Well… if it’s aliens, we will probably have to live forever with the disappointment that our solar system is not more to them than a gravity well in an Oberth maneuver.
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I’m on thin ice here, but isn’t the required reaction mass for a fixed delta v proportional to the total mass, as long as there are no significant drag forces?
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But then the paper effectively goes “…but this can be adequately described without any of that.”
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Surfboard of a herald of Galactus.
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what if the payload was , say , 3 kilos , and there was a kilo and a half of bus and ion engine , and , say , 15 keys of frozen gas as as reaction mass ??
So it deploys a lightsail, and decelerates that way.
(My initial thought was that a lightsail needed to decelerate a probe would be so huge as to be instantly visible from Earth, which kind of takes the ‘stealth’ aspect out of the mission. But the Breakthrough Starshot project proposes ‘bar of soap’-sized probes propelled by sails the size of “14 soccer fields”. Those sails are designed to accelerate a probe to about 20 PSOL; ‘oumuamua’s speed relative to us is far lower, so a smaller sail might be sufficient to brake a small probe enough to bring its velocity down below solar escape velocity, at which point it’s in the neighborhood to stay).
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I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again:
We are unable to locate extraterrestrials because they are delicious, and rightly fear our hunger.
PS, love that Terry Bisson story. Damn clever! Makes me smile every time I read it.
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…but there’s a chance it IS an alien probe, right? that’s what i’m hearing.
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Shouldn’t it have a flared end? They master space travel but can’t engineer a decent probe?
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Ah, but this just proves that a truly master Master Race can engineer a crappy space probe and still get outstanding results.
Something like the crappy medical care dished out by Doctor Benway in Naked Lunch:
Dr. Benway is operating in an auditorium filled with students: “Now, boys, you won’t see this operation performed very often and there’s a reason for that…. You see it has absolutely no medical value. No one knows what the purpose of it originally was or if it had a purpose at all. Personally I think it was a pure artistic creation from the beginning.
“Just as a bull fighter with his skill and knowledge extricates himself from danger he has himself invoked, so in this operation the surgeon deliberately endangers his patient, and then, with incredible speed and celerity, rescues him from death at the last possible split second…. Did any of you ever see Dr. Tetrazzini perform? I say perform advisedly because his operations were performances. He would start by throwing a scalpel across the room into the patient and then make his entrance like a ballet dancer. His speed was incredible: ‘I don’t give them time to die,’ he would say. Tumors put him in a frenzy of rage. ‘Fucking undisciplined cells!’ he would snarl, advancing on the tumor like a knife-fighter.”
A young man leaps down into the operating theatre and, whipping out a scalpel, advances on the patient.
DR. BENWAY: “An espontaneo! Stop him before he guts my patient!”
(Espontaneo is a bull-fighting term for a member of the audience who leaps down into the ring, pulls out a concealed cape and attempts a few passes with the bull before he is dragged out of the ring.)
The orderlies scuffle with the espontaneo, who is finally ejected from the hall. The anesthetist takes advantage of the confusion to pry a large gold filling from the patient’s mouth….
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Ohhhhhh. SPACE probe?
never mind.
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They do not know the shape of it, “cigar-shaped” is just BB’s improvisation.
Nope. From NASA:
“…new data reveal the interstellar interloper to be a rocky, cigar-shaped object with a somewhat reddish hue.”
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Ok, sorry.
i hope it’s not an alien probe - i don’t think something that large will fit in my butt!
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Was coming to say this.
I will add that I think in the Riddick Universe all the humanoid “alien” species are just descendants of humans that populated the galaxy. So the Furyans and Elementals for instance are in fact far future descendants of terrans.
At least that was how I always understood it (hence some ancient earth references and things like tea, golf balls, and can openers).
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Yeah I really want to see what we have. It sounds like it is mostly data. Doi you have a decent source of actual information on the object? Is it Nasa or ESA?
Statistically this object and its acceleration are almost certainly a natural phenomenon. But it’s unlikely that we’re alone in all of space and time, or even our galaxy. We may someday pick up broadcasts from civilizations probably long-dead by the time we get them, but our own radio signature is rapidly getting quieter as our communications technology progresses, so it would probably need to be a deliberate beacon. Finding litter from their own space programs drifting at cosmically insignificant speeds through the neighborhood is a pretty good secondary way to find out about them. Given its average velocity, if this is alien debris they’ve probably been dead and gone for millions of years.
So again, this is probably a rock. But there is interstellar space litter. We’ve put some of it out there and it will likely still be moseying along long after we and our civilization have been subducted into the mantle of the Earth.
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Yes. It was a very, very odd thing, the likes of which we have not as a species yet observed and recorded. It also absolutely could be an asteroid. But it was, indeed, anomalous.
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