single data point.
    Almost all naturally occurring properties can be arranged in a Gaussian distribution. We don't necessarily know what that curve looks like, but it's going to be big in the middle and small on the sides. So if you pick one object at random from that group of things, you're more likely to be getting an item from the middle. You're most likely to get the object that is perfectly average. So even when you only have one data point, you can still know that you most likely have something within 1 standard deviation of the mean, and almost certainly have something within 2 standard deviations of the mean. It's possible it's further away, but if you just assume you're within 2 standard deviations you'll be right 19 times out of 20. You still don't get an idea of what a standard deviation is or even which side of the mean you're on, but it gives a good starting point for what you should expect to see lots more of.

    This works with the number of times something should occur, too. So if we spend 5 years looking for a thing before we find the first one, we can safely assume that 5 years is within two standard deviations of the average amount of time it'll take to find another of those things the way we're doing it. We also have a nice lower bound since you can't take less than 0 time to find something, so that gives us a bounds for what the standard deviation will most likely look like.

    In this case specifically, we found this faster than our models said we should have. So either our models are wrong, we just experienced a lottery-winning low-probability event, or this isn't part of the natural phenomena that we modeled. And, comeon, isn't it more fun to think about what it would mean if it's from outside our model, instead of just going with 'our models are wrong'?

    Fun fact: If you take all natural phenomena that can be fit to a Gaussian distribution, and measure how far they deviate from ideal form of one, those measurements will form a Gaussian distribution.

  15. #345
    Quote Originally Posted by wiggin
    Baltic, I think the theory is that they have a model about how often objects of this size/etc. are ejected from a system, and based on the length of time we've been observing, seeing something this big is either incredibly unlikely to happen naturally or maybe it wasn't natural. The big problem with their reasoning is twofold:
    Three; the same reasoning applies to the alien probe hypothesis, based on the length of time we've been observing, Earth must be constantly getting buzzed by alien probes (in which case, why the... *gestures at a seemingly completely empty galaxy*) or we just witnessed something incredibly unlikely. Either way, we just witnessed something incredibly unlikely, so the alien probe theory doesn't even get rid of that.

    And, you know, if there are a thousand possible outcomes to an even each equally likely in probability then whatever happened you get to say you just witnessed something incredibly unlikely... but you don't get to say aliens did it.
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  16. #346
    On the one hand, there are models that predict tens of thousands of interstellar objects passing through our solar system every year, several of which "should" be detectable. On the other hand, the assumptions underlying the possible conclusion that all our models are very wrong... are not safe assumptions. We don't know whether these events are frequent. There are good reasons to assume that distributions might not be gaussian given the role played by objects' properties (eg. size & ability to survive the journey in a state that lets objects remain detectable), the role of gravity in capturing these objects etc. Gaussian distribution is a common first assumption when we don't know for sure, but in this case it's not a safe assumption.
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  17. #347
    Virtually everything winds up being in a Gaussian distribution. I'd have an easier time believing the alien probe hypothesis, or the lottery jackpot one. And if it's not in a Gaussian distribution, that would mean that our models are wrong, because they're all Gaussian, all the way down. Gauss is a real tough fucker to get away from.
    Last edited by Wraith; 11-22-2018 at 06:08 PM.

  18. #348
    The lottery jackpot version sounds rather plausible to me. As you said, roughly 95% of the observations fall within two sigmas from the mean, assuming a Gaussian distribution. So, observing an outlier that would fall within the 5% is unlikely, but not very unlikely. Especially considering that this is, AFAIK, the first such object ever observed (meaning, our models are based entirely on theoretical estimates, and therefore can quite reasonably be expected to be wrong, or at least significantly imprecise). It's been a while since I took a course on statistics, so I don't remember the details on dealing with probabilities involving discrete quantities - since you can't observe half an asteroid - but still, I don't think that you can derive any conclusions about the model in question based on one observation period, apart from that the result is unexpected and somewhat extraordinary. And the hypothesis that this thing was an alien probe is far-fetched, IMO.
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  19. #349
    Perhaps not 'space stuff' but something which could be far-reaching.

    MIT have developed the first ever ion-drive for powered flight. This is just wonderful.

    Last edited by Timbuk2; 11-23-2018 at 08:57 AM.
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    It's actually the original French billion, which is bi-million, which is a million to the power of 2. We adopted the word, and then they changed it, presumably as revenge for Crecy and Agincourt, and then the treasonous Americans adopted the new French usage and spread it all over the world. And now we have to use it.

    And that's Why I'm Voting Leave.

  20. #350
    Another Tabby's Star has been found at VVV-WIT-07 this time with even more extreme dips.

    This one is definitely aliens. 100%. I mean, it's almost certainly dust, but alien dust, you know?
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  21. #351
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    Three; the same reasoning applies to the alien probe hypothesis, based on the length of time we've been observing, Earth must be constantly getting buzzed by alien probes (in which case, why the... *gestures at a seemingly completely empty galaxy*) or we just witnessed something incredibly unlikely. Either way, we just witnessed something incredibly unlikely, so the alien probe theory doesn't even get rid of that.

    And, you know, if there are a thousand possible outcomes to an even each equally likely in probability then whatever happened you get to say you just witnessed something incredibly unlikely... but you don't get to say aliens did it.
    Does it change anything if the aliens sent the probe here intentionally, rather than a random flyby? Random means there's a zillion probes out there, but if the aliens are specifically interested in Earth, then it means something entirely different, possibly.

    By intent, I'm thinking the Earth has had life, and the atmosphere has shown signs of that life, for 3 billion years +/-. We ourselves are on our way to being able to identify life signatures in exoplanet atmospheres via telescope, so, it's reasonable to assume any relatively nearby aliens with similar interests identified life here a very long time ago. Perhaps they fire off a probe periodically to do flybys, maybe 1 every 3.76 years, and have been doing it for 100 million years. Does 3 billion years or so of being discoverable change the math at all?
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  22. #352
    Quote Originally Posted by EyeKhan View Post
    Does it change anything if the aliens sent the probe here intentionally, rather than a random flyby? Random means there's a zillion probes out there, but if the aliens are specifically interested in Earth, then it means something entirely different, possibly.

    By intent, I'm thinking the Earth has had life, and the atmosphere has shown signs of that life, for 3 billion years +/-. We ourselves are on our way to being able to identify life signatures in exoplanet atmospheres via telescope, so, it's reasonable to assume any relatively nearby aliens with similar interests identified life here a very long time ago. Perhaps they fire off a probe periodically to do flybys, maybe 1 every 3.76 years, and have been doing it for 100 million years. Does 3 billion years or so of being discoverable change the math at all?
    1) If there are any 'relatively nearby aliens' then the galaxy must be absolutely teeming with advanced civilisations, otherwise we're looking down the barrel of another absolutely enormous coincidence, far bigger than either the random bit of rock or random alien probe ones. And the galaxy isn't teeming with advanced civilisations.
    2) As Wraith pointed out, 'Oumuamua is slow. It is, in fact, only travelling twice as fast as Voyager, which was never even intended as an intersteller probe. So if these hypothetical aliens have been space faring for 100 million years and still can't make better probes they need to ask themselves some questions. You could colonise the galaxy a few times over in that timescale.
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  23. #353
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    1) If there are any 'relatively nearby aliens' then the galaxy must be absolutely teeming with advanced civilisations, otherwise we're looking down the barrel of another absolutely enormous coincidence, far bigger than either the random bit of rock or random alien probe ones. And the galaxy isn't teeming with advanced civilisations.
    2) As Wraith pointed out, 'Oumuamua is slow. It is, in fact, only travelling twice as fast as Voyager, which was never even intended as an intersteller probe. So if these hypothetical aliens have been space faring for 100 million years and still can't make better probes they need to ask themselves some questions. You could colonise the galaxy a few times over in that timescale.
    Referring to the numbers:
    1) We don't know, yet, the galaxy isn't teaming with advanced civilizations. This could be our first solid clue it is, which is why it's such a curiosity...

    2) The hundred million years is just a for instance. And I don't think the speed of the object, slow as it is, necessarily says anything definitive, given the huge scope of the unknowns we are facing.

    I doubt very much there will be any chance to send a spacecraft to take a look at it, which is unfortunate. But it would be worth considerable expense, imho, given how odd the object appears to be.
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  24. #354
    I wouldn't rule out probe just because of the speed. As EyeKhan's article points out, it makes it virtually impossible to trace back to its origin star, so there is a benefit. The time scale is obscene, and I don't see Humanity ever deciding something like that would be a worthwhile endeavor, but the thing about aliens is, they're alien.

  25. #355
    Quote Originally Posted by EyeKhan View Post
    Referring to the numbers:
    1) We don't know, yet, the galaxy isn't teaming with advanced civilizations. This could be our first solid clue it is, which is why it's such a curiosity...

    2) The hundred million years is just a for instance. And I don't think the speed of the object, slow as it is, necessarily says anything definitive, given the huge scope of the unknowns we are facing.

    I doubt very much there will be any chance to send a spacecraft to take a look at it, which is unfortunate. But it would be worth considerable expense, imho, given how odd the object appears to be.
    1) We kind of do know that, though. With 13 billion years to play with the sky should be absolutely riddled with alien crap by this point if life is so common in the universe that two technological civilisations developing within, say, a thousand light years of each other isn't a ridiculously huge coincidence, and yet we can't find anything. In my personal view, our very existence demonstrates the extreme rarity of life, it is very unlikely that a planet as kushy as Earth would have been left alone while it was in the single cell sludge stage (which it was for the majority of it's history) would have been left alone in a universe with thousands or millions of advanced civilisations running around for millions or billions of years.
    2) I actually think the speed of the object rules out it having been deliberately sent all by itself. You wouldn't send something that's going to take a million years to get to where you want to go when you can just wait for technology to advance a bit and then get there in a few hundred or thousand, or shorter.

    I honestly think it's more likely that I'm an alien probe than Oumuamua.
    When the sky above us fell
    We descended into hell
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  26. #356
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    1) We kind of do know that, though. With 13 billion years to play with the sky should be absolutely riddled with alien crap by this point if life is so common in the universe that two technological civilisations developing within, say, a thousand light years of each other isn't a ridiculously huge coincidence, and yet we can't find anything. In my personal view, our very existence demonstrates the extreme rarity of life, it is very unlikely that a planet as kushy as Earth would have been left alone while it was in the single cell sludge stage (which it was for the majority of it's history) would have been left alone in a universe with thousands or millions of advanced civilisations running around for millions or billions of years.
    2) I actually think the speed of the object rules out it having been deliberately sent all by itself. You wouldn't send something that's going to take a million years to get to where you want to go when you can just wait for technology to advance a bit and then get there in a few hundred or thousand, or shorter.
    1) We just strayed into the Fermi Paradox here... it's conceivable there's only one Out There, the First One from 9 billion years ago, and It keeps the rest in the galaxy from becoming interplanetary. Or whatever the hell else you can think up. But just because we can't see what to us is obviously a bunch of space craft zipping around beaming television to each other doesn't mean there aren't a bunch of space craft zipping around beaming television to each other.

    2) It could have originated from a larger 'mother-ish' craft stationed not too far away - like far out in the Oort cloud, manufacturing copies from local resources and sending them every so often through the inner system. I wonder if it would still appear to be from outside the solar system if that were the case? It's escape speed would make sense if the probers didn't want junk accumulating for us to find at some point.


    I honestly think it's more likely that I'm an alien probe than Oumuamua.
    Now I'm wondering...

    I don't really think it's a probe either, or alien space junk for that matter, but based on available data it's very weird and must have something valuable to teach about the nature of things outside Sol system. It really is a shame nobody's going to chase it down for a closer look.
    The Rules
    Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
    Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
    Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)

  27. #357
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    2) I actually think the speed of the object rules out it having been deliberately sent all by itself. You wouldn't send something that's going to take a million years to get to where you want to go when you can just wait for technology to advance a bit and then get there in a few hundred or thousand, or shorter.
    It's probably not a probe, but I don't think it's safe to try to predict alien psychology. Some possibilities off the top of my head:

    1) They could believe they'll still be around to get the benefits of slow-boating like this, and if they're risk-averse and comfortable with that time scale, then this is the way you'd want to scout systems for other sapients. If the stars are full of wolves, they won't be able to send a relativistic kill vehicle to the origin star, because there's no way of telling which star that is.

    2) They don't care that they won't be around to get the benefits, the probe is altruism motivated. They littered space with a network of slow probes because their cheap, easy, and obviously not hostile so less chance of being intercepted. They do this so that future species will be able to access the network and make use of the data, 'cause they're pretty nice guys.

    3) They're deployed by a low-energy (probably synthetic) intelligence that mostly sticks to interstellar space. The low-energy densities between stars means that they have to operate very slowly, so the time scale we're looking at isn't nearly as overwhelmingly massive to them as it is to us. For them, maybe the manufacturer is still alive and thinking a weird alien thought every century or so.

    4) They're aliens with alien psychologies and we're never going to guess at their rationale.

  28. #358
    If they want to disguise their origin point, I think it would make sense to just Go Fast but approach the target from a misleading direction.

    As for the But Aliens Are Incomprehensible argues, the trouble with these is that you can explain anything as aliens using that logic. Why does Uranus orbit on it's side? Aliens. Why would aliens do that? Well, you can't understand alien psychology, so maybe they just did it for some reason.

    The point of calling Oumuamua a potential probe was that it explained features of it better than if it were a random rock, but I think it just introduces more weirdness than it solves, i.e the comparatively easy to explain acceleration.
    When the sky above us fell
    We descended into hell
    Into kingdom come

  29. #359
    Quote Originally Posted by Steely Glint View Post
    If they want to disguise their origin point, I think it would make sense to just Go Fast but approach the target from a misleading direction.
    The higher the energy, the more detectable it is. If the idea is to be sneaky, you probably don't want a high-energy "everyone look at me!" announcement while you're orienting your vectors.

    As for the But Aliens Are Incomprehensible argues, the trouble with these is that you can explain anything as aliens using that logic. Why does Uranus orbit on it's side? Aliens. Why would aliens do that? Well, you can't understand alien psychology, so maybe they just did it for some reason.
    Comeon, you know that's stretching it well past its intended use. It's only use is to counter the "aliens wouldn't do this because humans wouldn't do it" argument.

  30. #360
    Quote Originally Posted by Wraith View Post
    The higher the energy, the more detectable it is. If the idea is to be sneaky, you probably don't want a high-energy "everyone look at me!" announcement while you're orienting your vectors.
    Does that matter? I though the purpose was to disguise where you came from, not the fact that your craft is artificial in nature?

    But OK, let's assume the goal is to both disguise your point of origin and disguise the fact you're a probe (even though you wouldn't need to hide the point of origin if you look like a simple rock and vice versa). Given how slow Oumuamua is, you've got a lot of wiggle room to play with. You could disguise your point of origin by simply taking an extremely circuitous route, making any course corrections far from Earth, over hundreds of years. You'd still get the job done faster than the possibly 100s of milliosn of year timescale this speed implies. Even a minor deviation from a direct route would potentially widen the possible point of origin to thousands of stars.

    Furthermore, what even gave us the idea that Oumuamua might be artificial? First, it has an unusual shape. Second, there was the unexplained acceleration as it left the solar system. If your goal was to be stealthy, you'd look like a rock and not accelerate until you're well into intersteller space.

    Comeon, you know that's stretching it well past its intended use. It's only use is to counter the "aliens wouldn't do this because humans wouldn't do it" argument.
    It's more a case of "Nothing about this points to aliens having done it". "It wasn't aliens" is the default position here.
    When the sky above us fell
    We descended into hell
    Into kingdom come

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