The title of the post is "‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails"
Why was this changed in the HN submission? It sounds much more click-baity than it is.
‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
41–50 of 112 posts
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#42If that is a discarded lightsail, maybe it's payload is right now decelerating towards Sol. THAT would be something (pun intended).
My understanding is that the authors of the paper were speculating that this object might be debris from an encounter with another star that later flew by our sun by mere coincidence.
As far as I can see, the observed hyperbolic trajectory doesn't seem consistent with a scenario where the target of the sail's payload would be our solar system.
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#43If that is a discarded lightsail, maybe it's payload is right now decelerating towards Sol. THAT would be something (pun intended).
What if it's payload contains an AI in a tiny container rather than a biological being?
Like in the book Accelerando? Advanced civilizations might want to send digital copies of their astronauts, to keep the operation light and lean.
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#44Although unlikely to be a lightsail I think, this reminds me of the Rama series by Arthur C. Clark. I really wish someone like HBO, Netflix, or Starz would pick that series up and make a show out of it.
Morgan Freeman talked about producing _Rendezvous with Rama_ like five years ago now. https://youtu.be/20DaSHa4I1k
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
Always amazes me how people won't acknowledge there is plenty of things we humans don't know. I didn't think this was clickbait, it's just some interesting ideas based on our limited knowledge of something, nothing pretentious or over reaching IMO
But that's not what happens: proposed alien technology always approximately tracks human technological development. I'm having trouble finding it at the moment, but somewhere out there is a pretty good article that points out that even though more people are now carrying cameras than ever before, UFO sightings have basically fallen off a cliff. They rose with the advent of jet aircraft and the space age, and then fel…
'proposed alien technology always approximately tracks human technological development'
Or to put it another way, humans conceptualize, observe and measure based on what they currently know and the tools they have.
My point again is we all to often fill the vacuum of what we don't know with 'the extent of our knowledge and experience is the extent of the entire universe'.
We have no idea about what we don't know...
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#46While I find it highly unlikely, it does raise an interesting point about Fermi's Paradox, which is that even if there were enough alien life out there for its discarded light sails to go hurtling through our solar system every once in a while, we might not get any more evidence of it than this article demonstrates. So, it's almost certainly not a light sail, but even if it were, we would never know.
Fermi's paradox demonstrates it's almost certainly not a light sail. For it to be a light sail which was observed by chance by our totally unprepared observatories after a window of less than a century but also consistent with all our observations of the universe, we would need to hypothesize that we got extraordinarily lucky to observe a super-rare artifact, or that countless (or one vast) interstellar, pan-galactic civilization throwing out light sails in every direction constantly which also collectively choosing for millions/billions of years to avoid any kind of stellar engineering or direct colonization or Dyson sphere-like artifacts or even atmosphere composition tweaks visible on exoplanet spectrographs all carefully preserving the illusion of a 100% dead cosmos in every inch of our Hubble volume, or that alternately, interstellar civilizations are super common and in fact routinely throw out solar sails all the time, but some sort of interstellar-capable Great Filter kills them almost instantly before they can have any visible effects, leaving just a bunch of spreading artifacts. (And this Great Filter can't be any of the usual ones like asteroids or nukes or pandemic or development of intelligence.)
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have knowledge of probability. The probability of the interstellar object being a light sail is equal to the probability of the flying spaghetti monster existing. So in other words, the probability is not Zero. Meaning it is very much worth considering and this article is legit.
I would say that it's near impossible to assign a probability since this is the very first extra-solar object ever detected.
What's the probability that the very first extra-solar object is a light sail? Lets be real...
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#48If we send a Voyager-sized probe to Alpha/Beta Centauri, could we use a similar gravity assist to slingshot around one of the stars? How good is our aim across 4.4 light years?
Wouldn't we have a robot steer the light sail as it got closer?
Genuine question, this is well outside my wheelhouse.
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#49Given Oumuamua's well documented non-gravitational acceleration, what was the cause? That's the key question this article – and the paper it cites – are investigating. Comet-like off-gassing has been mostly ruled out due to the lack of observed dust or gas around the object, as well as lack of effect on spin. The paper suggests that a highly reflective 0.3mm-thick film 20m in diameter could be consistent with the obs…
It’s a fascinating mystery, but I gotta say that’d make a crappy lightsail, considering that even at our current tech level we could make a much lighter one if we could manufacture it in space. (The experiments that have flown were all constrained to survive launch and unfolding.)
Microscopic debris impacts could have degraded it over its lifetime to its current state.
Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
#50While I find it highly unlikely, it does raise an interesting point about Fermi's Paradox, which is that even if there were enough alien life out there for its discarded light sails to go hurtling through our solar system every once in a while, we might not get any more evidence of it than this article demonstrates. So, it's almost certainly not a light sail, but even if it were, we would never know.
Fermi's paradox demonstrates it's almost certainly not a light sail. For it to be a light sail which was observed by chance by our totally unprepared observatories after a window of less than a century but also consistent with all our observations of the universe, we would need to hypothesize that we got extraordinarily lucky to observe a super-rare artifact, or that countless (or one vast) interstellar, pan-galactic…
Or that this was a relatively nearby civilization, and the light sail was intentionally headed toward our solar system (like a few of our proposed interstellar missions to Alpha Centauri).