'Oumuamua: An analysis of the debate regarding the first interstellar visitor

I firmly believe that we're not alone in the universe, but advanced alien civilizations capable of interstellar travel would probably look at us like we look at mold - at best, with indifference and at worst, something to remove. But, it is fun to imagine how our belief systems would have been shaken up if scientists were able to show Oumuamua was an interstellar probe ("Rendezvous with Rama" anybody?)

There was an earlier interstellar object in 2014, and it hit earth. They are planning an expedition to retrieve pieces of it. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;2014-meteor-first-interstellar-visitor-oumuamua" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.space.com&#x2F;2014-meteor-first-interstellar-visitor...</a>

I like thinking about why something that survives interstellar travel might be elongated and off the top of my head I think of what analogous shape is familiar. The best way to penetrate mass is with length and density and of course space is “empty” but not over long time scales, and not when you add up interstellar medium over long distances. A big feature of such a shape assuming some stability is a small cross section and the length comes as a side effect of the necessary mass. It makes some sense that an object would be shaped like that but I do wonder what might provide the stability to maintain a small cross section rather than having a more chaotic rotation about some axis other than the radial one. I don’t think we know enough about Oumuamua to say whether this wondering is even relevant to it, but it’s fun to speculate, it could also be Darwinian in a sense. Its stability about a long rotation axis over long periods of time is why we end up seeing it on a long, long, long journey, or it’s something totally different :).

Aside: I want to point out the currently known composition of the universe:<p>~5% matter. Most of this is H and He though, bit of Li in there too. And it&#x27;s all mostly burning in a star&#x27;s gravity well. Like, 99.99999% of it. The stuff you and I are made of (C, N, P, Fe, etc), that we would wish aliens would be made of too, is <i>really</i> rare.<p>~25% dark matter. We know a little about it. We know that it falls down and doesn&#x27;t like to touch just about anything. But that&#x27;s really kinda it.<p>~70% dark energy. It falls ... up (?!). We know pretty much nothing about it. And it&#x27;s the large majority of &#x27;stuff&#x27; in the universe.<p>If there are friends out there, then we may want to look at stuff that is a bit more common than ourselves too.

Avi Loeb at Harvard is the one advocating for interpreting this as an alien probe. He writes a very large number of very short papers, sort of idea papers, and he views himself as providing stimulating ideas.<p>The object was interesting in that it wasn’t just a sphere, it had a non-spherical shape. And beyond that is speculation, the actual shape is not well established, let alone whether it has a shape that suggests aliens.

Ayyy I know this article is about the actual thesis, but it’s super cool to see Hawaiian on a top article title here. Although I don’t believe it was coined by a Native Hawaiian, it’s still fun to see Hawaiian make its way into science!

Is the mark &quot;first interstellar visitor&quot; universally agreed upon (as far as we know)? That alone is kinda cool.

There is only one point around the whole Oumuamua topic for me, that makes me a bit sad. Extraterrestrial or not is not it, but that we had no means to just fly there (with or without humans) and checkout what it is.<p>Even worse, it seems no one in the scientific community (please correct me if I&#x27;m wrong) stepped up and said &quot;We need to change this!&quot;. And it seems we will not have those means in the coming years&#x2F;decades.<p>Honestly, if we can&#x27;t do this in our own neighbourhood, because we simply lack the will power and consensus to do it, it says a lot about the future of space exploration.

This is an interesting paper and Oumuamua will remain fascinating for a long time.<p>Maybe the answer to the Fermi Paradox (or &#x27;Where the hell are they?&#x27;) is that they&#x27;re around and doing interstellar drive-bys and we&#x27;re just starting to notice.

After reading all sorts of arguments in this thread, I am extremely excited by the possibility of an alien probe passing by. Heck, even if it’s the most horrible kind of alien race - you have to agree - it would be pretty fucking epic to witness the end of mankind in a real-life, sci-fi movie.<p>And if it’s the loving kind of alien race, that’d be awesome too. Either way, enjoy while it lasts!

if an intelligent civilization needs to find if there is another intelligent civilization, it might send out an object like that. If the object gets trapped, someone intelligent is there so check it out. If not, its a pass. Its cheap. Its safer since it doesnt accept or deny that originator is intelligent.

One of the author&#x27;s conclusions to &quot;find out more&quot; (my paraphrase) suggest a rocket using a gravity well to go after it.<p>Are there any options for using a Voyager 1&#x2F;2 or radio based telescopes to observe it? (I&#x27;m a CompScience guy - not an Astrophysicist so that&#x27;s my best way to describe my question)

Here is the PDF linked by the page for those getting &#x27;hug of death&#x27; <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uu.diva-portal.org&#x2F;smash&#x2F;get&#x2F;diva2:1721987&#x2F;FULLTEXT01.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;uu.diva-portal.org&#x2F;smash&#x2F;get&#x2F;diva2:1721987&#x2F;FULLTEXT01...</a>

Nitpick: it&#x27;s ʻOumuamua, not &#x27;Oumuamua. The initial letter is the ʻokina (U+02BB), representing a glottal stop.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%CA%BBOkina" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;%CA%BBOkina</a>

Seems HN has ruled out aliens but have we given any consideration that &#x27;Oumuamua may have been sent back in time by a future human civilization? That may explain the rather phallic shape.

If Oumaumau is in fact of extraterrestrial origin, it could be the only evidence of life outside of earth that will ever pass through our solar system. We&#x27;ll never know.

&gt; Open Access in DiVA &gt; fulltext(1312 kB) &gt; 0 downloads<p>well... either their counter is broken, or nobody needs to read the article to take part in our fruitful discussion

I believe in aliens from a statistical standpoint.<p>But I don&#x27;t believe in interstellar travel at all. I don&#x27;t think people grasp the distances between stars. The longest distance a human has traveled through space is to the moon. If, for scale, this was about 2 millimeters, then the nearest star would be another 200 kilometers&#x2F;124 miles away. Here&#x27;s a great video to illustrate <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dCSIXLIzhzk</a><p>IMO Oumuamua was a rock.<p>However, it&#x27;s fun to think about it being alien, and it&#x27;s remarkably similar to Arthur Clarke&#x27;s Rama story.<p>Presumably the speed and trajectory of Oumuamua is known? Has this been traced back to give a potential origin if it is fro another star system?<p>&quot;Two of NASA&#x27;s space telescopes (Hubble and Spitzer) tracked the object traveling about 85,700 miles per hour (38.3 kilometers per second) relative to the Sun. Its outbound path is about 20 degrees above the plane of planets that orbit the Sun.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarsystem.nasa.gov&#x2F;asteroids-comets-and-meteors&#x2F;comets&#x2F;oumuamua&#x2F;in-depth&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;solarsystem.nasa.gov&#x2F;asteroids-comets-and-meteors&#x2F;co...</a><p>If the distance to the nearest star is 40,208,000,000,000 then:<p>40,208,000,000,000 &#x2F; 38 (km per second) &#x2F; 3600 seconds per hour &#x2F; 24 hours per day 365 days per year = 33552 years if it had come from closest star<p>Do I have those numbers right? Maths isn&#x27;t a strength.

Advanced aliens could only do space travel and they have no interest in us nor our science.<p>Something they may need and we have is resources but it&#x27;s not rare at all in the universe.<p>I bet they need a habitable planet or they are some kind cult like evangelical chritivans have to spread their religious bullshit everywhere.

Hugged to death?

Consider the statistics of it being an alien probe. Now consider the statistics of it being a rock. It&#x27;s a rock.

Katz&#x27;s attempts to delegitimize Loeb as a scientist makes his argument less credible. Aliens or not, it&#x27;s disingenuous to deny that some aspects of Oumuamua don&#x27;t yet have satisfactory explanation.

Clearly we need to launch Bezos, Musk, and Branson toward this object so they can inspect it for us and radio back what it is.

Slightly off-topic but I find it incredible that people in the comments think interstellar travel is impossible (or almost impossible)<p>A couple centuries ago, the brightest minds thought that humans flying in the air would take a million years. How can humans travel to the other part of the earth within a month? Today, it takes 16 hours (4 of which are airport security).<p>A century ago, almost everyone thought that stepping on a divine body like the moon is absolutely impossible for humanity. We did it less than 80 years after inventing aircrafts.<p>A century ago, everyone thought it was impossible to fling a tiny device to blow up an entire city. Hiroshima and Nagasaki...<p>Now, we think that it would be impossible to travel very long distances in space. Well, this challenge seems a piece of cake compared to flying in the air, walking on the moon, or generating unimaginable energy from atoms.<p>My layman solution to interstellar travel is constant acceleration using controlled nuclear fusion. We can use interstellar dust for necessary matter for our nuclear fusion (lots of hydrogen in interstellar dust). Even if we can&#x27;t use interstellar dust while travelling, we can certainly carry enough from our solar system.<p>I read somewhere (don&#x27;t remember where) that if a ship constantly accelerates in space, it can reach another star system in a few decades and another galaxy in less than a century.<p>It&#x27;s definitely a trivial challenge for humanity compared to what we have accomplished in the last 2 centuries. What do you think?

Imagine the solar system as a guitar, now imagine a gravity rich &quot;visitor&quot; (like a ejected jupiter&#x2F;saturn) plunging through, plugging on the gravitational relations string set. How long could you hear that sound revebrating, and could you untangle it if it happened multiple times? Could such a &quot;visitor&quot; suspend the gravitational shielding by the outer gas giants?<p>It should actually be doable with a de-convolution operation, once you compute the gravitational &quot;click&quot; accoustics of the solar system.