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Astronomers race to study interstellar interloper

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125 points bikenaga | 2 comments | 11 Jul 25 15:43 UTC | HN request time: 0.964s | source
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rtkwe ◴[11 Jul 25 17:11 UTC] No.44534650[source]▶
On a similar vein there's Project Lyra which is a theoretical fly-by mission of ʻOumuamua or 2I/Borisov. The proposed trajectories to catch up are pretty crazy with my favorite being the 2030 launch for a 2052 fly-by that uses Jupiter and a close Sol 10 solar radii!) gravity assist to rocket out of the solar system [0].

It will be interesting to see if we've just been missing these extra solar objects. I have doubts we'll actually do a project Lyra style fly-by though. Funding is going the opposite direction and all.

[0] http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif and https://i4is.org/project-lyra-a-solar-oberth-at-10-solar-rad...

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jerf ◴[11 Jul 25 17:47 UTC] No.44535076[source]▶
I'd expect this is just the lamppost effect and we'll start seeing lots of these. It means there's no great need to chase any particular one of them, we can almost certainly wait until we're ready, then pick one that is convenient at the time.

It also means that "Oumuamua is an alien craft!" will almost certainly join in the ignoble legacy of "thinking the first instance of a new thing must be ALIENS" once we've detected hundreds of these (or more, depending on how sensitive we can get). You'd really think we'd be over this by now, but apparently not.

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__MatrixMan__ ◴[11 Jul 25 17:52 UTC] No.44535132[source]▶
If we ever stop being excited about the possibility that poorly understood phenomena are evidence of undiscovered intelligent life the we'll have lost a part of our humanity.
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pfdietz ◴[11 Jul 25 18:07 UTC] No.44535271[source]▶
That's just bullshit. The idea that undiscovered intelligent life is a plausible explanation for such things is just the triumph of numerically illiterate wishful thinking over rational thought.
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__MatrixMan__ ◴[11 Jul 25 18:51 UTC] No.44535695[source]▶
I'm not saying that it's a conclusion that we should jump to. Just that it's silly to expect people not to consider it first. It's more related to why we're looking up in the first place than any of its alternatives.
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1. pfdietz ◴[11 Jul 25 20:39 UTC] No.44536576[source]▶
It's so ridiculous that the only reason to expend a single keystroke on it is to demolish it.

Consider what the implication would be if these are ET spacecraft. The galaxy would be absolute soaked in ETI. The Fermi argument would then bite maximally: why did we even evolve, if the galaxy has been so saturated? Why wasn't every single planet and asteroid used for colonies and resources ages ago?

It's important to realize that science fictional tropes of galaxies with everyone zooming around in spaceships having adventures are not consistent with what we observe.

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2. __MatrixMan__ ◴[11 Jul 25 21:58 UTC] No.44537179[source]▶
What does the low probability have to do with it?

If you had asked Galileo's contemporaries about the probability that he'd find moons orbiting Jupiter, they'd have put it at zero, and they turned out to be wrong.

Einstein's work was also in flagrant disregard of the established scientific sensibilities of the time.

I can't speak for everybody, but the excitement that I get when I look through a telescope, or a microscope, or commune with any machine that can see something that I can't... it comes from the possibility that I'll see something impossible, something that invalidates the theories which previously governed what I'm likely to see. It's why we keep building better telescopes and bigger particle colliders--because we want to prove ourselves wrong.

It's fine to be a rationalist with an appreciation for existing theory, but it's not irrationality when others attempt to invalidate what you're protecting--thats where progress comes from. We wouldn't know as much as we do without the people who look for things that shouldn't be there on the basis of viewpoints outside of accepted theory.