To not bury the lead: His team studied data the government made available from military missile tracking systems, which conveniently also false-positives on asteroids. There was one in 2014 which slammed into the Pacific Ocean at a speed at least twice that of the speed stars around us move relative to the sun, which makes it likely to be extra-solar. Based on that speed & how much burned upon entry, they concluded its material must be tougher than iron. They're planning an expedition to the oceanic area around Papa New Guinea, mostly funded through private donations, to recover the object.
A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
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Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#12Camouflage by Joe Haldeman is the sci fi book that springs to mind.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#13I think I've seen this movie before; just don't let anybody touch the strange Sphere thing and you should be alright.
Seriously though, this doesn't make much sense to me. Finding shipwrecks even when you know they exist and what general area they should be in is hard enough. This sort of search is a huge money sink, the ships, towed sonars, etc all cost a ton of money to operate.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#14To not bury the lead: His team studied data the government made available from military missile tracking systems, which conveniently also false-positives on asteroids. There was one in 2014 which slammed into the Pacific Ocean at a speed at least twice that of the speed stars around us move relative to the sun, which makes it likely to be extra-solar. Based on that speed & how much burned upon entry, they concluded i…
Papua, not Papa.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#15I don't see anything in the original research that suggests it is "tech". I think the article completely made this up.
To be pedantic, nearly all of the material that we are made of came from other stars, manufactured in their nuclear fusion and supernovae. I think what they mean is a macroscopic object that was formed in another star system, which they've inferred from its incoming trajectory.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#16The title is a little silly. It’s from outside our solar system, but there’s zero evidence suggesting it’s technological or made by aliens. It’s just a meteor that was going really fast, and it was made of something that was sturdy enough not to break up too much.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#17> "We’re planning to board the ship and build a sled and a magnet attached to it that will scoop the ocean floor. And we will go back and forth, like mowing the lawns across the region, 10 kilometers in size and collect with the magnets, all the fragments that are attracted to it, and then brush them off and study their composition in the laboratory." Wouldn't this only work for iron fragments of a meteor? If the the…
It's possible that it's an iron alloy. Which can be stronger than iron, and also magnetic. But in regards to feasibility of such a project, I feel that 10km range is a major understatement. Think of the effort it took to find fragments of Malaysia Flight 370, even with a pretty narrow path. And that search was the most expensive search operation in history at $155MM [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Air…
> Using data from government censors primarily used for national security as part of our missile defense system
If it got past the government censors it has to be super pure and clean. So not an alloy; it must be previously unimagined material!
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#18I don't see anything in the original research that suggests it is "tech". I think the article completely made this up. To be pedantic, nearly all of the material that we are made of came from other stars, manufactured in their nuclear fusion and supernovae. I think what they mean is a macroscopic object that was formed in another star system, which they've inferred from its incoming trajectory.
> I don't see anything in the original research that suggests it is "tech". I think the article completely made this up.
It's because it's coming from Avi Loeb, the guy who suggested Oumuamua might be a Rama-style spacecraft. I don't think he's dead set on alien hypotheses, but he wants them to at least be taken seriously as possibilities.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#19To not bury the lead: His team studied data the government made available from military missile tracking systems, which conveniently also false-positives on asteroids. There was one in 2014 which slammed into the Pacific Ocean at a speed at least twice that of the speed stars around us move relative to the sun, which makes it likely to be extra-solar. Based on that speed & how much burned upon entry, they concluded i…
Lede, not lead.
Re: A meteor or alien tech: Harvard professor plans UFO expedition
#20poor professor