[HN Gopher] 'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the f...
___________________________________________________________________
'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the first
interstellar visitor
Author : Breadmaker
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-01-11 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (uu.diva-portal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (uu.diva-portal.org)
| czbond wrote:
| One of the author's conclusions to "find out more" (my
| paraphrase) suggest a rocket using a gravity well to go after it.
|
| Are there any options for using a Voyager 1/2 or radio based
| telescopes to observe it? (I'm a CompScience guy - not an
| Astrophysicist so that's my best way to describe my question)
| mhh__ wrote:
| Voyager 1/2 are both basically EOL at this point so I think at
| best you could _maybe_ turn the instruments back on for one
| last hurrah but they 're an awfully long way away from Kansas
| now so even a suicide mission of sorts could overwhelm them.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Voyager 1/2 are both basically EOL at this point so I think
| at best you could maybe turn the instruments back on for one
| last hurrah but they're an awfully long way away from Kansas
| now so even a suicide mission of sorts could overwhelm them.
|
| I don't even have to look it up to be 100% sure that Voyager
| 1/2 are in the wrong place, going in the wrong direction,
| with the wrong instruments to observe Oumuamua. Their
| batteries are also nearly dead and they never had enough
| propellant to go anywhere except approximately where they're
| going now. The best they could ever do is make small
| corrections to slingshot off something else, and there's
| nothing to slingshot off of anymore. Also, I think they're
| almost out of propellant, too.
| readonlybarbie wrote:
| [dead]
| jacobsenscott wrote:
| Clearly we need to launch Bezos, Musk, and Branson toward this
| object so they can inspect it for us and radio back what it is.
| whycome wrote:
| Is the mark "first interstellar visitor" universally agreed upon
| (as far as we know)? That alone is kinda cool.
| Rastonbury wrote:
| I believe so, so far we only know of two
| edfletcher_t137 wrote:
| Apparently (TIL!) it's three now, with a meteor that burned
| up in 2014 having been confirmed in just April 2022 as
| interstellar! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNEOS_2014-01-08
|
| And who was part of the team that first reported its
| existence? "CNEOS 2014-01-08 is an interstellar object
| reported in June 2019 by astronomers Amir Siraj and Abraham
| Loeb"
| pengaru wrote:
| Not only is it kinda cool, it's also why it's particularly
| annoying we didn't get better data while it was near enough to
| do so. We missed what _may_ have been quite an exceptional
| opportunity.
| rwmj wrote:
| Probably. But also it was detected within the first 10 years
| of operation of the Pan STARRS 1 telescope so perhaps similar
| things should be expected every decade or so?
| chongli wrote:
| First confirmed interstellar visitor. Who knows how much
| interstellar dust and other small stuff we've run into over the
| eons.
| di456 wrote:
| Pretty much every element from lithium and up came from
| another star's death. The fusion reaction of a star goes from
| H -> He -> and on up the periodic table until the star
| implodes and/or goes supernova, creating gold and other
| heavier elements.
|
| Most of the matter on our current planet has interstellar
| origins, including humans. We are all made of star dust!
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Consider the statistics of it being an alien probe. Now consider
| the statistics of it being a rock. It's a rock.
| david927 wrote:
| What is that called? Occam's Blindfold?
|
| We don't know it's a rock. We don't really know what it is,
| other than it's the first _thing_ we 've picked up from an
| interstellar trajectory, is bizarrely shaped, didn't reflect
| the pull from the sun, swung by the Earth and then accelerated
| away.
| daveslash wrote:
| Stand back, this guy/gal's using Occam's Razor! They'll cut
| you!
| aaron695 wrote:
| [dead]
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| If Oumaumau is in fact of extraterrestrial origin, it could be
| the only evidence of life outside of earth that will ever pass
| through our solar system. We'll never know.
| distortionfield wrote:
| Let's slingshot a probe to it and find out! I'm only half-
| kidding. I think it would be super worthwhile to do, though.
| Especially to attempt to solve the mystery of why it sped up by
| 17 m/s for no visible reason.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint.
|
| But I don't believe in interstellar travel at all. I don't think
| people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a
| human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale,
| this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be
| another 200 kilometers/124 miles away. Here's a great video to
| illustrate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk
|
| IMO Oumuamua was a rock.
|
| However, it's fun to think about it being alien, and it's
| remarkably similar to Arthur Clarke's Rama story.
|
| Presumably the speed and trajectory of Oumuamua is known? Has
| this been traced back to give a potential origin if it is fro
| another star system?
|
| "Two of NASA's space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) tracked the
| object traveling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per
| second) relative to the Sun. Its outbound path is about 20
| degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun."
| https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/asteroids-comets-and-meteors/co...
|
| If the distance to the nearest star is 40,208,000,000,000 then:
|
| 40,208,000,000,000 / 38 (km per second) / 3600 seconds per hour /
| 24 hours per day 365 days per year = 33552 years if it had come
| from closest star
|
| Do I have those numbers right? Maths isn't a strength.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I dont get why people get hung up on distance. It only takes
| time to traverse and it isn't exactly in short supply. Whats
| the rush?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| It's a good point.
|
| Humans have existed for about 300,000 years.
|
| Sharks have existed for about 450 million years.
|
| I suppose its possible that humans could exist for hundreds
| of millions of years? If so then several hundred thousand
| years robot probe missions might make sense.
| gfodor wrote:
| An interstellar object created by aliens arriving here doesn't
| imply interstellar travel, if you meant that to mean "manned
| craft."
| zeitgeistcowboy wrote:
| One of the arguments for Oumuamua being more than just a "rock"
| was it's detected dimension. If I recall correctly, it was very
| long and skinny and thus not very rock-like in a traditional
| sense. I think Avi Loeb put forth the idea that structurally an
| object like this could be a a piece of space junk. Maybe a
| piece of a space ship that would be able to be held together
| while spinning even with a long and skinny dimension. You'd
| imagine less stable pieces of rock to collapse into themselves
| and become more sphere like. Oumuamua was potentially a long
| skinny object that had been spinning around through the
| universe for a very long time.
| detritus wrote:
| Yeah, for me this is the sad reality of getting older and
| replacing somewhat essentially sci-fi fantasies of progression
| with bleak, mundane reality.
|
| Space is really big. Really, really big.
| coldpie wrote:
| The impossibility of interstellar travel is perhaps the only
| fact that I find so depressing that I simply refuse to
| believe it. The universe is just so much more _interesting_
| if FTL is possible. It helps that being wrong about this fact
| doesn 't really impact one's life either way.
| api wrote:
| Okay, then I'll cheer you up just a bit: interstellar
| travel is quite possible. In fact it's easy... if you can
| cold hibernate.
|
| It would be very easy for an AI that could simply turn
| itself off for tens of thousands of years. It might be a
| do-able for an alien biological entity with a different
| biology that finds it easier to survive cryogenic deep
| freeze, something like a big smart tardigrade.
|
| Managing sleep and wake is pretty easy too. No internal
| timing mechanisms needed. Just let your proximity to a star
| do it for you. When you leave the vicinity of a star you
| have no energy and you go night-night. Your temperature
| will fall down to as low as a few kelvin. This basically
| stops time in terms of any chemical degradation, though the
| most sensitive bits will need to be wrapped in radiation
| shielding against cosmic rays to prevent cumulative damage
| over the aeons. When you approach another star the
| temperature starts to go up and solar power will power
| everything up.
|
| Interstellar travel is only hard for us because we have
| short life spans and can't survive being frozen. Unless we
| can figure out how to successfully freeze a human down to
| liquid helium temperatures and then revive them it's
| unlikely that humans will ever leave the solar system.
|
| The AIs we build might though. This would include
| "uploaded" minds if we ever figure out how to do that.
|
| If anything ever does visit us my money would be on it
| being an AI.
|
| If you find humans being stuck in the solar system
| depressing, consider that the solar system is absolutely
| gigantic and we could explore and settle it for aeons and
| aeons without getting close to exhausting that frontier.
| daveslash wrote:
| _You just won 't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
| big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the
| road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space._ ~
| Douglas Adams
| sien wrote:
| Have you had a look at Project Daedalus ?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus
|
| Or Project Orion :
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propuls...
|
| and the excellent book on Project Orion
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/...
| jiggawatts wrote:
| A nice visualisation I like to use is this: if the orbit of the
| Earth was scaled down to the size of a coin, then the average
| distance between stars is about a mile.
|
| EDIT: Corrected the maths.
| postalrat wrote:
| And yet we pretty much have the technology right now to send
| a probe to Alpha Centauri. The Parker Solar Probe would make
| it there in about 8000 years. We could probably make a probe
| that makes it there in much less time if we wanted (by taking
| much longer to accelerate and de-accelerate). Then it just
| needs to survive a few thousand years dormant.
| [deleted]
| haskellandchill wrote:
| Interstellar travel would be possible if we learn how to
| manipulate consciousness and then transport consciousness as
| data using light. The first part may be accomplished without
| continuity for the original but as a seamless experience for
| the copy.
| david927 wrote:
| This is an interesting paper and Oumuamua will remain fascinating
| for a long time.
|
| Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox (or 'Where the hell are
| they?') is that they're around and doing interstellar drive-bys
| and we're just starting to notice.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I think the most convincing answer to Fermi is the dark forest
| theory. The reason no one speaks up is that there is good
| incentive not to - you get to survive as a species if you stay
| small and quiet.
| vecter wrote:
| The Dark Forest is a fun idea but sounds so clearly illogical
| to me for so many reasons:
|
| 1. The cost of interstellar travel is so obscenely high that
| the threat posed by the discovery of an alien species on
| their home planet would be so miniscule to us and them
|
| 2. The cost of remotely annihilating an entire species is so
| absurdly high as to be obviously impractical and basically
| impossible.
|
| [Spoiler alert] The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin renders all of
| this irrelevant by the use of science _fiction_ : it purports
| the existence of interstellar world-destroying weapons that
| any lowly member of a species can casually "flick" at a "star
| plucker" to obliterate them. That is not how physics or
| reality works.
|
| We don't even send our trash to space because just getting it
| out of Earth's orbit is so ridiculously expensive, yet we're
| thinking about sending enough explosives to destroy an entire
| civilization some 100+ light-years away?
| oblak wrote:
| I guess enough time has passed since major Carter blew up a
| sun, since people are no longer talking about it
| rcoveson wrote:
| Are you arguing that advances in science that would look
| like impossible magic to us today are confined to fiction
| forever? Why do you believe that (1) and (2) are true at
| every stage of technological advancement in our distant
| future, which may be the technological present of our
| galactic peers?
|
| A handful of people today can casually "flick" entire
| cities out of existence, and enough such flicks could
| eradicate our species, and even if not it would certainly
| eradicate many. That would have been an absurd notion to
| somebody a thousand years ago. But the idea that we'll be
| able to destroy stars just as easily in a million years is
| somehow just fiction?
| vecter wrote:
| No, I am simply arguing that FTL travel is extremely
| unlikely since whatever physics we discover in the future
| will almost certainly not overturn special relativity.
|
| This thinking along the lines of "things in the past that
| were believed to be impossible are now possible,
| therefore things in the future that we now believe
| impossible may actually happen" is pretty poor reasoning.
| In the past, our understanding of the fundamental laws of
| physics was quite lacking. Today, although it is
| incomplete, our understanding of physics is considerably
| more advanced to preclude a lot of physically impossible
| things.
| sophacles wrote:
| Interesting that you assume physics and engineering are
| "done" and that there are no unknowns, and that there are
| no new inventions that will happen moving forward. I don't
| know any physicists or engineers who believe any such
| thing.
|
| 500 years ago your argument would have been: We cant even
| get to china in 12 weeks without considerable danger and
| expense, and you expect me to believe its routine for
| peasants to do so in 12 hours? That anyone can make a near
| perfect painting and send it to anyone else no matter where
| they are in a heartbeat - we don't even make bad paintings
| of anyone who isn't extremely rich because of the absurd
| expense of it.
| vecter wrote:
| I did not assume that "physics and engineering are
| 'done'". I assume instead that the known laws of physics
| which seem to prevent faster-than-light travel hold and
| are inviolable, despite how smart any species may be.
|
| The analogy with the the argument 500 years ago doesn't
| apply because 500 years ago we did not have the
| understanding of physics and chemistry that we have
| today. Of course we still have a lot of physics left to
| discover, but it's extremely unlikely that whatever new
| physics we discover will violate special relativity.
| postalrat wrote:
| You don't need faster than light travel to cover the
| entire galaxy. Using it as a roadblock doesn't make
| sense.
| vecter wrote:
| It does when traveling interstellar distances. Even
| traveling at 10% the speed of light, it would take a ship
| one million years to cross the galaxy. The energy
| required to accelerate to that speed (and then decelerate
| to rest) is absurdly high. Once you realize how large the
| costs become for interstellar travel, simple economics
| makes most of these arguments moot. The outcome is not
| worth the cost for almost anything you want to achieve.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > the threat posed by the discovery of an alien species on
| their home planet would be so miniscule
|
| That species, left unchecked, could fill up its galaxy in
| the blink of an eye, by galactic timescales.
| ericb wrote:
| We've already been sent the world destroying bomb. It is an
| information bomb built on tragedy of the commons to ensure
| we overheat our planet before we become interplanetary. Its
| name is Bitcoin.
| pklausler wrote:
| The most convincing answer to Fermi's paradox is that since
| the galaxy is not saturated with Bracewell - von Neumann
| self-replicating slow interstellar probes, no civilization
| has yet launched one, and thus there has not yet been a
| civilization in our galaxy capable of launching one.
|
| The launch of a working BvN probe is basically a permanent
| phase change for a galaxy.
| jjallen wrote:
| Except we are already violating this by sending things out
| into interstellar space.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Not just "some things": Nudes, a mix tape, and directions
| back to our house.
| [deleted]
| catskul2 wrote:
| If you haven't already, read "the 3-body problem".
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Yeah, seems to me there'd be a bit of time in there before
| any civilizations decided it was better to stay silent. But
| that time might not be astronomically relevant.
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| My pet theory is they're using gravity waves for coms and we're
| the dumb apes still looking around in the electromagnetic
| spectrum.
|
| Once we can reliably detect and generate gravity waves much of
| our knowledge of electromagnetic waves can apply. 802.11gr
| anyone?
| thriftwy wrote:
| Gravity is so many orders of magnitude weaker than
| electromagnetism that it is not even funny.
| buildbot wrote:
| True, but you can theoretically format a gravity wave to
| not follow the inverse square law - these are called
| solitons (apparently, I just looked this up)
| jerf wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Now look into how you construct a soliton, and try to
| figure out what monstrous levels of control you'd have to
| exert over solar-system sized quantities of degenerate
| matter to create them, and how much energy it would take.
|
| Now compute how much laser light you can generate for,
| oh, let's say, 6 orders of magnitude less energy. And how
| tightly you'd expect a civilization that apparently can
| casually wiggle dozens of solar masses at multiple Hz, in
| a modulated manner no less (so just a several Hz orbit is
| not sufficent, we are wiggling these things under power),
| to be able to collimate such a beam.
|
| This is the problem with gravity waves. It isn't some
| sort of supreme cheat code of the universe for super
| awesome communication. It's transparently obviously
| idiotic. Like, not just, "well, it's not necessarily the
| best way, but even if it's not great someone may have
| tried it", like, you're burning _dozens_ of orders of
| magnitude more energy per bit. Plural dozens, of _orders
| of magnitude_. Not dozens of times, _ten to the power of_
| dozens. This is not sensible no matter how advanced the
| civilization. We 're talking levels of stupid that would
| _greatly_ exceed spending the entire output of Earth 's
| collective industrial civilization for all of history on
| a single pack of Skittles. This is not a bright thing to
| do, and it only gets dumber the smarter you suppose the
| aliens are.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| To be fair, because we don't know how to construct
| gravity waves does not mean such a means does not exist.
|
| Keep in mind, not too long ago we thought we needed to
| heat up a fillament surrounded by an inert gas in order
| to make artificial light, and our understanding of
| gravity is fairly poor (to the point where it's largely
| considered an unsolved problem quite how it fits together
| with other parts of physics).
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If we make assumptions like that then the sky is the
| limit for other baseless assumptions, right? We're
| basically just picking our favourite pseudomagical
| science and arguing for it?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Well that is the basic posture of all science,
| uncertainty. We must assume we don't know until we are
| convinced otherwise.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| But you don't use that to suggest new unsupported ideas.
| In that case why can't I postulate for FTL communication
| by form of anti protons to be the best communication
| method?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I've never talked about FTL communication.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I didn't say you were. I was trying to make the point
| we're both suggesting science fiction now and it's not
| terribly helpful when trying to talk about the current
| science.
| jerf wrote:
| I believe it is important to separate flights of fancy
| from things grounded in real science, no matter how
| speculative.
|
| I can't _prove_ that I can 't generate gravity waves by
| the proper chanting of a spell. I'm serious, not just
| being silly. The simulation hypothesis certainly admits
| of such things being built into an otherwise sensible
| simulation (at the risk of a bit of a spoiler,
| https://qntm.org/ra ). If you want to talk about what
| could be if we bend what we understand this way, by all
| means, be my guest. I'm a big fan, actually.
|
| However, I think we should be _clear_ that we are doing
| that, and specify the rule changes we 're considering.
|
| In the real universe, we do "know" how to generate
| gravity waves. We can't _do_ it at any sensible scale,
| but we know how. The energy computations are trivial
| extensions of Einsteinian relativity, suitable for
| assigning an undergraduate for homework.
|
| Besides, the way of making gravity waves has to not just
| be like three or four times better than wiggling a
| neutron star, to beat light, it needs to be the
| aforementioned dozens of orders of magnitude better. Just
| like lasers, you'd be looking at the thing being a great
| weapon rather than just a communication mechanism. It's
| actually a lot of orders of magnitude improvement
| necessary. A fire on the end of a stick versus the
| brightest modern stadium lights don't even begin to cover
| the magnitude range.
|
| People keep acting like light is some sort of terrible
| communication mechanism that we need to somehow level up
| from. The reality is that the only improvement you could
| practically ask of it is to go faster. It is otherwise
| _unbelievably_ good at communication. It is hard to even
| conceive of what could be better in anything like our
| real universe.
| all2 wrote:
| Yes, but does it propagate faster than the speed of light?
| Even if a gravitic field is weak, it would be my preferred
| mode of communication if it propagated "instantly" across
| space/time. And it moves at the speed of light [0] so
| there's no speed advantage here.
|
| I see no reason a sufficiently advanced species would
| choose gravitic waves over any other EM wave. Does someone
| with a clue (not me) have any ideas why this would be the
| case?
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_gravity
| jerf wrote:
| It does not. The concrete evidence of this is relatively
| recent; theoretically nobody has expected that it would
| for a long time, but it has been theory.
|
| But yes, we've coordinated detections between LIGO and
| radar astronomy now, and there's no reason to believe
| gravity travels FTL. As always, there are error bars, but
| they're tight enough not to get excited about. That is,
| who cares if gravity travels at 1.00000000000001 the
| speed of light? (The theoreticians would go absolutely
| _ballistic_ , but pragmatically that would mean nothing.)
| raverbashing wrote:
| This is the answer
|
| Something like a neutrino bean sounds more plausible as a
| communication medium than gravitational waves
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| we generate gravity waves every time we move something with
| nonzero mass, don't we?
| JohnBooty wrote:
| What would be the advantage of that?
| Reason077 wrote:
| Unlike radio waves or light, gravity waves aren't impeded
| by obstacles like stars, planets, interstellar dust, or
| anything else that might be out there. Nothing could block
| or jam them and you'd always have a clear signal.
| vecter wrote:
| It takes so much energy to create gravity waves and so
| much effort to detect them that it's silly to try to use
| them as a medium of communication.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| *For Kardashev Type 1 civilizations like us. (And we're
| only 0.74 not even 1)
| landswipe wrote:
| It'll be more likely something subatomic, like they're chain
| entangling photons, we just don't know how to interpret it
| yet.
| whycome wrote:
| They keep ringing our sun and we never even respond! And now
| they're just annoyed with us and won't respond when we
| eventually call back.
| distortionfield wrote:
| I firmly believe that the chance humans have been visited by
| aliens is (admittedly) slim but _not non-zero_. I would say the
| chance has a few leading zeros of precision, and I understand
| that the universe is _huge_, but by the same logic, the
| universe is _huge_.
| Teever wrote:
| What does 'visit' mean to you?
|
| While I find it unlikely that aliens have travelled to our
| solar system specifically to visit humans, I find it
| incredibly unlikely that human activity have not been
| detected by a Sentinel probe and that this probe has not
| relayed this info to its creators.
| [deleted]
| distortionfield wrote:
| "Visit" to me means either they entered or observed our
| solar system with some decent degree of resolution. Enough
| to get a baseline of information about us, I think.
| basch wrote:
| Or they exist at a completely different scale than us. Their
| neurons are the size of galaxies or they live in Whoville in a
| snowflake.
| jerf wrote:
| Neurons the size of galaxies, even if one stipulates them
| magically coming into existence as early as possible,
| couldn't have hardly thought "hello" to themselves since the
| universe began. In the meantime, on that time scale,
| _incredible_ violence has occurred througout the universe.
| Round trip times of millions of years for the simplest
| communications are not feasible in this era of spacetime. You
| 'll need to be waiting many tens or hundreds more billions of
| years before that is conceivable, in the long quiet dark
| before heat death.
|
| The snowflake hypothesis is at least in the range of the
| "things we can't disprove", at least if by "snowflake" you
| mean neutron star surfaces:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon%27s_Egg Of course, one
| must consider that I'm citing a science fiction book, with
| all understanding of what that means. But that is at least
| one hypothesis I don't think we can disprove at the current
| time, unlike most other ideas put forth. I'd still call it an
| absolute long shot, and an even longer shot that such beings
| could leave their star.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| I'm fascinated by the idea that the same creatures can live
| in the same universe and have very different experiences of
| it. Ants, cats, and humans are all going to perceive the same
| objects in very different ways. And only humans can
| understand what human-specific objects are for.
|
| A cat will see a book as a flat surface which probably smells
| of its owner and go to sleep on it. It has no other concept
| of "book." And if it sees an open book it can't see the
| contents as writing, because it has no concept of writing.
|
| The fascinating part is that a human will _see the same
| object_ but perceive it very differently because of the added
| human-specific knowledge and cognition.
|
| Unless you're going to make the very bold claim that humans
| are the most sophisticated and advanced life in the universe,
| our perceptions will be limited in an analogous way.
|
| We see clouds of dust and gas, star systems, and random
| background noise. An intelligence a few million years ahead
| of us may see the same objects as [symbol] and [relationship]
| in ways we literally can't imagine.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| > Ants, cats, and humans are all going to perceive the same
| objects in very different ways.
|
| Probably in very similar ways, given how many ways there
| are to perceive something.
|
| Ants, cats, and humans are all carbon-based lifeforms with
| eyes, nervous-systems, and brains.
|
| Imagine how a cat perceives a bird vs. how a human
| perceives a bird vs. how a cloud of neutrons perceives a
| bird.
| shostack wrote:
| That's what I love about the Children of Time series. The
| skill of the author with immersing you in that truly alien
| perspective of different biological capabilities, sensory
| organs, etc. is remarkable.
| [deleted]
| redeux wrote:
| I worry that this is the case. The idea that we're in some
| advanced species sphere of influence is a bit unnerving. Given
| the ability to create deep space probes, it should be fairly
| easy for someone to keep tabs on a large swatch of the galaxy.
|
| If a species had a mere 1 million year technological lead on
| us, they'd certainly have nothing to fear and would only need
| to do a drive by every ten-thousand years or so, to keep tabs
| on things.
|
| Perhaps more concerning is that we could be in between two
| competing species and they're monitoring to make sure the other
| hasn't colonized this system.
|
| When it comes to aliens there are many possibilities, and few
| of them are good for us imo.
| Reason077 wrote:
| At least Oumuamua's light sail will only accelerate it to
| 15-20% of the speed of light. Unless they have some kind of
| warp drive we haven't seen yet, that should give us (at very
| least) 20-30 years before the invasion fleet gets here.
| Probably much longer.
| yojo wrote:
| Unless it seeded a little self-replicating factory on the
| way by. The invasion force could already be growing
| exponentially out in the Oort Cloud.
|
| Or not. To paraphrase: sometimes a cigar-shaped
| interstellar mass is just a cigar-shaped interstellar mass.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| why worry that interstellar drive by visits might be real?
|
| also, might you presume such possibilities are rarely good
| for us because of implicit recognition how bad we humans are
| to other species?
| floxy wrote:
| Dark sector. 85% of the mass of the universe. Those dark sector
| astrophysicists have a tougher time, since their book keeping
| is only 15% off, and everyone just thinks they aren't measuring
| things precise enough.
| terran57 wrote:
| I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but
| advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would
| probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with
| indifference and at worst, something to remove. But, it is fun to
| imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if
| scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe
| ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)
| xmonkee wrote:
| >but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar
| travel would probably look at us like we look at mold
|
| Why? An advanced civilization wouldn't have cultural curiosity?
| They wouldn't want to study us from all the different
| perspectives we study people and literature and philosophy and
| even biology and neurology etc etc?
| simonh wrote:
| Bear in mind we study mould. It's some people's life's work.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| We even use slime mold on representations of maps to see if
| it would have done things the same way we do. For all we
| know, perhaps we are in a galactic petri dish and the
| entire point of our existence is to test out the growth of
| life for some great universal scientist! (tongue in cheek
| comment)
|
| https://www.livescience.com/8035-slime-mold-beats-humans-
| per...
| wcarss wrote:
| The argument would maybe be more readily taken if instead of
| mold, the GP had said "birds". We think birds are kinda neat,
| but most people hold a perspective with inbuilt human-
| exceptionalism, and birds are fundamentally not humans.
|
| Birds may communicate complex things to each other, they may
| construct homes, feel emotions, dream, and even do some
| things we can't, like fly -- but they don't have Shakespeare
| or the Primes so if it comes down to us or them, it's us. A
| lot of humans believe only humans possess "souls".
|
| To fully go into the argument: an alien species may well hold
| their own form of self-exceptionalism, and they'll have their
| own practices and history which we can't compete with. It is
| perfectly possible that there is nothing we could accomplish
| which would make us read as peers, as opposed to birds,
| gorillas, or... mold.
|
| (edit: I do think the "at best" above may be unreasonably
| gloomy -- at best in this outlook, aliens might regard us
| with compassionate curiosity, as some humans do toward the
| species we share the earth with. That would be pretty lucky,
| but not impossible!)
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| If we were an advanced alien civilization capable of
| interstellar travel, how would we look at a planet/species like
| 2023 Earth?
| teekert wrote:
| Something like: hmm these guys went from horseback riding to
| cell phones, internet and a mars helicopter in the time we
| took to travel to their star. Perhaps we should keep an eye
| on them.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| It's that last thing that's most concerning: "hmm, these
| guys aren't going to be contained to their own rock for
| long"
| exitb wrote:
| Not necessarily a probe, maybe just a piece of cosmic junk? An
| equivalent of our rocket booster or a Tesla Roadster on its way
| to Mars.
| janef0421 wrote:
| If 'Oumuamua is a probe, it appears that it would be a fairly
| simple one. To a sufficiently advanced civilisation, it would
| probably be relatively low-cost. If an alien civilisation has a
| reasonable degree of curiosity, sending a cheap probe to
| examine another star system is likely worthwhile.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| This presupposes an advanced alien civilization only sends out
| probes to places they find interesting. I think it is just as
| plausible that an advanced civilization would just shoot out a
| billion probes at random to zoom through the universe
| collecting data.
| namrog84 wrote:
| To compound this. Its not unreasonable to think said probes
| could find appropriate asteroid belts with appropriate
| materials(e.g. metals) mine them and replicate more and send
| them out. Potential exponential growth of drones across the
| galaxies.
| narrator wrote:
| I've got a better theory. Interstellar civilizations have
| probably fought wars over habitable planets and in the
| aftermath of those wars they probably have set up some rules
| for a long time about what you're allowed to do on habitable
| planets in a galactic framework. In fact, the reason this
| planet is not strip-mined and every living thing on it dead
| thousands of years ago is they probably have some rights in
| there given to life that evolved on a planet.
|
| Besides, E.Ts can probably do ok in deep space or underground
| on lifeless planets if they can do interstellar travel.
| pasquinelli wrote:
| i've got a better better theory! interstellar civilizations
| have never and will never exist.
| NovaVeles wrote:
| It is a reasonable conclusion. Resource limitations means
| civilizations, burn up too much of their energy/materials
| before they ever get truly space bound.
|
| They could all be just like us. A few space probes manage
| to escape the energy well but they are so small that no one
| else ever detects them again. I mean, it is not uncommon to
| sight life ending asteroids days after they have passed
| earth, the odds of us detecting any sort probe/device the
| size of a fridge - is nearly zero.
|
| Best analogy I heard came from Stephen Harrod Bruhner.
| Civilizations are just like plants. A plant is at its
| fullest just as it is about to produce seed and die off.
| During the peak of our energy use, we have been sending
| probes into space. It is a neat thought experiment.
| kelipso wrote:
| All that probably but main thing is faster than light
| travel turns out to be actually impossible.
| morepork wrote:
| If we found mould on mars or anywhere without terrestrial
| origins it would be the subject on intense scientific curiosity
| trts wrote:
| Earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years, about 1/3rd
| of the age of the universe. If another technological
| civilization that is more advanced than us by even 1M years is
| watching earth, and suddenly this planet starts spitting up
| rockets, satellites, nuclear explosions etc., that seems pretty
| interesting. That's one species out of 2+ million on earth,
| which is one of trillions & trillions of dead planets, that
| manages to transcend the atmosphere.
|
| But to your point, I guess at the scale of even just the known
| universe it's hard to assert that anything is common or rare.
| yyyk wrote:
| >But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have
| been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an
| interstellar probe
|
| Just about every ancient tradition has some form of non-human
| intelligent beings who are not god(s). Polls suggests almost
| 50% of Americans believe in ghosts[0]. I don't see why any
| belief system would change too much given what people already
| believe.
|
| The only people who perhaps should worry are the aliens -
| surely a significant portion of humanity will find some way of
| blaming all our problems on them.
|
| [0] https://www.newsweek.com/more-45-percent-americans-
| believe-d...
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/style/do-you-believe-in-g...
| babelfish wrote:
| Here is the PDF linked by the page for those getting 'hug of
| death' http://uu.diva-
| portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1721987/FULLTEXT01...
| Jimmc414 wrote:
| Katz's attempts to delegitimize Loeb as a scientist makes his
| argument less credible. Aliens or not, it's disingenuous to deny
| that some aspects of Oumuamua don't yet have satisfactory
| explanation.
| jerf wrote:
| "Doesn't yet have a satisfactory explanation -> Must be aliens"
| has a long history, long enough that the rest of us are
| entitled to draw the inductive conclusion that it's a weak
| argument very unlikely to be true.
|
| It is inductive, not deductive, so this bothers people laboring
| under the misapprehension that science deals with deductive
| reasoning. But science is ultimately inductive; we happen to
| sometimes get to deduce things within its framework but it all
| lives in an inductive framework.
| Finnucane wrote:
| That's just one step down from "Doesn't yet have a
| satisfactory explanation -> Must be supernatural.'
| ProAm wrote:
| It's a passive aggressive funding fight. Just politics and
| business. I'm pretty sure Loeb isn't as crazy as his latest
| claims make it seem, but without outlandish bold claims no one
| will fund future observation and scientific work on it. At
| least that's been my take on Loeb's behavior.
| [deleted]
| echelon wrote:
| Scientists are people subject to the same foibles as the rest
| of us.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| But, the abstract promises a direct challenge:
|
| > one of them is Jonathan I. Katz who challenges Loeb's
| hypothesis directly
| cmoscoe wrote:
| Hugged to death?
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