Statistically, there almost certainly are aliens. Now, whether they are intelligent, and whether the intelligent ones have sufficient technologies to communicate with us, yeah, that is a question. Fermi, anyone?
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It would have been a hoot if theyd just gone ahead and named it “Rama”… though on second thought, people are so credulous, maybe not so funny.
What I’m really curious about, is whether humans have the tech to have flown a camera past the thing, and how much warning we’d have needed to launch such a thing in time.
(Or how crazy-lucky we’d have had to be, to have had something already in the vicinity to take a snapshot)
For all we know, these things swing through every 50 years like clockwork!
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Months, at least. Considering how fast it was perhaps even years, it would need a gravitational slingshot or two.
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Yeah, it was basically here and gone in 3 days, right?
Not quite that quick, but we did not even notice it until it was outbound.
It was visible for a total of 34 days… but that started after it had already passed the sun. We quite literally didn’t see it coming, only going.
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Space poop is real, my homies.
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Galactus dookie!
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You get a golden star for that one.
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It was clearly a probe or surveillance device checking up on the orange-hued humunculous they installed in the White House.
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Maybe aliens invented cigar sharing. Sort of interstellar Uber.
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The other half of their media extensively displays their mating rituals and the act of procreation. Obviously they’re afraid to forget how to… Do it.
I’ve apparently stumbled into Coast to Coast AM hour on boingboing…
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To function as a solar sail it has to have a high albedo, a large surface area in relation to its mass, and be able to point its reflective surfaces at the sun. Put together, these factors suggest it is artificial.
Moties would have been heading directly into the sun.
Of course. The Ramans do everything in threes.
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Calm down. They’re just making a delivery.
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Those are some damn peculiar sensor readings. The albedo changes made it seem to be tumbling. But the apparent acceleration doubled its velocity. I wouldn’t have expected a well functioning solar sail to be that efficient, but then, who can say how accurate those velocity changes could be, in any case?
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The paper says it was wandering along at 26 km/s, about 1/10,000th the speed of light. Nobody has thought to mention where it was coming from, that is, back along that flightpath, how far is it to the nearest star? If, as is likely in most directions, it’s some tens of light years, then it was over 100,000 years in transit from the last possible matter of any kind.
That’s one patient bunch of aliens. Most would try to get a probe up to some hundreds or thousands of kilometres per second, in hopes of data coming back in a mere few thousand years.
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Non sequitur … I am unable to derive meaning from your statement.
I was waiting for Plait’s take: https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/is-oumuamua-an-interstellar-spaceship-im-still-going-with-no
