
A Harvard professor on the extraterrestrial origins of Oumuamua - mathattack
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-if-true-this-could-be-one-of-the-greatest-discoveries-in-human-history-1.6828318
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anoncoward111
A very interesting article that I hope doesn't fade into obscurity because
it's Sunday.

The scientist who is hoping that Oumuamua is a solar sail is a Harvard
scientist under the employ of Zuck et al. to make a solar sail and send it to
Alpha Centauri. He does a good job of countering some of the arguments against
Oumuamua being anything other than a rock.

1) Ouamuamua, according to him, is either cigar shaped or pancake shaped,
based on the way it is reflecting light. He allges it is even just millimeters
thick, and that we've never seen a rock naturally form this way.

2) He argues that the lack of radio activity from the object is due to the
object either being inactive, or only send data back to its host system in a
ray, not an omnidirectional cloud. So, Earth wouldn't detect the radio
signals.

3) He argues there is nothing to gain by calling it a rock and thinks that
some civilization many thousands of years ago maybe have created billions of
solar sails and sent them to any and every star on a whim. He argues that the
sail was deployed as a buoy that would sit in place until our system came
roaring past it. We weren't targeted directly, but the object was designed to
flyby our habitable zone.

\-- All in all I think he does an interesting job of explaining why the object
is different from the thousands of rocks we have observed, but I have no way
of confirming if his analysis is true. Based on the red spectral data, the
tumbling nature of the light reflected at us, and the artist's impression of
the 150m ish object, I thought the scientific consensus was that it was just a
really weird rock formed in chaotic conditions that has drifted in the galaxy
for eons.

I guess we will have to start building some sails to find out :)

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diminish
So the alien civilization has more or less our physics knowledge at some point
in time last 600K years.

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anoncoward111
Interesting question. If it did come from Vega's area 600,000 years ago, the
author argues that the civilization sent out billions of these devices to
every star using solar sail technology. Kind of like if we sent out billions
of Voyager 1s deliberately to every star for them to be discovered upon
arrival.

They have our understanding of physics but seemingly way more ability to mass
produce and launch these items into interstellar space in specific ways for
stars to collide with them.

Or it's a 2 billion year old sandblasted rock that caught some weird gravity
assists :)

