
Interstellar object ‘Oumuamua covered in 'thick crust of carbon-rich gunk' - secfirstmd
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/dec/18/interstellar-object-oumuamua-covered-in-thick-crust-of-carbon-rich-gunk
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notacoward
To a certain kind of alien, "thick crust of carbon-rich gunk" could describe
Earth as well.

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RepressedEmu
Maybe the aliens ARE the "carbon-rich gunk"?

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hinkley
You’re carbon-rich gunk.

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gebeeson
A co-worker of mine, upon reading this, opined that my face was carbon-rich
gunk. He's not wrong.

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avian
Personally, I'm strangely happy that this is turning out to be "just" an
ordinary piece of space rock. Imagine if it looked more like a spent booster
or a probe from remote observations. We would have no realistic way of
intercepting it to learn more about it. It would forever remain an open
question whether it was just a strange rock or a once-in-a-life-time missed
opportunity to explore an artifact from an alien civilization.

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johngalt
If there was solid evidence that it was of alien manufacture, we would go get
it. No question. Access to something like that triggers 'national security'
type responses. Projects under that heading have bottomless budgets and high
risk tolerances.

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planteen
We don't have the technology. The fastest object we have ever made is Voyager
1 at 17 km/sec. It got its speed by flybys of Jupiter and Saturn. Oumuamua is
going 26 km/sec.

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ceejayoz
We didn't have the tech for nuclear bombs until we decided we wanted to blow
up cities. We didn't have the technology to go to the moon until we decided we
wanted to go there. A little more than ten years ago the Motorola Razr was the
height of mobile phone design.

Stuff like NERVA or Project Orion stayed proposals not because they're
impossible, but because there's nowhere we really _need_ to get that fast to
justify the risks/expense/fallout.

"We need to get to this interstellar starship" would change the cost/benefit
ratio of developing the tech needed.

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Roboprog
NERVA was actually prototyped in the 60s, right? Dirty, but something that was
known to work.

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gumby
Undoubtably the accumulated corpses of explorers from the sundry solar systems
it has passed through during the past several billion years.

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CalChris
> organic ices – such as frozen carbon dioxide

I'm pretty sure that CO2 isn't classified as organic.

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paol
Organic has a specific meaning in chemistry:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry)

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a-priori
Yes but in some cases, astronomy uses slightly different definitions of key
scientific terms: "metal", for example, means anything other than hydrogen or
helium.

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nkoren
Nonsense. Nickel-iron asteroids are called "metallic," because they're largely
made out of, well, metal. Stony asteroids are called "carbonaceous" because
they've got a lot of carbon. They're very definitely _not_ called "metal". And
astronomers believe that the core of Jupiter is both hydrogen _and_ metallic
-- hydrogen compressed to the point where it acquires the property of a metal.

So: there are many things that are neither hydrogen nor helium nor metal, and
a few things which are both hydrogen _and_ metal.

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aexaey
I think GP meant "metallicity" as a property of stellar objects:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity)

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rishav_sharan
I am just happy that it doesn't have a reflective mercury like surface

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Avshalom
Which is completely normal.

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nerdponx
Sorry you're being downvoted. I thought this was pretty cool, too. How often
do we find interstellar "carbon-rich gunk"?

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jdonaldson
This sounds like my cast iron pan. It takes so long to build up the perfect
seasoning. I hope the owner is reunited with it.

