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Over the years, I have come to believe that the laws of physics cease to apply in only two places: singularities and Hollywood.
sometimes humanity needs a nudge.
If evidence of extraterrestrial life appeared in our solar system, would we notice?
as Galileo Galilei argued after looking through his telescope, evidence doesn’t care about approval.
The value of information doesn’t reside in the number of thumbs-ups it gets but in what we do with it.
I submit that the simplest explanation for these peculiarities is that the object was created by an intelligent civilization not of this Earth.
This is a hypothesis, of course—but
the object was traveling toward us from the direction of Vega, a star just twenty-five light-years away. It intercepted the orbital plane, within which all of the planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun, on September 6, 2017. But the object’s extreme hyperbolic trajectory guaranteed it would only visit, not stay.
We assigned the object several official designations, finally landing on one: 1I/2017 U1. But our planet’s scientific community and the public would come to know it simply as ‘Oumuamua—a Hawaiian name reflecting the geographical location of the telescope used to discover the object.
The Hawaiian word ‘oumuamua (pronounced “oh moo ah moo ah”) is loosely translated as “scout.” In its announcement of the object’s official designation, the International Astronomical Union defined ‘oumuamua slightly differently, as “a messenger from afar arriving first.” Either way, the name clearly implies that the object was the first of others to come.
Initially, the IAU had called it C/2017 U1; the C was for comet. Then it switched over to A/2017 U1; the A was for asteroid. Finally, the IAU declared it 1I/2017—the I stood for interstellar.
Our civilization has sent five man-made objects into interstellar space: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, and New Horizons. This fact alone is suggestive of our unlimited potential to venture far out.
In deliberation, there is the humility of uncertainty.
Sometimes, by near accident, something exceptionally rare and special crosses your path. Life turns on your seeing clearly what’s in front of you.
In addition to being small and oddly shaped, ‘Oumuamua was strangely luminous. Despite its diminutive size, as it passed the Sun and reflected the Sun’s light, ‘Oumuamua proved to be relatively bright, at least ten times more reflective than typical solar system asteroids or comets. If, as seems possible, ‘Oumuamua was a few times smaller than the upper limit of a few hundred yards that scientists presumed it to be, its reflectivity would approach unprecedented values—levels of brightness similar to a shiny metal.
of the way around the Sun, its trajectory deviated from what was expected based on the Sun’s gravitational force alone. There was no obvious explanation for why.
The universal laws of physics allow us to predict with certainty what a given object’s trajectory should be as it speeds around the Sun. But ‘Oumuamua didn’t behave as we expected.
There is yet another difficulty with the outgassing-comet hypothesis, regardless of whether ‘Oumuamua outgassed pure hydrogen or not. Its acceleration during deviation was smooth and steady.
Given so many worlds—fifty billion in our own galaxy!—with similar life-friendly conditions, it’s very likely that intelligent organisms have evolved elsewhere.
Some of the resistance to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence boils down to conservatism, which many scientists adopt in order to minimize the number of mistakes they make during their careers. This is the path of least resistance, and it works; scientists who preserve their images in this way receive more honors, more awards, and more funding. Sadly, this also increases the force of their echo effect, for the funding establishes ever bigger research groups that parrot the same ideas. This can snowball; echo chambers amplify conservatism of thought, wringing the native curiosity out
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Proxima b has a surface temperature comparable to that of the Earth, but because of its proximity to its faint host star, it is believed to be tidally locked, with permanent day and night sides. ESO
Given its deviation from its expected orbit and its other peculiarities, “might ‘Oumuamua have been an artificial engine?” Like my idea of eavesdropping on alien civilizations, it was just a passing thought. And I might have been content to let it stay that way if I could have gotten the StarChips out of my head.
the idea that ‘Oumuamua was a naturally occurring rock implies that the population of random interstellar objects is far greater than what we expect and what our own solar system predicts.
humans seem to be better at seeing the technological signature of alien civilizations after we have developed the technology ourselves.
the Drake equation,
N = R* × fp × ne × fl × fi × fc × L, where the terms are defined as: N: the number of species in our galaxy that possess the technology necessary for interstellar communication; R*: the rate of star formation in our galaxy; fp: the fraction of stars with planetary systems; ne: the number of planets in each system with environmental conditions amenable to life; fl: the fraction of planets on which life arises; fi: the fraction of planets on which intelligent life arises; fc: the fraction of intelligent life that develops sufficiently sophisticated technology to take part in interstellar
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Fermi raised a simple, provocative question: How do we explain the paradox that, given the vastness of the universe, the probability of extraterrestrial life seems high, yet there is no certain evidence for anything but terrestrial life? If life is common in the universe, he asked, “Where is everybody?”
In 1998, the economist Robin Hanson published an essay titled “The Great Filter—Are We Almost Past It?”
Perhaps the answer to Fermi’s paradox was, Hanson argued, that throughout the universe a civilization’s own technological advancement overwhelmingly predicts its destruction.
What if, in 1939 and over the course of the next decade, humanity had oriented itself toward space exploration and the discovery of extraterrestrial life rather than the vast extermination of life here on Earth?
We are greatly in need of a new branch of astronomy, what I have termed space archaeology. Similar to archaeologists who dig into the ground to learn about, say, Mayan society, astronomers must start searching for technological civilizations by digging into space.
It could well hold insights that nudge us in new scientific and cultural directions—and perhaps make our civilization one of the rare ones to outrun the great filter.
