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‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

centauri-dreams.org

61–70 of 112 posts

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#61
post #46

While 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…

> even atmosphere composition tweaks visible on exoplanet spectrographs

I'm fairly certain we can't detect that yet even if they had.

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#62
post #17
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betteridge's law of headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

tome's law https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17978737

In any HN thread where Betteridge’s law is invoked, tome’s law follows with probability 0.85. Anonymous law.

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#64
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know - did you ask them? (the aliens)? ;)

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

[deleted]

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#66

If 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?

No. It would took around 200.000 years in order to reach Alpha Centauri by Voyage. It is flying MUCH slower than speed of light.

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#67
post #7
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clickbaited

Centauri Dreams can be highly speculative at times but it definitely does not do clickbait. Note that the title on that article is actually "‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails". I suppose it might have been different when submitter submitted it, but that seems unlikely.

The title of this submission was different when I made my previous comment. Something about aliens or extraterrestrial intelligence.

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#69
post #20

As another comment pointed out, the actual title of this article is ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails . While the question " Could ‘Oumuamua be debris from a technological civilization, a discarded lightsail? " occurs in the article, this title does the article a clickbaiting disservice. (" Is the interstellar object Oumuamua a lightsail from an alien civilization? " at the time of this comment)

Yes, that title broke the site guidelines, which ask: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." We've since reverted it.

All: Accounts that do that eventually lose submission privileges on HN, so please don't!

Re: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails

#70
post #2

No

This low-quality subthread happened because the submitter posted the article with a tarted-up title ("Is the interstellar object Oumuamua a lightsail from an alien civilization?") We've since changed the title back.

Doing that to titles is explicitly against the HN guidelines and eventually will cause an account to lose submission privileges.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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