Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey are you welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind? My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and gather ye round because I am about to tell a tale of space. Ah well, let's do it of space and discovery. So on October nineteenth of this year, of a telescope on a mountain in Hawaii caught sight of something very strange passing through the sky.
The telescope was the pan STARS one, which stands for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System and it's part of the High Altitude Observatory on holliakla of Volcano on the island of Maui. Robert, have you been to Hawaii? I've never been. Yes, I have been once in the past and actually looking to go back this year. Can did you climb a volcano? I went into a volcano. I mean I went to Volcano National Park on the
Big Island, burned alive and it was reborn. Yeah. But yeah, so so picture yourself up on one of these, you know, Gravelly big craters, the Big Shield volcano. And so the pan stars program is a system of telescopes, cameras, computers that are designed to monitor the sky continuously for signs
of variable objects. Now, there might be new discoveries of near Earth asteroids or comets, or there might be like small minor moons of big planets like Jupiter Saturn that they discover, or they might be looking at other features of the sky that move or change over time. And on October nineteenth, pan Stars one caught a glimpse of something that was indeed moving incredibly fast. Immediately they enlisted the help of other observatories like E. S O S
very large telescope in Chile. And at first what the scientists thought they saw with a comet. Now, to remind you on basic Solar system geology, and asteroid is a small object made of primarily rock and metal, and a comet is a small object made primarily of dust and ice. And asteroids were generally formed closer to the Sun where volatile compounds like H two O would melt or evaporate, and comets were generally formed farther away from the Sun
where water would freeze. So they have this new object, they think it's probably a comet. And because they thought it was a comet. It got the designated designation see slash you one see for comet. So the scientists who discovered it enlisted the help of other of other telescopes and other scientists, and analysis revealed the path of the object,
and it was a truly unique one. Pretty Much everything in our Solar System orbits on a relatively flat plane, and that's because most of the stuff in the Solar System was formed out of the same original stellar accretion disk four and a half to five billion years ago. If you make a model of the movement of objects in the Solar System, the angle of their orbital tilt with respect to the reference plane of Earth's orbit is known as their orbital inclination. Now, most planets are within
just a few degrees of us. All the planets are relatively flat, except Pluto. Pluto is a good bit more tilted than the others, with an inclination of a little over seventeen degrees, so it's sort of tipped like a hat. But the inclination of this new object, discovered in October is off the charts. It is a hundred and twenty
three degrees according to the JPL data on it. That means if you were to look at a model of the Solar System lying flat on a table with all the orbits, you know, they're they're flat down on the surface. This thing would be approaching the system from above, not quite straight down, but close to it, sort of dive
bombing right through the middle of our galactic neighborhood. Now, you might normally see that kind of orbital inclination in long period comets originating in the Ort cloud, but not in planets or asteroids, whose orbits are generally pretty flat. So here's the thing to wonder. You're you're imagining this thing dive bombing down into the Solar System. Where did
it cross the plane right? Was it somewhere out near Jupiter? Nope, it was booking right past the Sun. This object pierced inside the orbit of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun, passing within twenty of the distance between the Sun and the Earth. So it was less than a quarter of one astronomical unit. And of course, when you pass that close to the Sun, the Sun's massive gravity, well really
takes a bite out of your trajectory. And so because they knew that this had happened, the scientists were able to construct a model of the object's path. Now, if you look at some of these maps of what the objects path looked like zoomed into the scale of the inner Solar System, it looks sort of like the object barrels past the Sun and then begins to bend in
its trajectory like a bow. But if you zoom way out to a map the scale of the orbit of Neptune, say, the trajectory suddenly looks instead like a giant letter V. It's straight down to the Sun, sharp turn, then straight back out of the Solar System, as if it's slingshotted off of the Sun. Yeah. Now, you might see other
comets with like largely eccentric orbits. You know, a comet has an eccentric orbit when it's not very circular, when it's like this crazy oval shape that comes really close to the Sun and then goes way far back out into space. Um. But you don't usually see this kind of shape. So so once you know how close it recently passed to the Sun, you should know something else about it. If it were a comet, you'd expect to see what commentary activity he would expect to see it
acting like a comet. The tail of the comet for instance. Exactly. Yeah, So a comet is made of volatile stuff. It's made of gas and dust and water, um, and so it's frozen into this dirty snowball, this chunk of ice. And when a comet gets close to the sun, it starts to warm up and thaw out. And for a comet, of course, warming up and thaw out in tails, the release of gas and dust, uh, the coma, you know, the cloud of this haze of dust and gas that
surrounds the comets nucleus. And then as you mentioned, the tails. Actually two types of tails can show up, the you know, the dust tail dragging behind the comet, and the gas or the ion tail being blown away from the Sun by the solar wind. So we've got this weird trajectory on this crazy commet. And they look for the commentary activity to look for the tail. They look for the coma, the gas, the dust, nothing. Astronomers didn't see any of it.
They found that it was pretty much completely inert with no dust or anything around it. So whatever it was, it was not made of ice and dust, and so it wasn't a comet. So instead they decided to reclassify this I think was about a week after the discovery or so, so this would still be like late oct over probably they reclassified it as an asteroid a slash you won. Now earlier we mentioned this thing was moving
really fast. How fast is that? Well, at its fastest, this would be when it was sling shotting right around the Sun at its parahelion on September nine of this year. So they were able to sort of like take what they knew about it and chart the back course that had come from. They didn't see it at this point, but they knew what it had done by modeling it. At this point, it was going a hundred and ninety six thousand miles per hour or eight seven point three
kilometers per second. That is pretty fast. And looking at this speed and at the angle of its trajectory compared to other objects like long period comets, you start to notice something different. Most objects that passed near the Sun bend around the Sun in this elliptical path, indicating they might go way back out into deep space and they might have this really great orbital eccentricity, but you give them long enough and they'll be back to pass around
the Sun again. They're locked in orbit this new object, no dice, no orbit. It came from deep space, bent around the gravity well of our Sun, and then left for deep space again, and it won't be coming back. What I'm reminded of are these videos that you see of streakers taking to a major sporting event, you know, where they just make a bee line onto the field and then they're almost immediately chased off the field or tackled.
In this case, the streaker was not tackled, but got in did this, put on their phenomenal show, and made a break from it. Yeah, it's perfect. It's a space streaker. Now, when you have an orbital path like this, or I guess it's not an orbital path, Normally an orbital path, you'd have some kind of elliptical pattern, but this is what's known as a hyperbolic trajectory. It forms a hyperbola, so it's not gonna loop back around. It just bends
around and then goes off on its own way. So scientists have realized that that makes this object totally unique in the history of astronomy. This is the first definite confirmed sighting of an interstellar object in our Solar System. It's from somewhere else and Thus, instead of being a slash you one and we'll get to a better name in a minute, it became one I seen you won I for interstellar. This object ripping through our Solar system came from deep interstellar space, and before that it almost
definitely came from another star. And we've never seen anything like this before. Now, of course, the important caveat here is is we have never seen it right. And then, of course we have to take into account the very small portion of time during which humans have been observing the cosmos with this degree of detail exactly right, And there might be other objects like this that have passed before us, even when we've had telescopes. We just didn't
catch them. Because this thing is very small and very far away and moving very fast, and the direction that it's moving very fast in is currently a retreat from Earth. So it came kind of close to us, and now it's going and in within some short amount of time
our telescopes won't be able to see it anymore. I think one of the amazing things about this story is that it's exciting on the astronomer astronomer level, Like like astronomers and scientists are excited about this, Uh, this ongoing study, and uh, outside commentators, um, the science media and beyond are also excited about it, but all for good reason, Like like, it's not some sort of like geeky level of astronomy excitement that one would need to be just
really in depth in the field to get. And it's not something that the journalists have to blow out of proportion in order to to to make extremely fascinating. Yeah, and it gets weirder. It's gonna get weirder. I think we should take a break and then when we come back we can discuss in what ways it gets weirder than Alright, we're back. So first the good news. We don't have to keep calling it the objects that we'll
probably use that a little bit. And we definitely don't have to keep calling it one I slash you one. It has a regular name now as the sort of regular Yes, yes, it is called Oma, which has a nice ring to it, and it feels comforting somehow, it's not frightening. We'll tell me about the name Robert, all right. So, oh, Muama is Hawaiian for something that is a quote scout or messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to us. Yeah, I've seen it translated occasionally as first Messenger. Yeah.
So this name was chosen in a consultation with Hawaiian language expert Cayu Kimura and Larry Kimura. Uh And in this uh word oh means reach out for and uh mua with the can mua placing emphasis means first in advance of, So it's like first first Reacher Outer. Now. The Pan Stars Discovery team chose the name, but they reportedly referred to it at first as Rama uh in a reference to the nineteen seventy three Arthur C. Clark science fiction novel Rendezvous with Rama, which I have still
yet to read. I think I have a paperback copy of it, but it's a It's a major science fiction classic I've only been trying to make a movie out of for years. I think um Morgan Freeman I believe was attached to it. But it's set in the thirties and concerns a fifty kilometer or thirty one miles cylindrical alien starship that enters earth solar system, and the fictional ship was in turn named for the Hindu god Rama, a major deity and central character in the Hindu epic.
The Ramayana. So already you can see what type of excitement was attached to this by the scientists. Yeah, well, I mean that's kind of ominous. So they're they're naming it after a spaceship. Surely that doesn't mean they actually thought it was a spaceship. Well that's that's the interesting thing because when you start looking at some of the characteristics of this object um, you can't help but begin to make those connections. Like you can try and fight
it off, you can. You can imagine a scientist saying, down, I don't think about as a spaceship. Don't don't get your hopes up, don't get don't get all riled up about this possibly being a spaceship. But when you start looking at the bullet points, you can't help but think this could be a spaceship, could be it. This is what you know. I kept feeling is like, we're responsible science communicators. It's not aliens, but it is kind of weird. Okay, so we will we'll talk about that more later. We
should discuss what the characteristics of Omama are. So before the discovery of Omama, astronomers knew about approximately seven and fifty thousand asteroids and comets in our Solar system, and as far as we can tell, every single one of those objects originated here in the local Solar system. This is the only object from anywhere else that we know
about that we've ever seen locally. So it provides us with this tremendous opportunity to learn about the geology of other star systems and what's out there in terms of interstellar objects. So this is the first one we've ever been able to see up close. Yeah, if it's not a and it's probably not a message, a literal messenger from another star system, it is figuratively a messager from
another star system. It is information from another star system, bringing us a very brief opportunity to catch a glimpse of what research potential is out there. So the scientists who discovered it and analyzed it, they published their findings in Nature in November. It was a paper called quote A Brief Visit from a red and extremely elongated interstellar Asteroid, and the research was led by Dr Karen Meach and astronomer at the University of Hawaii. So let's discuss some
of the facts we've learned so far about Omumua. First, the size, the object is very small. The authors of the Nature paper determined it has an average radius of just over a hundred meters. But so you're thinking radius a hundred meters. Okay, maybe it's a two hundred meter wide sphere, But the shape of the thing is not a sphere. The shape is one of the weirdest things
about it. You might wonder, how do you figure out the shape of something that's so small and so far away and traveling through space at lightning speed, Like, shouldn't it just be a blurry streak in the sky. That is true, that is sort of what it is if you see the direct images we've been able to capture of its just kind of a streak on a screen. But you can start to analyze what the shape of this object is like by looking at something called light
curve charts. Now, a light curve model is a graph that shows the intensity of light measured coming from an object over time, and by analyzing patterns of reflected light over time, scientists can start to figure out the shape and the and the rotation sation of an object like this. And what they discovered about this object about O Muamua is that it appears to have a roughly ten to one length to width and depth ratio. So imagine a roughly cylindrical or tube shaped object ten times longer than
it is wide. According to a NASA write up, I found it could be maybe about a quarter of a mile long, So that's up to about four hundred meters And if so, that would mean it's only about forty meters wide. So we have a long, slender space cigar redition color this this needle from another star. We should point out that this is not a normal shape for
space objects. We don't know other asteroids are not like this. Yeah, when you see the images that have been put out there of of of this particular object, the first thing that enters your mind is this is not something you see in uh in, in typical illustrations of the cosmos. I mean, it looks more like something you would see in a science fiction film. Yeah, exactly. So. Analysis reveals also in terms of its rotation, that it's what's known
as tumbling. This means it's rotating not around a principal axis, but just sort of spinning crazily around an irregular axis once every seven point three hours. Now, by looking at the spectrum of light coming off of the thing. They've been able to determine that this thing is going to have a deep red coloration on its surface, and this is similar to some objects in our Solar System that have seen heavy bombardment by cosmic rays. Looking at its trajectory,
I guess we should ask where's it going. It's already on its way back out of the Solar System, heading out from the Sun about at an angle of twenty degrees up off the orbital plane, so it's going away from the Sun and then up at an angle off of the orbital disk of all the planets, and this puts it on a heading for the Pegasus constellation. It passed the orbit of Mars at the beginning of November, and it's going to pass the orbit of Jupiter by
mayen and then saturned by early twenty nineteen. So once again it's booking. And this does present kind of a problem because like, what if we wanted to send a space mission out to meet it, you know, send a send a probe to go land on this thing. That's gonna be a real tough order. You'd have to put together some kind of propulsion system capable of achieving speeds unlike anything we've ever done before. You would need a real crack team of of scientists and explorers to to
tackle this kind of problem. Yeah, it would be really hard to catch this thing. Uh So, so it's heading out towards Pegasus and it's going really fast. The other side of that question is where did it come from. Scientists currently think that it's been flying through interstellar space for probably hundreds of millions of years before it entered our solar system. Uh And on its approach trajectory, it seems like it was coming from roughly the direction of
the large STARV Vega in the constellation Lira. But this doesn't mean it came from the Vegas system because this is one of the most disorienting things about space. So you've got to remember that our view of the night sky is moving, so from our perspective, something that came from Vega, say a few hundred thousand years ago, if if it would have been a hundred a few hundred thousand years ago where Vega is now, Vega wasn't there
at the time. So wait, are you saying that the age of the object would be in the hundred million year range or the hundred thousand year range. Well, we don't know for sure, but I've seen it speculated that it it has been drifting. It has existed and been drifting for maybe hundreds of millions of years, but that about three hundred thousand years ago, say it would have been about where Vega is, but about where Vega is now, about not where Vega was then. So ultimately we don't
really know its origin yet. But I just saw there is a paper out that's on on pre publication servers right now, so it's on archive dot org, a paper by Simon's vart at All that discusses three theories about where this object came from. So one of the theories is that it's actually a Kuiper Belt object, so something local.
But if you're you might be wondering, Okay, if it's local, why would it have this hyperbolic trajectory, And the idea there is that it would have had to have been accelerated to a hyperbolic velocity by some kind of large object. You got a gravity assist from like a dark hidden planet or something somewhere out there that made this thing go really fast, fast enough to escape the Solar System, some sort of local space collision that that beamed it
in not necessarily collision like that. If there if there's a dark, hidden massive plant somewhere, so it gets a gravity assist from this unknown object somewhere out there in the ort cloud or something like that, and through that gravity assist it gets enough momentum, it gets enough velocity that an escape the Solar System. They don't rate that as very likely. It looks very much like it actually
did come from another star system. Uh. They look at the theory that it originated from a nearby star called t y C four seven four to Dash one zero to seven dash one Yogurt system. They also rate this is very unlikely. So the most likely option is this. When a young star forms a protoplanetary disk, the matter in this disc gradually coalesces into planets and other smaller objects, and this is how our Solar System came to be about four and a half to five billion years ago.
This is how other stars came to be as well. But then things like other stars in a star cluster can disturb these disks and cause matter to come out of orbit, or gravitational resonances between young planets can fling
stuff out of orbit with great velocity. So mathematical models show that these disks frequently eject math is of rock and ice out from the systems as they're forming and send them flying into interstellar space, and that there are probably lots of lonely little asteroids like this floating out in the void between star systems, and the authors think that's probably what this rock is, unless it's something else entirely. And we'll get to those possibilities when we come back
from a break. All right, we're back and we're going to discuss another possibility here. And I and I and I know everyone already can guess what it is. Now. Of course, we know by this point if anybody discovers any kind of anomalous phenomenon whatsoever in space, the Daily Mail is going to run an article saying it's aliens. It's seriously, it's aliens. Also check out these Royal family beach bods. But it's aliens. Um. And you know, lots of publications like to do this. That it's aliens is
always going to get you clicks. Uh. And then or aliens, you know, just just put a question heavily implying it's aliens. Uh. Then you've got on the other side all of the actual space and science journalists who get really annoyed by this, like they're they're jaded from having to fill their careers by writing hundreds of It's not Aliens articles over and over, and they'll immediately get angry and say, it's not aliens. Now. Of course the latter camp is always right so far.
But let's say we reserve judgment and try to sort of marry the responsible skepticism of the scientists and the science journalists with the hopefulness and the open mindedness of maybe not the it's aliens community, but at least of SETI researchers. So it's time to ask this object, is it aliens? Yeah? Well, you know, we can't help but think about this for a number of reasons. Uh science science fiction has been preparing us for a mysterious alien
vessels to to show up for some time. Uh. You know, they could be curious visitors, advanced scouts in an invasion fleet, or simply a darrelict ship bearing extraterrestrial dead. But it is such a common plot point in our science fiction. It's even if we even knowing that that is fiction, that these are imagined scenarios, we can't help, but look for it when when an example like this comes around. I mean, it's the one thing about space that is
sure to get everybody's attention. You've got people who are into space, and they find space beautiful and interesting on its own characteristics, in the same way that geology might be interesting. You know that there's mystery out there even if there's not life. But generally everybody is going to get excited if you think there might be life out there.
And and that comes back around just to the fact that that life elsewhere in the universe is an open question, like there are You're gonna find hardliners on both sides that say, yes, there's definitely not only extraterrestrial life, but intelligent life and also I saw it yesterday, or you're going to you're gonna find people who are taking the hard line of there's there's probably nothing. We have no evidence to support the idea that there is, and there
probably is not, but it is an unanswered question. We ultimately cannot definitively say there are aliens or there are no aliens, at least in the broader sense. But when we have a situation like this, well then we can zero zero in on it. A little bit right, we can say, is this aliens? That's a very different question. It's a very different question, yes, and also a question. The answer to that question is not going to answer the larger question obviously either well well, well one answer
would if this is aliens, there definitely are aliens. But if it's not aliens, still might be aliens. That's there still might be aliens out there. This is just this just shows is how ready I am for it to not be aliens, because I do want to just continue to drive that home. This is almost certainly not aliens, but it never hurts to look Okay, So what are some of the obvious problems here? Um, first, there's the
problem with anybody showing up, period. So astro physicist Michael H. Hart he wrote He wrote about the matter in a book titled Interstellar Migration and the Human Experience. There's a collection of essays and he wrote one of them here, and he makes a number of points. Mostly he's talking about the possible existence of interstellar empuyers. Uh, both in the human sense could we build one? And then in
the sense are they out there? Because we can't help but think about that kind of like colonial expansion right, So he's going to be talking about the likelihood of like the physical arrival of alien objects of technology or beatings. Yeah. So he points out that first of all, we have to remember that space is huge. While technology has drastically reduced terrestrial travel to uh, you know, a matter of hours uh quote, there is no reasonable hope that future
technology will ever succeed in reducing interstellar travel time. Two months were simply attained in uh to this to this room via the confines of special relativity. Bearing some unforeseen breakthrough, we cannot beat a beam of light in a drag race. You see throughout the Star Wars movies that there is a jump to light speed and then it will get you there pretty fast. The sad truth is, we can't jump to light speed, but even if we could, it wouldn't be fast enough. So you've got mass, You're not
going to be going light speed anytime soon. But it doesn't matter because even if you could go light speed or of light speed, is still going to take you forever to get between stars. There's just so much space, that's right, heart. He says he started star travel would likely work out to at least a fifty year journey and that's that's a you know, a reasonable distance of the star. We're not talking about going to a far
flung uh star. And he says given the time frame, giving the distance, given the distance involved in the limits of travel, he figures it would take two million years of like determined colonization for a civilization to colonize the galaxy. Uh. Now, this is one of those areas where I don't even know if that's a low or or a high estimate. Well, I mean, would the things colonizing the galaxy by the end of that still be humans? Yeah, that's that's true.
I mean, ultimately could be just machines, right that have been created by organic life and become the species of movement. Uh. But he points out that this would have also been nothing like a human empire who consists of splintered civilizations to the tune of a few hundred billion to batch match the number of stars. Again, just that the distance would would play such a role in in the extent to which you could maintain order across any kind of
a large organization. So I assume in this model he is assuming some significantly faster travel than we have today, but all so not like light speed Yeah, he's saying that that we're still gonna even with advanced technology, we're gonna come up against hard limits. There. There are speed limits in place, and they prevent some of the models of interstellar civilization that we have dreamed up in the past.
One of the great questions that most sci fi fails to address about how to get quickly between stars is the question of deceleration. Yes, nobody ever thinks about how you need to stop when you get to a place, and if you're going it like I don't know, fifty percent of light speed or something, and you just hit the brakes and decided to suddenly stop. You you are maybe atoms still, but you're not a human. I mean, that doesn't work well. So you'd essentially have to accelerate
halfway and decelerate halfway. Yeah, and that's something you definitely encounter will a in more realistic science fiction, harder science fiction, but also in in proposals for how we might um go on longer space flights. We would have to spend half the time ramping up in half the time ramping down. If you don't want to liquefy, right, you throw on
the brakes too hard, you're going to you're gonna liquefy. Now, the inherent part of all this is that aliens would be bound by the same limits, though perhaps they're not limited in other ways that humans would be. Uh. They could of course be machines. They could have extremely long lifespans. I will say that I think if we ever were to detect make alien contact in our solar system, I
think it's unlikely. But I think it's far more likely that we would come across alien technology than aliens themselves as beings. I could see more likely the scenario where we receive an unscrewed probe, right, I mean, especially if we're basing it on how we have we are behaving in our exploration of space, it seems more likely that a machine would show up or their voyager arrives. Yeah, their voyager arrives, and it's not even a not even
representative of their current level of technology. You know, to what extent you can talk about current and the current state of technology and the now when you're dealing with these vast distances. Um, So maybe we should go on that model, Like if it is aliens, maybe it's not physically biologically aliens. Maybe it's alien technology. Yeah, exactly. So again he says he thinks it would take two billion years for a civilization to really expand and and and
reach this power, this level of galactic power. Uh. And two million years is certainly a drop in the bucket compared to the Milky Way galaxies ten billion your history. Uh. But it also means that other emergent life forms and other emergent civilizations would have the same odds. And nothing has seemingly expanded throughout the Milky Way Galaxy in the
previous two million year uh period of time. So Heart says, quote, we might reasonably infer that we are the first colonizing civilization in our galaxy, and for the moment, probably the only species within advanced technology. If this is so, it will be our descendants who are likely to colonize and populate the entire galaxy. Alright, So all this just tackles the question are there aliens? But again we're dealing with a much more specific situation. We're asking is this aliens?
Is this thing this elongated object, some alien spaceship or piece of alien technology? Yeah? Is it an artificial object? Be it a ship, be it a you know, like a monolith with carvings inside it or something you know, is it something that was sent here deliberately or accidentally? Well, I mean, I guess we should instead back up to say the question, to ask the question, is there any good reason to think it might be aliens other than
the fact that it's an interstellar anomalous phenomenon. Alright, we'll lead Billings of the science writer to discuss this a little bit in a Scientific American article that came out in the last few weeks. Because everything has pretty much come out in the last few weeks and it's still coming out regarding this story. So if it does turn out to be aliens, this episode is a total bust. We are in the odd position of rooting against aliens with a scenario simply because it means we'd have to
re record that episode. Wait, no, so what does Billings say about reasons people think it might actually be aliens? Well, he points to the to the quote collision minimizing form favored in many designs for theoretical interstellar probes. Okay, so the elongated form because we don't usually see that in naturally formed space objects, and because it mirrors a kind of spaceship design form that you would have if you wanted to minimize the chance of running into something in space.
You you might start to think, Okay, maybe that's sort of a tick in the column of could be artificial exactly. It's it's shaped like we might shape a ship or a probe for a similar purpose. And on top of that, it's pretty solid, as we discussed, possibly metal, making it perfect for surviving a long journey between stars. And additionally, we don't have much in the way of satisfactory theories about how an elongated object like this would have formed
or survived ejection from another solar system. Yeah, that is a good question. Now. On the other hand, he also points out that, Okay, it boasts an impressive spin rate, and I imagine some of you are thinking, oh, it's rotating, it's good artificialty, but he said, he argues that it's it's not really enough to produce meaningful artificial gravity. Yeah, because I think they said that it rotates every what
seven point three hours or something like that. Um, that's not super fast and it's not super huge, and generating artificial gravity either requires your your environment to be very large or to spin pretty fast. So there's nothing really we can significantly latch onto with that. Additionally, there's there's no sign of propulsion here. It's following an orbit shaped by the gravitational fourth of the Sun. That's not to say it can't be a ship, but that makes it
more of a sailboat than a speed boat. And also speaking of speed, experts apparently think that it's actually moving a bit slow for a probe. The reasoning here is that you'd likely want to be moving faster to cover more ground and that, but of course that also raises
a left questions about the presumed alien sense of time. Right, So you'd think if they're aliens, say this is like a voyager or some some kind of probe to send the aliens information about our solar system, you'd think they'd want the probes to be going really fast to their star systems to get the information back as soon as possible, because the people who made it might want something recognizable as their own children or grandchildren or something like that
to be able to get the information. And if it's going to take hundreds of thousands of years to travel between star systems, like, what's the point unless it's just a message in a bottle, and and it's it's not about hearing back from it. It's not about their lifespan. But again I'm I'm you can. You can make all sorts of different interpretations of it and sci fi it up and just the right way that it makes sense.
So I guess some people would say then that there might be a few kind of interesting little reasons to think, oh, maybe this could be artificial. But I think a lot of the skeptics are going to be saying, look, it's not aliens. Why would you waste your time bothering with this? Well, part of it comes down to the fact that we can't yet say definitively that it's not. Uh, It's like this is an open question. We're still trying to figure out what this thing is and it's not. We haven't
completely ruled it out. It's very unlikely, but we haven't completely ruled out the possibility that it is an artificial object. Is it one of those scenarios where the question is just so interesting that even if you're ninety nine point nine percent sure that the answer is no, you've got to ask anyway, just because it feels so titillating. Well, and we also have to ask because there are some steps that we can take to further investigate the possibility.
So it's not just one of those things where it could be aliens. So let's keep the dream alive. It's it's more like it could be aliens. Let's take the next logical steps to test that hypothesis out right, we can, we can check it out. So for instance, obvious ob an astrophysicist and Breakthrough advisor, that's the Breakthrough Listen initiative, which we'll get into a little more in a minute here. Okay Um and he's also an advisor at Harvard University,
pointed out the following to Scientific American quote. Perhaps the Aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecraft that freely fall into planetary system on a reconnaissance mission. In such a case, we might be able to intercept a communication signal between the different spacecraft. Oh I like that. I mean it makes me think of like the scene in the Empire Strikes Back where the ship's going through and launching the Imperial probe droids off in all these directions,
exactly same sort of scenario. And indeed, just because the things not trying to communicate with us, it could have some sort of communication that has to make back to the mothership. Well, in that case, let's put some radio telescopes on it. And I bet people are already doing that exactly, I mean, because that's that's what the folks at said he have been thinking to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so they think that it could be emitting or at
least lead radio waves. However, initial snooping via CETI institutes Allen telescope array turned up nothing. On Wednesday, December seventeen, the Breakthrough Listen project aimed at the West Virginia based on Green Bank Telescope at Omamua for ten hours of of observations in a wide range of radio frequencies. So was it aliens no nest? So they listened from three pm to ninety five pm Eastern Time. They scanned across four radio brands, spanning billions of individual channels across the
one to twelve gig hurts range. Over the course of a two hour observation of the object itself, they collected ninety terabytes of data raw data. Uh, and they're searching that data for signs of artificial signals. But despite some heavy computing power, this is still gonna take a little while to carry out. So as of this recording, there is currently no evidence of any narrow bandwidth signals in
the data that would suggest artificial nature to this object. So, whatever it is, it does not appear to be communicating via radio waves with anything else yet, unless something is happening right now that is changing all of that, in which case we will have to revisit putting out the episode to begin with. But we're we're making a safe
bet here. Now here's the Here's another interesting point on the topic of rarity made by Breakthrough Listens lead scientist Andrew Simon that underlines humanity sort of Babe in the Woods understanding of the cosmos. He says, this thing cannot be a rarity. I mean, well, the idea is if it were, if it were rare, we wouldn't be seeing it at all. Okay, Yeah, So, which is an interesting argument if if you think about the idea here is that it can't be a natural object that just happens
to fall in our laps. If there's one of these out there, there have to be more in the ideas that we just haven't each the point where are we're able to uh to see them, we just were not able to detect them yet and we don't have the technology. And is that technology comes online, we realize, oh, yeah, there are space cigars everywhere. Uh, this was just the first time that we saw one. Yeah, so I think that is uh, pretty much in line with what a
lot of these astronomers are thinking. Yeah, there are probably a lot more objects like this coming through the Solar system all the time. This is just the first time we caught one. It's kind of like the way I was thinking of it is, if say somebody does not know anything about Bollywood films, but they can name one Bollywood film, chances are that one Bollywood film they can name is a major title. It's like, you know, one
of the pillars of Bollywood. Like, what are the chances that the one film they can name is some super rare entry. You could use that with anything in pop culture, chances are if you can only think of one example of a type of thing in pop culture, it's one of the most widely replicated and talked about examples of that genre or category exactly. And so that's basically the scenario that's that that is probably taking place with this object.
That if we're seeing it, it cannot be rare unless, of course, it's an alienship, and that kind of changes everything. I mean, that is very characteristic of someone who thinks statistically about their experience of reality, and that is a mindset that I don't often go to myself, but I can respect. Now it makes me question and say, well, well, isn't it also true that if this is if this does turn out to be an alien spaceship, then alien spaceships are also common, and maybe this is just the
first time we're seeing one of these. I think that would be implied by that probabilistic argument. I mean, it's all based on the assumption you should make that your your life is not special and your experience is not unique. Yeah, I mean that's the the anthropic principle and a nutshell, the idea that we cannot we cannot look at the cosmos with with the notion that the human perspective is privileged, or that Earth is privileged in any way that you know,
defies just mere statistics. At the same time, you are all individually very special. I mean, really you have to feel special to to think about it. Just think of the fact that this story is happening right now? That that the the open question is there is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? Uh, that were this close
to to potentially getting a yes answer, but probably not. Well, I want to renew what I said earlier, which is that I think this object and the story of its discovery is fascinating, even if it's not aliens, which it's almost definitely not. Yeah, but it But it's kind of
like an unsolved murder, like suddenly there's a suspect. The suspect is almost certainly not the perpetrator, but the mere fact that there's a subject, that there's a suspect in the case is pretty phenomenal, even if they're gonna you know, walk the street and just you know, a few hours because their ALBI checks out. To be clear, this space object has not killed anyone, It's true, not yet. Now some of you are probably wondering, well, what what's going
to happen? Then, assuming that that looking at this object data was to present itself that that suggested some sort of an intelligence and at least an intelligent design to the thing, what would go down? Well? Uh, Simon provides a sort of step by step breakdown of how this would take place. So first of all, the signal would be detected or the signal would be decoded, like we would find data in the in the radio waves that tipped us off, all right, So the next step would
be too immediately re observed to confirm that signal. Okay, you want to make sure that it wasn't a fluke in the recording, right. Nobody wants to be the the scientists to immediately go on cable news and say we did it, we made contact with the aliens and we oh, we didn't actually check it though it was actually a TV satellite alright. So after this, if they once they confirmed the signal, next they will reach out to pre selected astronomers around the world to target the object with
other radio telescopes. And I think his his exact words were, we have a we have a rolodex just for this, so they have all the contexts ready to go, and then if that shakes out, then they're going to go public with what's happening. So there's not going to be this government conspiracy. Let's hide the nature of aliens from the people because they'll all freak out, uh and start buying bread and beer. Never really made a lot of sense to me. Well, I mean it would. It would
disrupt things. It would at least disrupt the news cycle for a little bit, you know, uh, it would. I mean, you know, it would change everything if if suddenly we had proof that there was alien life, it would I don't know that it would cause a collapse of civilization, but I don't think so. This would be This would be a good topic to discuss though, just sort of like like the preparations for like the cultural preparations for
the identification of extra stress real life. I think it would be one of the most I agree with that. I think it would be one of the most interesting discoveries in the history of humankind. But I don't know if it would actually disrupt life all that much unless they were like here and ready to wage war on us or something. Well, but that would be the next question, like why is it here? What is it doing? What are its intentions? Right? And that can lead to a
certain amount of paranoia. I guess so, but I don't know. I think if we just discovered a not overtly threatening alien, I think people would basically be really interested, but in the next day they need to go get the groceries. I think one of my big concerns here though, is is in some sort of a first contact scenario, like
how does communication go with this entity? You know, like certainly well, I think we've touched on this in the podcast before about the different individuals and organizations sort of uh that have been proposed as a first contact team
or or counsel. But right, you can certainly imagine scenarios were say leaders that exists to might want to be the first person to talk to the aliens, and maybe that would not be great, Like if they realize that Twitter is our primary mode of communication, and so the spaceship were to join Twitter, like it were to to acquire the omamua Twitter handle, and then anybody could tweet at it. Just think of the chaos, and it's just
an egg. It's just an interstellar egg. It probably would they wouldn't you know, They might not even have sight. It tries to figure out hashtags and fails, just keeps
hashtagging normal words, or it doesn't actually say anything. It just likes tweets, And then you have to wonder who doesn't say it it's likes or an endorsement of the idea or not, and so it basically means that we have just all the great minds of the world are just pouring over Twitter to try and figure out what it's Uh, it's ideology is based on its likes, and its ideology is it only likes the tweets of that
guy who played the kid on Star Trek the Next Generation? Yeaheah, Well that that would I think it would be an okay scenario. And then then Will has to step up and be the ambassador for Earth. I was trying to think, who else are those good like, well liked social media
power users. Well there, most of them are, really. I mean, he's even divisive depending on where you you stand, right, I can't think of a single like universally ld Twitter, uh individual, because Twitter, by his very nature is about hating and loving and equal measures. Right, we've gone way off topic here, but hey, but we've given everybody some food for thought here. Uh. Think this is a fascinating, ongoing story. And again we're really betting that it's not
alien life here, but it's still amazing to dream about. Yeah, the first messenger from another star. All right, Hey, in the meantime, when we're waiting for answers from our visitor here, be sure to hack out check out stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's what we'll find. All the podcast episodes will find, blog post videos, and links out to our various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram,
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