I have no doubt that someday we will build something to catch up to Oumuamua and determine the truth. The only question is when.<p>I like the spirit of Oumuamua's wager - treat it as if it is alien tech, even if it probably won't be. The journey to find out will push us in a desirable direction.<p>I'd rather be part of a society that tries to catch a weird asteroid on the off chance it's something truly amazing, than part of a society that doesn't care.
I find the idea plausible that theories regarding extraterrestrial life are unfairly dismissed within the profession. And it would be such a tragedy to miss out on real evidence of alien life just because, institutionally, scientists are not allowed to consider it.<p>But can we put any stock into Avi's opinion on it, given that committing to the 'Oumuamua solar sail idea has been very lucrative for him, in the way of media attention, book deals, podcast appearances etc.? It is a little ironic to talk about other scientist's egos while promoting your own book.
We can maybe judge the quality and accuracy of the reporting from the remark, "the object sped up faster than could be explained by our star’s waning gravitational grip".<p>'Oumuamua didn't speed up at all. It slowed down. Just, infinitesimally less than it seems like it ought to have.
The key points were that he believes the scientific community is scared to discuss more SETI related research for fear of redicule and job impacts. It sounds like he thinks it is impacting the science too as someone will gladly create a proposal to look for liquid water outside our solar system, but scientists are too worried about getting shunned to look for the molecules in industrial pollution (arguably a better use of time assuming that the hunt for water was a proxy for what they really wanted to do) on those planets instead. I think looking for water on exoplanets is still pretty relevant though and is useful to know even if you believe ET doesn't exist, so I don't really understand his argument here to be honest. I agree with what he's saying regarding string theory and other related fields that are very hard to run experiments on. In his eyes, they're more outlandish than SETI research as they can be made to fit a lot of different models. He is not against that kind of research, but is arguing that if you're okay with string theory, you should be okay with SETI.<p>I still feel like he's being a little brash in assuming Oumuamua is an alien vessel. I think it's possible, but likely there is another possibility that we haven't thought of.
Where are the scientists looking at all the credible UFO sightings? Nowhere, because scientists are just like everyone else, they don't actually want to discover any thing new or change anything, they want to reconfirm what they think they already know, which for the most part means maintaining the status quo. The number of scientists or astronomers who laugh off thousands of credible first hand reports of people seeing unexplainable things in the sky...they're not interested unless it fits into an already accepted framework. The idea that there "isn't any evidence" for non earth based UFOs visiting earth is plain wrong. What you conclude from the evidence is, of course, up for debate, but I've never seen a main stream astronomer say they've even looked at this evidence. Like this article suggests, I think this represents a real crisis in science. How timid and scared we must be to not even talk about this in real terms, we imagine star trek and laugh. "why don't they arrive on the white House lawn"? "why do they always appear to some redneck blah blah". I think all the astronauts and pilots who are listed amoungst ufo reporters would disagree with the second statement and as for the white House lawn... we humans send space ships to other planets, they study then and send back data. If aliens are here then they will be studying us and attempting not to disturb. They would want to introduce us to the idea of extra terrestrial life slowly as they would have gone through this innocence as well and would know what damage radical change can do. If that sounds ridiculous to you I suggest you're not thinking realistically about aliens, you are living in the star trek universe. I ask which is more realistic?