What's really fascinating about Oumuamua is that experts have no fucking idea what it is. It's the first confirmed object to have entered our solar system from another solar system, and the jury...
What's really fascinating about Oumuamua is that experts have no fucking idea what it is. It's the first confirmed object to have entered our solar system from another solar system, and the jury is out on what it is. It's been a comet, an asteroid, a planetary fragment, just a big rock, maybe a light sail... Nobody can say for certain. I think that's exciting. We're not even sure where it came from, though we have a few candidates.
I hope we launch something to catch up with it someday to figure this one out. That's not a trivial exercise, but I'd love to see it done.
Even cooler than that, it's possible, even likely, that we'll never know. Not knowing is a key part of science. It's the first step in the scientific method. Maybe, hundreds or thousands of years...
Nobody can say for certain. I think that's exciting. We're not even sure where it came from, though we have a few candidates.
Even cooler than that, it's possible, even likely, that we'll never know.
Not knowing is a key part of science. It's the first step in the scientific method.
Maybe, hundreds or thousands of years from now, we'll meet extraterrestrial intelligence and ask "hey, so back in our year 2018, we saw this weird thing pass through our solar system" and it'll turn out it was their equivalent of a cargo ship heading from China to the US carrying iPhones and Happy Meal toys. Or maybe their equivalent of Elon Musk launching a car into space because lol fuck it.
Even if we did meet aliens, maybe they'll be stumped by it too. We might never know what 'Oumuamua was, and it's important for the process of science to be OK with not knowing. The best we can hope for is that another one passes through, and we have better instruments to examine it, and based on that start forming hypotheses that can be tested if a 3rd one appears.
What's really fascinating about Oumuamua is that experts have no fucking idea what it is. It's the first confirmed object to have entered our solar system from another solar system, and the jury is out on what it is. It's been a comet, an asteroid, a planetary fragment, just a big rock, maybe a light sail... Nobody can say for certain. I think that's exciting. We're not even sure where it came from, though we have a few candidates.
I hope we launch something to catch up with it someday to figure this one out. That's not a trivial exercise, but I'd love to see it done.
Even cooler than that, it's possible, even likely, that we'll never know.
Not knowing is a key part of science. It's the first step in the scientific method.
Maybe, hundreds or thousands of years from now, we'll meet extraterrestrial intelligence and ask "hey, so back in our year 2018, we saw this weird thing pass through our solar system" and it'll turn out it was their equivalent of a cargo ship heading from China to the US carrying iPhones and Happy Meal toys. Or maybe their equivalent of Elon Musk launching a car into space because lol fuck it.
Even if we did meet aliens, maybe they'll be stumped by it too. We might never know what 'Oumuamua was, and it's important for the process of science to be OK with not knowing. The best we can hope for is that another one passes through, and we have better instruments to examine it, and based on that start forming hypotheses that can be tested if a 3rd one appears.
Here's a pretty interesting article about this paper from last week: ‘Oumuamua, Thin Films and Lightsails
That website (Centauri Dreams) has such great in-depth reads. It's one of my regular reads on Feedly.