51–60 of 126 posts
How do we jump to the conclusion of aliens with so little information? Why not God sent it?
If it comes flying in on an asteroid sized spaceship...what’s the difference?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My concern is that we aren't going to get much more than what was said in the articles already. I think the beneficial outcome of all of this is that we can identify what to look for next time, and hopefully get funding to do that. I also wonder if, as our tracking tech gets better, it would be relatively cheap to land a bunch of sensors on these and have them go on a ride somewhere in space for much cheaper than lau…
If you can intercept an interstellar object to land something on it you can by definition also just launch the thing to the same trajectory. Unless your payload is advanced enough to use the mass of the object for something (fuel, radiation shielding, construction materials, etc.) there is not much benefit in landing on an interstellar object if you just want to launch an interstellar probe. Maybe actually if you wan…
How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion. This was the first object of its kind and we had very limited observations of it. From what I've read, none of the hypotheses regarding the measured acceleration (e.g. outgassing vs manufactured solar sail) can really be backed up in any substantial way. So it seems disengenuous to get into vitriolic argumen…
I think some of the vitriol comes around the discussion of whether or not we should develop a mission to go visit it.
Whatever the thing is, it's clearly an interesting object and the only sane response is to build a big rocket to go chase it. But we don't have our shit together civilizationally and have to wait (and hope) that there's a next one. This is one reason that I'm such a big fan of robot probes vs. human space flight. If your space program is about flinging tiny cameras into the remotest reaches of the solar system, it's…
It was already moving away too quickly once discovered, even if we there had been some kind of craft ready.
https://i4is.org/what-we-do/technical/project-lyra/
https://www.wired.com/story/should-earthlings-chase-oumuamua...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is that in any way related?
Both imply that the military has scientific knowledge that the bulk of public research does not. (about events that are not directly caused by them)
In other words the military clearly does have early eyes on all sorts of situations - and their action or inaction on that info is a separate consideration.
How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion. This was the first object of its kind and we had very limited observations of it. From what I've read, none of the hypotheses regarding the measured acceleration (e.g. outgassing vs manufactured solar sail) can really be backed up in any substantial way. So it seems disengenuous to get into vitriolic argumen…
This is actually Avi's argument for considering the probe hypothesis. He's not trying to prove it was a probe, he's making a case for investing resources into experiments that could detect probes and industrialized alien civilizations, as opposed to detecting new classes of comets.
How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion. This was the first object of its kind and we had very limited observations of it. From what I've read, none of the hypotheses regarding the measured acceleration (e.g. outgassing vs manufactured solar sail) can really be backed up in any substantial way. So it seems disengenuous to get into vitriolic argumen…
I think some of the vitriol comes around the discussion of whether or not we should develop a mission to go visit it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think some of the vitriol comes around the discussion of whether or not we should develop a mission to go visit it.
There’s no chance of catching Oumuamua. It’s leaving the solar system at 26 km/s and it has a 3 year head start.
I'm just saying, if I wanted to probe every solar system in the galaxy, I'd build a craft with extreme geometry that would fly very close to stars and accelerate for a gravity assist before flying toward the next target star. So it would look exactly like what we saw.
The next question is whether or not there is some other logical path that defines logical gravity assists to visit as many stars as possible - nothing like that has been put forward either.
Afaik, it's coming from so far away that we have no idea what star it previously visited.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My concern is that we aren't going to get much more than what was said in the articles already. I think the beneficial outcome of all of this is that we can identify what to look for next time, and hopefully get funding to do that. I also wonder if, as our tracking tech gets better, it would be relatively cheap to land a bunch of sensors on these and have them go on a ride somewhere in space for much cheaper than lau…
If you can intercept an interstellar object to land something on it you can by definition also just launch the thing to the same trajectory. Unless your payload is advanced enough to use the mass of the object for something (fuel, radiation shielding, construction materials, etc.) there is not much benefit in landing on an interstellar object if you just want to launch an interstellar probe. Maybe actually if you wan…
Yes on trajectory, but no on same trajectory, with same mass. Of course, this might be a moot point, because other than hiding from some radiation and micro-scoping impacts, as well as leaching resources (which we aren't really advanced enough to do), there is no benefit.