What's NASA Up To And Other Space Stuff

[Aimless]

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.

[Wraith]

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.

[Aimless]

Virtually everything winds up being in a Gaussian distribution.

But this is not the case. It is more appropriate to say that various aspects of most complex phenomena will tend to show more-or-less bell-shaped distributions. Gaussian or normal distribution can frequently approximate those distributions to a high degree of accuracy, but not always. For phenomena that involve the summation of many independent similarly influential variables that show random variance, you can safely apply the central limit theorem and expect to see approximately normal distributions. However, it's not at all certain that the detection of Oumuamua and other similar interstellar objects are good examples of such phenomena. Whether or not a natural object is launched on an interstellar journey, whether or not it survives that journey from its origin to--and through--our system, and whether or not it's detected, are all non-random and skewed towards objects within a certain range of size and mass, making it more difficult to infer the properties of the overall population of interstellar objects, and the likelihood of us detecting them.

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.

Many Gaussian models are probably wrong, but they are nevertheless very good approximations. Not all models rely on typical bell-shaped distributions.