And by high chance, I mean, relatively high chance. Like, maybe, about 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000. Which, for this sort of thing, is rather high.
‘Oumuamua is a very large cigar shaped thing moving at just over 300,000 kilometers per hour. It came from outside our solar system, and will travel right through our solar system. It is near Jupiter now.
The thing is, this cigar shape is odd. Space rock should be blob shaped. This is elongated, and I think it is moving along its long axis. This is exactly how one would design a space craft to travel between solar systems, if you were into that sort of thing.
If you read any of the books in this series
Possible scientists at the rich-person-ego-trip institute “Breakthrough Initiatives (we really do pay these rich people too much these days) are planning to make contact with the aliens. Here is a terrestrial press release outlining that project.
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Last said, IIRC, by Counselor Deanna Troi tp Mark Twain aboard the starship Enterprise.
This was the first thing that I wondered. What is the probability that an interstellar object, shaped thus, would travel along it’s long axis?
Maybe it hit something in its travels to push it into this orientation.
An intelligently piloted interstellar object would be elongated with its pointy end forward.
Obviously you need to travel that way in air, not in space between planets. But for the multi-thousand year journeys across the cosmos, you have to go back to the elongated “aerodynamic” model again because the rare bit of space dust you do run into will be travelling at one gazillion miles an hour.
Pilot ship for the Vogan Constructor Fleet?
Galactic version of the backyard football pass play “Go deep.”
Its all fun and games until somebody gets Acute Planetary Traumatic Encephalopathy.
Rendez-vous with Rama, at last.
Time to refresh my memories on prime numbers, and to train on low-G bicycle. That may come in handy.
Also, don’t try to dissect the alien servitor drones without grounding them first (no, not grinding. Grounding).
It’s not moving along its long axis. We only know its approximate shape because of the variations in brightness which result from the fact that it’s rotating around different axes, i.e. tumbling. This argues that it’s not a live starship. It could, however, be a dead one, or a discarded booster or fuel tank.
It may have gone into the tumbling mode in order to confuse us.
Please feel free to let us know when the ‘Oumuamuans issue their own press release 🙂
What David Evans said – I too thought it was tumbling, but it could be a ‘dead’ ship, I suppose. The shape is very odd.
If you wanted to conduct covert surveillance of a distant solar system, with the goal of determining whether a technical civilization existed there — and were very patient — one way to do it would be to send an apparently natural body with various sorts of sensors built into it through said system.
The probe could look like any old rock, which is to say having a generally lumpy roundness as opposed to an elongated shape, like a cigar. It would simply drift through the system, recording data on signals picked up, compositions of atmospheres, etc. Of course it would not emit any signals itself, nor do any maneuvering.
On the other hand, a roughly cigar-shaped body might be a calculated gamble, intended to draw closer inspection and thus obtain more data on the space-travel capabilities, if any, of the civilization. The risk would be that a ship might make actual contact with the probe, or at least get close enough to observe its artificial components. This could be mitigated by having the probe travel at high speed.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think Oumuamua is such a probe. Nothing I know of precludes a natural rock having its shape.
I think you’ve nailed it. It is clearly a probe.
Of course it could be a disc and is being seen edge on. TIC.
PBS now reports that it has an organic surface coating. Largest Galaxy/Mars Bar in the solar system?
All alien probes are elongated for obvious reasons. The only thing that scares me is the size of the thing the aliens are intending to probe…
Paraphrasing a passage on Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End:
“…from the Overlord’s description, Jan built up a picture of an enormous being living among the asteroid rubble of a distant solar system, depending for food on the range and resolving power of a single, giant eye… The Overlords had brought a full-sized whale from Earth, but they had drawn the line at this.”
Probiotic, maybe, even.
TNOOC Tongue now out of cheek, lick — lick.
It has come to my attention that the link above, to “any of the books in this series,” mysteriously sent readers to a DVD of Children of a Lesser God. Perhaps that applies here, I do not know.
What I meant was any of the books in THIS series
.
It must be the season for little green men:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-videos-pentagon-program-luis-elizondo/
If only they could cancel out the orange ones…