Oumuamua may be an alien lightsail?

[LURCH]

I do not entirely agree. Firstly, I don’t think we actually do have the resources, as a species, to go out and chase it down. If we did pool our collective wealth (both material and otherwise), we could begin design and development of a device that would then need to be constructed, which could be ready for launch many years from now, when the object of our curiosity is much too far gone and moving away much too quickly.

More importantly, this is as you have said, the very first object of its type that we’ve ever seen. It’s also the very first time we looked. The fact that we saw it right away suggests that these sightings are going to prove to be common. This one, we didn’t spot until it was on its way out of our system , but the next time we might be more prepared. Chances are nearly certain that we will spot it sooner, get a better look, and make some much more educated guesses as to its true nature.

I’m sure we will eventually get out to one of these things and take a closer look, but for this one, I think we missed it.

 

[Klystron]

Make a long lasting project for children to "track the first scout" then teach the next generation. Old debris or 'tangled light sail material', we can try to track it particularly as technology improves. Perhaps an "Oumuamua scout link" can hitchhike on some device sent near the correct path. Being made by us it'll communicate location, direction, and more by reflecting emf as we expect. Not much else. Travel behind. A few images?

Remote data sampling, presumably via robotics, becomes expensive and a long term project. If the spatial aspects even permit close contact. The information gathered should justify the effort IMO. Technology continues to improve as does our knowledge.

[BTW makes sense dropping the preliminary glottal stop on the name. Last week I learned to pronounce Hualapai correctly; so Oumuamua.]

 

[russ_watters]

This object is the first in human history to not be plausibally explained be ANY theory.

That is absurd hyperbole. At one time or another, everything we've ever seen has been unexplainable by "any theory". This was particularly true before science was invented!

There is no evidence so far that conflicts with the idea that Oumuamua is artificial. It probably isn't but that does not mean that we know that it isnt. We absolutely cannot and should not rule out the possibility.
[snip]
Of course we should be chasing this thing down.

You think we should be spending tens of billions of dollars in order to rule out the possibility, you admit is unlikely, that it could be artificial? REALLY?

What concerns me is that our near religious devotion to the scientific method and perhaps the fear of any working scientist of being labeled as a crank for even considering the possibility of artificial origin may prevent us from doing what really makes sense here.

It's not fear, it's seriousness. The idea that we should spend tens of billions of dollars in order to turn a "probably not" into a "no" is just plain silly.

Especially when there is an easier way. We just watch it from here and continue measuring its speed. It should only take a few months for it's drop in acceleration to be noticeable.

 

[Sanborn Chase]

I think some good points were raised in that last post, but, if resources are truly limited and not an excuse for exclusion, is this an occasion for the expenditure of those precious commodities? We must allow those with the most knowledge to maintain the prudent allocation of them, but it's the responsibility of all to question the wisdom of any given experiment as long as those least able to benefit from or, indeed suffer, from any marginal benefit of that allocation. "For the benfit of all Mankind..", may sound a bit lofty, but it is in essence the mission of science.

 

[Sanborn Chase]

I was referencing Mr. Metiman's post. Sorry.

 

[metiman]

There are additional benefits to spending those billions. Would developing a small Fission Fragment Drive or Pulsed Nuclear Thermal Drive or even a 1960s era pulsed Orion bomb-drive really be entirely without value for us? The nuclear test ban treaty should have had an emergency clause. Although there is no need to launch from the ground anyway.

Building a space station at a Lagrange point for construction of the smallest and lightest probe we can manage to build would make more sense. It may take 100 years just to build the space station and then maybe another 50-200 years to build an appropriate ship, but Oumumua is slow enough that we could catch up to it with any sort of bleeding edge nuclear propulsion. A simple 1960s era Orion ship could easily catch it. It's just a matter of throwing enough money at the problem. And time.

Even if Oumuamua is not artificial it is probably very strange and it may be the only interstellar object we see for hundreds of years. For all we know we may never see another one. It is true that the most boring hypothesis is usually the true one (modern equivalent to Ockham's Razor), but I find it overly pessimistic to be entirely certain that it is nothing particularly interesting and find it depressing that we as a species lack the imagination or hope to even consider the slight possibility to be worth the challenge here.

If it is an alien ship whether derelict or live the possible benefits of exposure to such advanced technology are probably beyond our ability to even imagine. It would be like cavemen discovering a Macbook Air or a Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. It might allow us to leap ahead in both science and engineering to where we might be in thousands or even millions of years. For all we know yes they may even have transparent aluminum. Isn't that worth a hundred billion or so? The chance may be small, but the possible reward is very very great.

 

[DrStupid]

I just wonder how a Macbook Air would cavemen allow to leap ahead.

 

[metiman]

Well that's a good point. It wouldn't really. It would probably impress them though and get them wondering how they could make such things. But we have science and engineering already. So even if we were hundreds of thousands of years behind the Oumuamuans and even if their tech were so advanced that it was essentially indistinguishable from magic we may still be able to reverse engineer at least parts of it.

Nevertheless I was thinking a lot recently about how it is possible that life on Earth was a sort of nanotechnology that only now we are beginning to look at the way we look at machines. Craig Venter essentially made his own bacterium, albeit not from scratch, but it is very clear that life is completely indistinguishable from a very very advanced level of nanotechnology. Even if we had definitive evidence that it was seeded here by some alien culture and was thus essentially artificial, that we ourselves were basically artificial, it would not change the fact that at least so far no matter how much and how deeply we study it we cannot design and manufacture what we call 'life' ourselves. We understand that life is basically a series of instructions encoded in DNA/RNA but we cannot even properly read the instructions let alone encode them ourselves to create our own new artificial species. When it comes to the nanotech we call life we are basically just hackers or script kiddies rather than programmers or software engineers.

So yes we may not be able to learn as much as I might hope from their technology, but the potential would still be there. No the cavemen would not be able to start semiconductor manufacturing even if they could figure out how to remove the case without jeweler screwdrivers and see the Intel CPU and RAM and all of the surface mount wave soldered components on the motherboard, but at least they would see what is possible. Although once the battery died they would not even be able to see that it does anything special. Future generations would have to rely solely on the tales of previous generations about what they once saw the device do. It might be thousands of years before there was anywhere to plug it in and well it would be way out of warranty by then.

 

[russ_watters]

There are additional benefits to spending those billions. Would developing a small Fission Fragment Drive or Pulsed Nuclear Thermal Drive or even a 1960s era pulsed Orion bomb-drive really be entirely without value for us?

I said tens of billions, not hundreds of billions - referring to a quick and light project using existing or nearly existing technology. The longer we wait the lower the outcome value, higher the likelihood of failure and higher the cost. I can't fathom why we would want to spend the better part of a century on the most expensive project ever undertaken in order to turn a "probably not" into a "no".

If there are "additional benefits" to developing an Orion drive, the project should be evaluated primarily with those benefits in mind.

Or, perhaps, it feels like even though you are saying "probably not" you really don't believe it...or maybe because Let's build a starship!

Even if Oumuamua is not artificial it is probably very strange and it may be the only interstellar object we see for hundreds of years. For all we know we may never see another one.

That is unlikely given our rapidly improving detection technology.

 

[Vanadium 50]

I can't fathom why we would want to spend the better part of a century on the most expensive project ever undertaken in order to turn a "probably not" into a "no".

a. Because aliens!
b. Because starships!
c. "Probably not" is "almost certainly not".

 

[collinsmark]

I can't help but be reminded of Charles Schulz's masterpiece, "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown."



"I got a rock."

 

[metiman]

I can't fathom why we would want to spend the better part of a century on the most expensive project ever undertaken in order to turn a "probably not" into a "no".

Because this is the first time we have encountered something with any chance at all of being an alien artifact. Even if the chance is 1% it is shortsighted and irresponsible to just ignore it because the most boring hypothesis is usually the correct one. It really could be something artificial and we should not ignore that possibility just because it seems too interesting to possibly be true.

I admit that it could have been far more compelling and if it had been I probably wouldn't have to make such arguments. If it had accelerated away at 10 Gs for instance or dropped smaller objects along the way that were big enough for us to see I would at least like to think that our species would be making preparations to build a space station and finally start building proper nuclear space drives to chase after it.

Of course if it did accelerate away like that we would never be able to catch it even with fission fragment drive tech, but presumably we wouldn't be having any debate about the object's artificiality, and I would again hope that we as a species could finally get serious about real space exploration.

Yes this object was a lot less interesting than it could have been, but it is still by far the most interesting space object we have ever seen and it is very close to us and moving away at a snail's pace for any civ with any kind of decent space drive. So yes we should be doing everything we can to chase it down and discover what it actually is. I have never seen life imitate science fiction before, and I did not think I would live to see it, but for once something at least mildly interesting actually happened and we are just shrugging and saying ah well...nothing we can do...guess we'll never know.

The working scientists who are afraid for their jobs are particularly disappointing. If we cannot count on them to react reasonably and rationally when something interesting and exciting happens than who can we count on? Yes they are pretending to be rational/reasonable, but really they are just being unreasonably skeptical in a way that is entirely unsupported by the limited evidence. It is just as unscientific to rule something out without evidence as to rule something in.

Oumuamua does not present as any natural object we have seen before. It's not a comet. It may be an asteroid but if it is one it is a very strange one unlike any asteroid we have ever seen and that acceleration would have to be explained even if it wasn't 10 Gs. Maybe it is artificial. Maybe it isn't. If it is artificial chasing it down would be the greatest discovery our civilization has ever made. If it isn't artificial it would still be one of the most interesting natural objects we have ever seen.

You guys are just dismissing it like it's a joke, but if it starts shooting pulsed streams of neutrinos in our direction what will you say then? Maybe it is a ship and their civilization hadn't been by here for a hundred thousand years or so and hadn't realized that our planet now has 10 meter optical telescopes and 500 meter radio telescopes to point at them and so underestimated our ability to detect them. Maybe when they realized their mistake they did that random looking rotation thing to try to throw us off.

 

[russ_watters]

Because this is the first time we have encountered something with any chance at all of being an alien artifact.

That is absolutely not true as a quick google will tell you! [Google with caution!]

Yes they are pretending to be rational/reasonable, but really they are just being unreasonably skeptical in a way that is entirely unsupported by the limited evidence. It is just as unscientific to rule something out without evidence as to rule something in.

The implication that alien origin is being ruled out by scientists is also not true. It was Harvard(!) researchers who broached the possibility in their paper!

It is a common crackpot claim that scientists are not open minded, but please don't fall into that trap. The work of research scientists is little else but exploring new ideas. It's the reason the pursuit of science exists!

You guys are just dismissing it like it's a joke, but if it starts shooting pulsed streams of neutrinos in our direction what will you say then?

Changing things changes things.

Since the discussion has devolved into attacks on science and imaginary scenarios to justify real action (blurring the line between fantasy and reality), I think it has run its course and is time for a lock.