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Have Aliens Found Us? A Harvard Astronomer on the Mysterious Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua (newyorker.com)
On October 19, 2017, astronomers at the University of Hawaii spotted a strange object travelling through our solar system, which they later described as "a red and extremely elongated asteroid." It was the first interstellar object to be detected within our solar system; the scientists named it 'Oumuamua, the Hawaiian word for a scout or messenger. 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." 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.
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. 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.
[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.
Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.
Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker has interviewed Loeb, who was frustrated that scientists saw 'Oumuamua too late in its journey to photograph the object. "My motivation for writing the paper is to alert the community to pay a lot more attention to the next visitor," he told Chotiner. An excerpt from the interview: The New Yorker: Your explanation of why 'Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
Loeb: There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about 'Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn't expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of 'Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. 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.
[...]The New Yorker: Hold on. "'Not where is the lack of evidence so that I can fit in any hypothesis that I like?' " [Bailer-Jones, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, in Heidelberg, Germany, has identified four possible home stars for 'Oumuamua, and was asked to respond to Loeb's light-sail theory by NBC.]
Loeb: Well, it's exactly the approach that I took. I approached this with a scientific mind, like I approach any other problem in astronomy or science that I work on. The point is that we follow the evidence, and the evidence in this particular case is that there are six peculiar facts. And one of these facts is that it deviated from an orbit shaped by gravity while not showing any of the telltale signs of cometary outgassing activity. So we don't see the gas around it, we don't see the cometary tail. It has an extreme shape that we have never seen before in either asteroids or comets. We know that we couldn't detect any heat from it and that it's much more shiny, by a factor of ten, than a typical asteroid or comet. All of these are facts. I am following the facts.
Last year, I wrote a paper about cosmology where there was an unusual result, which showed that perhaps the gas in the universe was much colder than we expected. And so we postulated that maybe dark matter has some property that makes the gas cooler. And nobody cares, nobody is worried about it, no one says it is not science. Everyone says that is mainstream -- to consider dark matter, a substance we have never seen. That's completely fine. It doesn't bother anyone. But when you mention the possibility that there could be equipment out there that is coming from another civilization -- which, to my mind, is much less speculative, because we have already sent things into space -- then that is regarded as unscientific. But we didn't just invent this thing out of thin air. The reason we were driven to put in that sentence was because of the evidence, because of the facts. If someone else has a better explanation, they should write a paper about it rather than just saying what you said.
It's never aliens, until it is.
Perhaps. Perhaps not... Maybe this civilization takes a long view. The probe could have been sent thousands, or even millions of years ago, at some fraction of C.
Of course when you think about the fact that less than 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something you had to draw it, it's hard to pontificate on what a civilization tens of thousands of years ahead of us could accomplish
that people don't want to just agree this was aliens. I'm all for it being aliens. In fact I hope it was and they either invade (soon please) or just come and visit. We need some crazy shit to shake things up here on Earth. But with our very limited knowledge of the universe this might just be a common type of asteroid or something we've not encountered before.
Maybe this civilization takes a long view.
So they have not invented Quarterly Results and Agile? That IS advanced.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
Not to mention 10,000 years isn't really even the metric to be using. We have been watching the skies now with advanced instruments longer than 4 light years. If there was alien activity on the scale required to launch a giant probe like this in one of nearest neighboring systems you also have to factor in the probability that we will have failed to observer any other indications of advanced life there, through radiation etc.
Either we are talking about some pretty stealthy aliens, which raises the question how come the prove isn't stealth too, or if it is an alien probe it came from some place much further away.
Assuming it came from further away, it would have to be (I suspect) an order of magnitude older still; which makes it even less likely some alien culture sent it.
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The opposite of science is believe. You can believe all you want, but to know something objectively you need science. Science is the method to develop hypotheses, try to falsify it, and improve your theories. What we know is the potential weight of the object, the shape -- well only very, very roughly -- all the drawings are artistic, so it looks most likely differently. Therefore, science concluded that it is an extra solar object, which is most likely not artificial. We do not know enough to come to another conclusion. We can believe of course that it is something else, but that is believe and speculation.
I'm currently reading Rendezvous with Rama so it definitely must be aliens.
How did you make the leap of logic that if it was sent, it must have been sent at a point in time requiring a significant speed to reach us at the time we observed it? Is it not plausible that a civilization sent one or perhaps many probes to nearby stars in the distant past in an effort to gain local observational data? The fact that we were here and had the technology to witness it could be complete coincidence.
I've listened to Dr. Loeb a few times; he's the real deal, publishing much well-regarded scientific work that isn't remotely sensational or controversial. All he's saying here is that so far, alien technology cannot be ruled out and that more mundane models to explain all of our observations have yet to be identified or seem less likely than alien technology.
Aliens should never be the first thing people run to when facing the unexplained, but it also should not be dismissively ruled out either; unless you are one of those people that deeply want to believe we are all alone in the universe. I would say this falls into the "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." category, and as the data on Oumuamua is sifted through, there is mounting evidence that it appears to have been designed. However, it also entirely possible that more data will come forward pushing the needle back toward the mundane, and that's fine too.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Clearly, you believe in science. :-D
How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away. Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Laws of physics suggests "no". You haven't "seen anything like it before" because we have barely "seen" anything.
Wait, why do you think it is hard to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light? Even a constant acceleration of just 1g would get you to relativistic speeds during interstellar travel. In fact, if we put a significant part of our money/resources on it, the tech to visit a star 4ly away at a reasonable time-frame is within reach (e.g. nuclear pulse propulsion). But to actually have a serious chance of finding the right star system, AT THE RIGHT TIME to come upon an alien civilization would probably require us to visit at least a few hundred thousand stars (still nothing compared to just our own galaxy), so that would take pretty much "forever" (in human time scale terms) even at relativistic speeds (well, OK, Von Neumann probes would be faster, but still...).
And this object wasn't even fast (0.008%c or something like that). There don't have to be aliens to explain interstellar objects just because we don't get to see them all the time. Just a rock passing by...
Of course it could always be a moon with an alien starbase propelled by a nuclear storage accident...
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To explain the world we have either 1) Science; 2) Solipsism; or 3) Magic. Choose your poison, or some combination of all three. According to my senses and IPU (Information Processing Unit, i.e. brain), hard science has a pretty good track record at explaining the mechanisms of observed phenomena.
One problem is that advocates can pervert the umbrella of science to peddle "advocacy science" or "junk science", where studies based on statistical analysis, improperly used, can yield spurious correlations to support a [social | legal | political | economic | scientific] position. Like the growing sugar revelations, which could be flat out lying for money.
All those probes that we send to planets should be designed with a longer operational life.
Yup, that's actually already the case. How do you think the mars rovers managed to stay so long in operation ?
Engineer plan for the worse, put as wide margin as possible, and try to manage to meet the primary mission even in the case of giant string of unluck and problems.
(Everything redundant, and other such backups - well within the limits of weight of what the launcher can put into orbit up there, of course).
Often, mission gets lucky, there's no catastrophic event happening and the probe turns out to be useful for much longer than initially planned (there are still at least 1 backup/redundant part working even after the end of the primary mission.
When the primary mission is over they start a secondary mission:
That's already the case : as long as it's still miraculously working, keep using it!
See: New Horizon's recent flyby of Ultima Thule, and the pictures of it that the probe will be uploading to Earth over the next couple of years. (Interplanetary bandwidth sucks...)
The existence of that object wasn't even known back when the mission was planned, but once it turned out that New Horizon successfully completed its primary mission (Pluto) and still had enough functional systems to continue, it turned out the contact binary (that was discovered a couple of years ago) was a perfect target that happened to be within reach of the probe.
long term observation which includes special unexpected things like oumouamua
Planning specifically for extra planetary things like 'oumuamua is asinine :
- You can't *plan* for *unexpected* object. See Ultima Thule above, it's wasn't even known until recently. You usually have a more opportunistic approach: given the remaining capability of the probe at the end of its primary mission, what are the possibility that present themselves ? Are there targets that are on the trajectory of the probe (baring some micro correction that could still be achieved with whatever left-over capability is available) ? :
What you're basically asking is aiming a probe 15 years in advance at some empty spot, and hope that 11 years later an unexpected extra solar object will suddenly pop-up and luckily happen to go through said empty spot at the exact right time....
and speaking of time
- Space is extremely vast and mostly empty (on a human scale. Of course on the grand scale of a galaxy we're still a pretty busy sector). You might be launching thousands to hundreds of thousands (*) of probes before another such extra solar visit even happen. ...and the probes that happen to be space borne at the moment might be at the wrong place, which leads to :
- Extra solar objects are weird (simply because they didn't form together with our solar system, by definition) and thus will have completely weird trajectory not even in the same rotational direction and not in the same plan to begin with (See 3d tracing of the path 'oumuamua. It's almost perpendicular to the plan of our solar system).
Also, changing trajectory costs big amount of energy and fuel/mass, which in turn is heavy and would require even more prohibitively powerful rockets to launch. To be launchable with currently existing rocket technology, probes end up limited to only small corrections/burns (and use free gravity assistance as much as possible), they can only change trajectory slightly.
Life isn't like in a video game where space ship can jump hyperspace portals all-over the place.
Thus, there wouldn't be a practical way to ask a probe to veer completely of course and head for a completely different and unusual spot where a recently spotted extra solar object is expected to show up.
With the current state of tech (only relatively short distance at which we can sport interesting targets, limited range of probes, etc.) we can't do much for ob
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Are they suggesting some civilization managed to build a probe that can travel at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light?
That's not what he's saying at all. He's saying the objects motion is statistically unlike anything else in our part of the Milky Way. It's essentially stationary with respect to the rest of the galaxy. A large amount of energy would be needed to achieve that relative velocity. He also notes that it has several characteristics, including acceleration, that are similar to current solar sail technology. It's a statistical anomaly.
I may have missed something, but he also doesn't mention it being uses specifically to study Earth. His hypothesis is that its use is to mark a specific reference point in the galaxy. Our solar system passed by it, not the other way around.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
> The opposite of science is believe.
*Facepalm*
The opposite of Belief (Faith) is Gnosis (experiential Knowledge) -- in contradistinction to intellectual knowledge.
The opposite of Science (process of removing falsehood) is Intuition (process of adding truth)