
A Harvard Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua - jelliclesfarm
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/have-aliens-found-us-a-harvard-astronomer-on-the-mysterious-interstellar-object-oumuamua
======
joe_the_user
There's definitely not enough evidence to say Oumuamua is an artifact of an
alien civilization. But there isn't enough evidence to say it isn't either.
Moreover, as far as I know, there _is_ enough evidence to be pretty sure every
other significant celestial body is not an alien artifact. So it's higher on
the scale than anything else.

The argument I've heard is that it is a disabled alien probe. This makes sense
given that any device sent into space will probably last much longer as space
junk than as a working device. So, the density of alien space junk would be
higher than the density working artifact. Thus, if this thing were to turn out
to be disabled alien probe, it would be more or less what you'd expect to see
occasionally if alien civilizations of our level existed in some moderate
density (note, most of "Fermi Hypothesis" possibility arguments involves
hypothetical higher levels of civilization, which seems to me a rather thin
argument).

~~~
0x8BADF00D
The shape seems to be the most interesting part about it. If it were
deliberately manufactured by a sentient alien civilization, why choose that
specific shape? A light sail based probe doesn’t seem to be a sufficient
enough explanation for the shape.

~~~
scrumper
Point is the shape is unknown. A cigar shape is one possible explanation that
fits the light curve data; a solar sail is another.

~~~
nerfhammer
Only the solar sail shape could explain how the object _accelerated_ without
outgassing

------
aschampion
PBS SpaceTime's excellent coverage of Loeb's paper: 'Oumuamua Is Not Aliens

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wICOlaQOpM0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wICOlaQOpM0)

------
apo
The title's use of "Harvard" is interesting in that it hints at appeal to
authority.

Imagine that the astronomer were based at Lackawanna College. Would that
information be worth conveying through the title?

"Lackawanna College Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua"

I doubt it. The problem with appeal to authority is that there's no place in
science for it. Not only that, appeal to authority undermines science itself.

As Carl Sagan put it in _The Demon-Haunted World_ :

 _Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made
mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better
way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are
experts._

[https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/535475-arguments-from-
autho...](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/535475-arguments-from-authority-
carry-little-weight-authorities-have-made)

~~~
TeMPOraL
In a way, quoting Carl Sagan is an appeal to authority in itself. If the same
words were said by /u/RandomRedditUser, the quotation would carry less weight.

You could also see the "Harvard Astronomer" and "Carl Sagan" here as appeal to
expertise, for which university association is an imperfect proxy.

~~~
apo
I see how it could be interpreted that way. But my purpose was to credit the
author and his book.

Had I left the quote without attribution and claimed it as my own, I'm sure
someone would have suggested I should take a refresher on plagiarism. Ditto
had I paraphrased Sagan without attribution.

If I had merely given the quote without a link or context, I'd run the risk of
perpetuating false quotes.

Had /u/RandomRedditUser written the text instead of Sagan, I would have cited
it in the same way.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I'm not criticizing the way you quoted Sagan; what I'm trying to say is that
there's no escape from any kind of "appeal to authority".

There's too many people saying too many things that are too expensive to
evaluate on their own merits; we all use heuristics to filter and rank stuff.
Appeal to authority/expertise is one of those (and, as all heuristics,
imperfect).

------
rando444
> _When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move
> relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five
> hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect
> that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from.
> If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very
> special._

If we're to assume that this is something that was expelled from a remote
solar system, wouldn't you then also assume that there had to be some
explosion or collision to get this thing on its current course? And wouldn't
that account for a speed that doesn't match nearby objects?

~~~
joe_the_user
As your quote indicates, it's not just not going at the speed of any nearby
star, it's going at the particular speed of the galaxy (or galaxy's average
rotation). If an object were expelled randomly by a nearby star, it's speed
would be: star's speed + random extra boost. The chances this would exactly
the galactic speed seems small.

~~~
jerf
Kinda a weird speed for an alien artifact too, though. One would expect for it
to be _launched_. Humans may in some sense have a small time horizton, but you
have to have an absurdly long time horizon to fling probes out into the
universe at the local average speed and expect them to encounter anything,
since by definition of "local average speed" that's literally the speed least
likely to encounter anything. In some sense, that's actually literally the
_least_ likely velocity I'd expect to be an alien result.

(And it's also conceivable that humans have bizarrely _long_ time horizons, if
the future of all intelligence is moving into a machine intelligence on a
computational substrate as fast as possible. If intelligences subjectively
experience hundreds or thousands or millions of times faster, it's like
dropping the speed of light by the same factor, and it still takes all the
same amount of energy to launch probes. I'm not saying this is inevitably
true, but I do think there's an excessively strong bias to assume that humans
are as bad as possible in every possible way.)

~~~
nerfhammer
It's exactly what you would want to do if you didn't want someone who found it
to be able to tell where it came from

~~~
jerf
For that, you just need the velocity vector not to be in the very narrow class
of vectors that point back at you. There's no need to put it in "galactic
neutral", especially given that, as I said, that's literally the worst
possible speed to get anywhere. That's just one possible choice from the
almost-every-possible-vector selection set that will work to disguise your
origin.

Of course, we also have the question of why you would care to disguise your
origin for a "space probe" traveling at such a slow speed. (Pretty much every
conceivable mechanism that could have something traveling at any appreciable
speed and that slowed it down anytime in the recent past would be very easily
detectable. Of course you can invoke inconceivable mechanisms, but as I often
say, you have to understand you have left rationality and logic behind when
you do that; if we're going to say this object has a magic drive that
decelerates without any detectable emissions, we might as well ask why it's
not just using an FTL drive, or why any alien civilization is bothering to
"probe" us when they've long since landed at Area 51 and have long since been
running our civilization anyhow as our secret leaders.)

~~~
ncmncm
Whipping it around a nearby unoccupied star would be an easy way to obscure
its origins. Just their bad luck that Sol turned out to be occupied, by a
primitive civilization that might be able to act on knowledge of its origin
vector in a few centuries or millennia.

It looks slow to us, but it might be that whatever method it uses to skip big
distances doesn't steer, so the only way to get pointed somewhere else is a
close approach. And, of course, the method doesn't work in a gravity well, so
it has to coast until it's a few hundred AU out.

Will enough records be preserved through the coming dark ages (after the
ecosystem collapses) for the raccoons or macaques or whatever inherits the
earth to act on them?

~~~
newsbinator
The raccoons and macaques will likely have their own close approaches to
observe and trace back.

------
gloriousduke
Oumuamua probably isn't artificial, but observations of objects like it and
Tabby's star, fast radio bursts and contact binary systems* will likely
increase as our instruments and data parsing improve. So, if aliens are the
cause of any these or some repeated, anomalous future observations, it's only
a matter of time before we all but confirm we are not alone.

*[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvbx4x/starivores...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vvbx4x/starivores-intelligent-life-that-could-eat-the-sun)

------
api
My favorite speculation is that Oumuamua is a spent _deceleration_ stage for a
larger inbound multi-stage interstellar rocket. It would probably be a nuclear
fusion rocket or similar. Previous stages flew past us and we didn't notice.
The next stages(s) and/or the payload should arrive shortly. Since it's
decelerating the next stage will be traveling slower.

~~~
mfoy_
That's actually a fun thought... once you've got your probe up to a third of
the speed of light or whatever... how are you going to slow down again in
order to actually do anything useful?

Or maybe this is a solar sail that was part of an ACCELERATION stage for a
probe that already passed through our solar system millions of years ago.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
If we were to do an interstellar ship with current physics it would probably
rely on:

\- Preacceleration strategies that speed up the craft without using its
onboard/deceleration reaction mass/fuel (gravity whips, launching lasers for a
solar sail, cannon-fired fuel pods)

\- Pulse nuclear acceleration using "preseeded" fuel pods launched ahead of
the craft and captured as the craft caught the pod

\- ion drive once the preseeded fuel pods weren't practical anymore

\- ion drive, solar sail, and pulse nuclear and more gravity whips to slow
down

Pulse nuclear/orion ships are the only thing that gets close to specific
impulse and performance to get to Alpha Centauri in anything reasonable. It
becomes a LOT more feasible if fuel pods are prelaunched, or seeded by a
leading disposable fuel seeding ship (it doesn't have to slow down, it can
just, uh ...

.... fly through the target system once it's done.

Uhoh.

~~~
mfoy_
This kind of makes me want to play KSP again...

------
rotexo
“...at least a quarter of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have a planet like
Earth, with surface conditions that are very similar to Earth, and the
chemistry of life as we know it could develop.”

I was rather surprised by this claim. Isn’t it currently beyond our ability to
detect earth-sized planets around other stars? Isn’t it also beyond our
capability to directly detect surface conditions on planets around other
stars?

~~~
nateberkopec
It is not beyond our ability, as "detecting earth-sized planets" was the
explicit mission of the Kepler spacecraft.

~~~
rotexo
I guess I should ask a different question then. Have we detected any earth-
sized planets? I can only remember hearing about super-earths and gas giants,
and I generally read the exoplanet discovery announcements when I see them.

~~~
skykooler
We have indeed. This page has some that are also in the habitable zone:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_potentially_habitable_exoplanets)

Note that, while some are super-earths, others like Kepler-438b or the planets
in the TRAPPIST-1 system are Earth-sized or smaller.

------
olefoo
If this unusual object were an artifact and our solar system wasn't it's
destination the most positive evidence for it's artificial nature would be
it's onward destination.

As yet I haven't seen any extrapolations of its post-encounter track.

------
modzu
thank you Dr. Loeb for giving this the attention it deserves. oumuamua
demonstrated that we aren't equipped to respond fast enough to these types of
objects. we need plans in place that addresses the latency of fast moving
objects so that we can prioritize them for study and not be left wondering...

~~~
emsy
I'm not exactly sure why you are being downvoted at the time of my reply.
Surely being prepared for this situation will give humanity benefits
regardless of any actual contact with alien civilizations. Similar to how
having environmental friendly tech is a net plus regardless of your stance on
global warming.

------
nkurz
_The following October, Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department,
co-wrote a paper (with a Harvard postdoctoral fellow, Shmuel Bialy) that
examined ‘Oumuamua’s “peculiar acceleration” and suggested that the object
“may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth’s vicinity by an
alien civilization.”_

The referenced paper is here:

Could Solar Radiation Pressure Explain 'Oumuamua's Peculiar Acceleration?

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11490](https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.11490)

------
newnewpdro
Having already read multiple articles about Oumuamua, the only thing this
particular article added to my knowledge is that Isaac Chotiner is not a
particularly good interviewer.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
>> Loeb has long been interested in the search for extraterrestrial life, and
he recently made further headlines by suggesting that we might communicate
with the civilization that sent the probe. “If these beings are peaceful, we
could learn a lot from them,” he told Der Spiegel.

Such as why it's a bad idea to communicate with alien civilisations,
particularly ones that appear to be more technologically advanced than ours.

------
nabla9
The whole case sounds just crazy publicity stunt.

After reading more, I think Avi Loeb had a valid reason to speculate and put
it out there even the numbers have large uncertainties and put the article out
because the argument is good enough even with the large uncertainties. It's
the fault of the general public if they get carried away.

(If I would bet, I would say the probability is less than 0.00001 that the
hypothesis is correct.)

------
ycombonator
Dr Avi Loeb is one of those rare individuals in his field who doesn't believe
in "settled science" as opposed to others in his field.

~~~
colordrops
"settled science". Love that term.

------
ncmncm
This guy will need to have a chat with a plasma physicist, one of these days,
if he wants to get to the bottom of this.

When he does, he will then need to keep it to himself, because there's no
quicker route to ostracism, in astronomy, than to start talking about
electromagnetics.

------
arisAlexis
some good news. if it's a solar sail it means that their technology doesn't
include em drive warp speeds and all that fancy stuff so it will take them a
long time to come and kill us all

------
nateberkopec
What's the future for the study of Oumuamua? Apparently, it should be beyond
the orbit of Saturn by the end of this month. Will we _ever_ know what it is
definitively, or is it too late?

~~~
aspectmin
I would like to understand this better myself. If we dedicated some resources
and say... a year until launch, could humanity (current state of tech) build
something that could catch up to this thing in a reasonable (2, 3-5 year?)
timeframe?

------
LyalinDotCom
Is the object too small and/or traveling too fast that we can never get better
photos of it? I am assuming we can still predict where it should be even after
it left our system?

~~~
drdrey
It was detected too late (already 0.22 AU from Earth and moving away) and it
is tiny, only about 100m. We will never get any photos from it.

------
pewdiepotpie
we [as a species] already have probes landing on interplanetary bodies; and
have made considerations to manipulate trajectories of such.

I would entertain the possibility the object in question could be just such a
hacksteroid of mostly cosmic origin with some tech pushing it around.

------
porphyrogene
I am making a note to read the paper because this interview was a disaster.
The interviewer asked a personal question about religious beliefs and denies
that the question was inappropriate after putting him on the defensive by
questioning his reasoning from a decidedly uninformed perspective. Why not
survey others in the field and voice their objections instead of condescending
to the interviewee? This reads like some weird gotcha journalism... in The New
Yorker of all places.

~~~
tokai
If you as an interviewer ever say "Hold on. Let me finish", you have failed
and should rethink your methodology. It was embarrassing to read.

~~~
pmoriarty
There's a much better interview here:

[https://boingboing.net/2018/12/06/interview-with-the-
astrono...](https://boingboing.net/2018/12/06/interview-with-the-
astronomer.html)

~~~
tokai
Thank you. I'll read it. I have heard multiple interviews of Loeb on
youtube.[0] I like that he doesn't hide away the potential for wonder in
astrology/cosmology. In that way he reminds me of Sagan a great deal. Sagan
faced some ridicule as well in his time, so go figure.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz3qvETKooktNgCvvheuQDw/videos)

------
fxj
It is all speculation and no proof, but a good advertisement for the cited
scientist.

------
airstrike
Being a Harvard astronomer in and of itself doesn't make one's arguments any
stronger. What a silly headline.

~~~
mfoy_
I down-voted you, and here's why:

1\. An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. However, authority does serve
a purpose. People will take Harvard astronomers more seriously than backyard
astronomy enthusiasts. Therefore his credentials are relevant.

2\. No one, at any point, makes an argument that you should believe anything
he claims on his credentials alone.

3\. In this world of click-bait headlines and ad-revenue-driven content, this
doesn't even qualify as close to click-bait. It doesn't even say UFO, or
alien, or artifact, or anything controversial. The title of the article is
_literally_ what it is. It is a Harvard astronomers thoughts on an object in
space.

~~~
airstrike
> 1\. An appeal to authority is a logical fallacy. However, authority does
> serve a purpose. People will take Harvard astronomers more seriously than
> backyard astronomy enthusiasts. Therefore his credentials are relevant.

You're basically saying "appeal to authority is a logical fallacy but it's an
OK fallacy"

We should judge his opinion on the validity of his claims, not on the
credentials he carries. If the backyard astronomer makes a more cogent
argument, we should prefer that over the Harvard astronomers. Ideas have
merits, credentials don't.

Carl Sagan famously said

    
    
        One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." ...
        Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong.
        Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else.

~~~
mfoy_
Your entire comment is off-topic.

You ignored points #2 and #3 and misrepresented #1. That's a classic straw-man
fallacy.

I did not say "it's an OK fallacy", so do not put those words into my mouth. I
said authority serves a purpose. It can serve as a signal, used to filter out
noise. His arguments must, of course, stand on their own. If you actually read
the article, you'll find he makes some good arguments.

In fact, neither this headline nor this article even make the "appeal to
authority" fallacy in the first place. So why harp on it?

~~~
airstrike
> Your entire comment is off-topic.

How so? I'm literally talking about the article.

> You ignored points #2 and #3 and misrepresented #1.

Point #2 wasn't worth addressing, but I'll do it just in case.

> 2\. No one, at any point, makes an argument that you should believe anything
> he claims on his credentials alone.

Nor did I say anyone made that argument. Irrelevant.

> 3\. In this world of click-bait headlines and ad-revenue-driven content,
> this doesn't even qualify as close to click-bait. It doesn't even say UFO,
> or alien, or artifact, or anything controversial. The title of the article
> is literally what it is. It is a Harvard astronomers thoughts on an object
> in space.

Nor did I say the article was clickbait. I mere pointed to the fact that the
choice of words for the headline implies appeal to authority, though I did not
say that in so many words.

Finally, I did not misinterpret #1. Let's revisit what you said

> 1\. (...) People will take Harvard astronomers more seriously than backyard
> astronomy enthusiasts. Therefore his credentials are relevant.

Let's break this down:

(A) People will take Harvard astronomers more seriously than backyard
astronomy enthusiasts.

This is precisely stating that people are subject to appeal to authority. You
are saying someone's credentials confers their opinion with greater weight
than if such opinion was anonymous, so you are agreeing with my original
point.

But let's for a moment ignore the fact that we wish (A) wasn't true.

(B) Therefore his credentials are relevant.

It seems like you were trying to imply that because (A) is true, then (B) must
true.

Your argument is tantamount to: If people believe in the value of credentials,
then credentials are valuable.

In a more generic sense, if people believe in X to be valuable, then X _must_
be valuable.

That's only true if you assume X has no inherent value but only that value
which others confer to it. I would disagree with that assumption.

> So why harp on it?

I'm harping because the headline perpetuates the fallacy that credentials mean
something. Maybe they do in practice as you said it yourself, but _that 's_
entirely besides the point. I'm arguing they _shouldn 't_.

I'm also harping because it's a free "country".

------
peterwwillis
This is the guy that believes aliens created a solar sail-powered pancake-
shaped spacecraft 600,000 years ago just so it could fly by us and say hi,
right?

~~~
radicaldreamer
That's not what he said at all?

~~~
peterwwillis
No, it is what he said.

In this article, he mentions a dead alien civilization sending it. He also
mentions the pancake shape.

In this other article[1] he mentions it taking 600,000 years to reach us from
Vega.

In this article[2] he mentions the solar sail.

You can find it all on the Wikipedia page[3]. But thanks for the downvotes,
guys.

[1] [https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-
news/astronomers-s...](https://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-
news/astronomers-spot-first-known-interstellar-comet/) [2]
[https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-if-
true...](https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-if-true-this-
could-be-one-of-the-greatest-discoveries-in-human-history-1.6828318) [3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ʻOumuamua)

~~~
mfoy_
Down-votes are not for factually correct or incorrect comments. They are for
comments that either do or do not contribute to the discussion.

Saying that he believes that "aliens created a solar sail-powered pancake-
shaped spacecraft 600,000 years ago just so it could fly by us and say hi" is
incredibly dismissive, and also a misrepresentation of his views, and his
point.

~~~
peterwwillis
Those are his views. I didn't misrepresent them, I stated them plainly. As a
result, it sounds like a stupid idea. That is my contribution to the
discussion. Not liking this contribution, or not agreeing with it, doesn't
mean it's not a contribution. The downvotes are because people don't like it.

