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Coming up next on the History Channel: Preliminary scans indicated 'Oumuamua was just a lump of space rock. But could it be... a derelict alien spaceship?
Perhaps like the derelict spacecraft discovered in Alien[1]. Check for a warning signal! [1] http://alienanthology.wikia.com/wiki/The_Derelict
Any headline with a question mark can be answered: no
Coming up next on the History Channel: Preliminary scans indicated 'Oumuamua was just a lump of space rock. But could it be... a derelict alien spaceship?
Further investigation revealed that it was indeed a space rock, but.... could it be some sort of projectile sent to obliterate humanity?
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It rotates, so its brightness changes over time. From examining this data they can draw some conclusions about its shape.
Sure, but "some conclusions" is a long way from "cigar-shaped".
>The astronomers figured out its elongated shape when they noticed its brightness varied when it rotated every 7.3 hours. When the asteroid’s long side faced the Earth, more of its surface area could reflect sunlight, making it more visible to us. And when the tip of the rock faced us, it was a very dim point of light.
>“What we found was a rapidly rotating object, at least the size of a football field, that changed in brightness quite dramatically,” planetary astronomer Karen Meech, who led the University of Hawaii team, said in a statement. “This change in brightness hints that ‘Oumuamua could be more than 10 times longer than it is wide — something that has never been seen in our own solar system.”
Source: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/a-cigar-shaped-asteroid...
Statement from the team in Hawaii: http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/info/press-releases/Oumuamua/
You would be surprised how much we can infer with p>0.05 based on information that looks scarce from the outside. Much of what we know about the universe is found from surprisingly simple sources.
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Sure, but "some conclusions" is a long way from "cigar-shaped".
When a factual mistake is called out, it's probably better to do some research instead of doubling down. >The astronomers figured out its elongated shape when they noticed its brightness varied when it rotated every 7.3 hours. When the asteroid’s long side faced the Earth, more of its surface area could reflect sunlight, making it more visible to us. And when the tip of the rock faced us, it was a very dim point of l…
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In The Killing Star , it was Star Trek that sealed Earth's fate. Humans came off as dangerous know-it-alls :(
In the Dark Forest, we could get lucky given how faint and brief the peak of our RF emissions have been. We’d probably have to be close to “someone” looking for signs of life to give ourselves away now. Still for all that we know the relativistic bombardment is already en route, or a dual-vector foil.
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Dark Forest Deterence. I'd be interested to find out what % of HR readers HAVEN'T read this trilogy considering how much it comes up in conversation on these forums. I'm willing to bet it is a VERY high % compared to the average reading population.
I started reading it and found it fairly poor quality sci fi so I stopped somewhere in the first book. I think the bit where they slice a passing ship with newly invented nanowires smacked more of a comic book or 50s golden age sci fi than the sort of “proper” science fiction I’m used to these days. That and the way the characters seem to have such simplified motivations. It’s just not good fiction - and science fict…
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It wasn't me! Personally loved the series! I'm always on the lookout for more "proper" sci-fi, so please share! I've been binge reading hard sci-fi this year and can't get enough. And yeah, HN is a tough crowd.
There’s so much awesome SF out there... it depends what you like! Personally, in very different styles, I found pretty much everything written by Iain M Banks excellent (start with Excession or Player of Games), I enjoy John Scalzi’s humourous sci fi space operas a fair bit too, Peter F Hamilton’s Reality Dysfunction trilogy was pretty decent... I’ve loved most of what I’ve read from Charles Stross but particularly A…
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I wish that book didn't have a part three.
Me, too. My background is biomedical, so i spent most of it thinking "epigenetics doesn't work like that!"