Object that passed by Earth *probably* came from Alien World, Harvard professor says

[KOUNTERPARTS]

SOURCE: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alien-e...CNM-00-10aac3a

Object that whizzed by Earth probably came from alien world, Harvard professor asserts


A Harvard University professor is making the case that we're probably not alone in the universe. Astronomer Avi Loeb's new book "Extraterrestrial" examines the 2017 flyby of a space object that he believes was truly out of this world.


"At first people thought, 'Well it must be a rock, just like the asteroids or comets that we have seen before within the solar system,'" Loeb told CBSN Boston's Paula Ebben. "But as they got more data on it, it looks very weird."

The cigar-shaped object seen by telescopes was dubbed "Oumuamua" – meaning "a messenger that reaches out from the distant past" in Hawaiian.

It was 10 times as long as it is wide and was traveling at speeds of 196,000 mph, researchers said at the time.

"It didn't look like a comet, yet it behaved some like something that has an extra push," Loeb said.

NASA confirmed that it's "the first object ever seen in our solar system that is known to have originated elsewhere," but said its origins are unknown.

His reasoning for aliens:

Loeb argues in his book that the object was probably debris from advanced alien technology – space junk from many light years away. It may have been a type of "light sail" propelled by sunlight, a technology that humans are currently developing for space exploration.

"It's possible that there is a lot of space junk out there or it is a probe," he said. "We don't know because we didn't collect enough data, enough evidence and I'm just alerting everyone to look for objects like that so that next time there is one coming by we will examine it more carefully."

Loeb said it's time for researchers to look for potential "messages in a bottle" like Oumuamua instead of just searching for radio signals as evidence of other civilizations.

He said his ideas aren't popular in the scientific community right now – talking about potential extraterrestrial intelligence is "out of the mainstream, and it should not be."

"We should be open minded and search for evidence rather than assume that everything we see in the sky must be rocks," he said.

For those who doubt the existence of aliens, Loeb says to consider the odds.

"We know that half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly the same distance from the star, so they can have liquid water on the surface – that's the chemistry of life," he said.

"That means that if you roll the dice billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy, we're probably not alone, and moreover, we're probably not the sharpest cookie in the jar, the smartest kid on the block."

So it is in his opinion that due to lack of sufficient evidence that proves it is aliens, instead, it is likely aliens. Do you agree that we shouldn't just pass off everything has "everything we see in the sky is rocks" or be more open minded?

[Doctor Amadeus]

SOURCE: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/alien-e...CNM-00-10aac3a.






His reasoning for aliens:





So it is in his opinion that due to lack of sufficient evidence that proves it is aliens, instead, it is likely aliens. Do you agree that we shouldn't just pass off everything has "everything we see in the sky is rocks" or be more open minded?

No because that’s not how science works. I mean it could be a giant fucking space unicorn.

Except it isn’t because we don’t know that or have any evidence it’s anything.

So it’s fine to say we do not know just as it’s fine to say it’s not aliens or space unicorns.

Because not knowing what it is in science does mean make shit up. Which is what happened here

[SavoirFaire]

Shit this thing sounds like a missile that just missed us. That’ll teach those aliens to round off when doing trajectory computations!

[PC2]

So it is in his opinion that due to lack of sufficient evidence that proves it is aliens, instead, it is likely aliens. Do you agree that we shouldn't just pass off everything has "everything we see in the sky is rocks" or be more open minded?

Of course we should be open-minded because it's possible that life and an advanced form of intelligence evolved on a different planet. However my problem with alien enthusiasts is that they often create conspiracy theories surrounding aliens where they try to explain every weird event on Earth as being a result of aliens secretly interfering with our society. Which it's really annoying when people make irrefutable claims and blame everything on an external entity instead of figuring out what is actually causing things to happen. Alien theories seem similar to religion in that sense.

[Kaleredar]

There's a detachment in reasoning here...

The assertions are thus:

1) The object came from outside our solar system. This is true.

2) The galaxy is very large and filled with billions of stars and planets, so the odds that life only exists on earth is very, very small. This is also, in essence, "true."

However, the leap in logic of "therefore, this random rock came from aliens" is completely unwarranted.

The only thing "strange" about it was its shape, and the fact that it seemed to accelerate as it left our solar system. I remember that Niel Degrasse Tyson, weighing in on the object, thought it was likely that it was a long string of individual rocky pieces that were loosely bound together by gravity and a common acceleration rather than a single needle-shaped rock, and that it accelerating seemingly under its own power could be explained by it having some icy components of its makeup which upon nearing the sun sublimated, thus causing a decrease in mass and therefore an increase in velocity.


Also, the "we need more data!" train has sailed on this particular object. It passed into our solar system and has exited it.

[Ripster42]

2) The galaxy is very large and filled with billions of stars and planets, so the odds that life only exists on earth is very, very small. This is also, in essence, "true."

We have absolutely no idea what the odds are. There is, quite literally, no second data point to generate a frequency count.

[Kaleredar]

We have absolutely no idea what the odds are. There is, quite literally, no second data point to generate a frequency count.

Sure, but the ingredients that formed life on earth make up the most common elements in the known universe. Even if we were to limit our concept of where life is able to form around a certain set of stars similar to our sun and on planets within a very specific distance from those stars (the "Goldilocks zone",) there are still hundreds of millions if not billions of planets that would fit that description.

But as I said, I don't believe that means that aliens sent this space rock or that aliens have ever visited earth.

[PC2]

However, the leap in logic of "therefore, this random rock came from aliens" is completely unwarranted.

The only thing "strange" about it was its shape, and the fact that it seemed to accelerate as it left our solar system. I remember that Niel Degrasse Tyson, weighing in on the object, thought it was likely that it was a long string of individual rocky pieces that were loosely bound together by gravity and a common acceleration rather than a single needle-shaped rock, and that it accelerating seemingly under its own power could be explained by it having some icy components of its makeup which upon nearing the sun sublimated, thus causing a decrease in mass and therefore an increase in velocity.

Exactly yeah, when it comes to explanations of evidence a good explanation will always be 'hard-to-vary' which means it has specific interlocking components and tightly knit details such that no one can easily come up with alternative explanations. A bad explanation will be easy-to-vary which means it's vague and people can easily come up with alternatives that account for the same thing.

[Ripster42]

Sure, but the ingredients that formed life on earth make up the most common elements in the known universe. Even if we were to limit our concept of where life is able to form around a certain set of stars similar to our sun and on planets within a very specific distance from those stars (the "Goldilocks zone",) there are still hundreds of millions if not billions of planets that would fit that description.

And we still have no idea about how often, given the right conditions, life actually arises. None. It very well might be only once in the entire universe. The data, at this points, is so scarce that it doesn't suggest anything. The drake equation sounds all nice, but the variables have no indicia as to what their values actually are.

[Kaleredar]

And we still have no idea about how often, given the right conditions, life actually arises. None. It very well might be only once in the entire universe. The data, at this points, is so scarce that it doesn't suggest anything. The drake equation sounds all nice, but the variables have no indicia as to what their values actually are.

I certainly err on the side of "what's to say it doesn't exist?"

We've no reason to believe that the sun or earth are "exceptional" in their makeup or positioning or that the elements that comprise them, the elements that lead to life forming, are "exceptional." We know that life can form under the circumstances that earth is under, because it obviously formed on earth, and we know that, statistically speaking, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of other planets that exist in our galaxy alone that also fit the exact same physical descriptors earth does.

With how common the elements that make life are in the universe (they are, in fact, THE most common elements in the universe, in order,) with how quickly life formed on earth, and then couple those with the age of the universe that is multiple times older than the existence of the sun or earth and the billions upon billions of planets in our galaxy alone, let alone billions of other galaxies that themselves hold hundreds of billions of planets each that exist in the universe, the odds that random chance would only produce life once out of the most common elements in the universe are far more staggering to me than... well, that not being the case, and that life only arose on one out of something like a hundred quintillion planets.

But again, let me make it clear. I don't believe that aliens have ever visited earth, either now or at any time in the past.

[Ripster42]

We've no reason to believe that the sun or earth are "exceptional" in their makeup or positioning or that the elements that comprise them, the elements that lead to life forming, are "exceptional." We know that life can form under the circumstances that earth is under, because it obviously formed on earth, and we know that, statistically speaking, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of other planets that exist in our galaxy alone that also fit the exact same physical descriptors earth does.

You've already said all this. Your argument is just an appeal to people's wonder. Using that as the basis for your argument, you asserted it was true:

2) The galaxy is very large and filled with billions of stars and planets, so the odds that life only exists on earth is very, very small. This is also, in essence, "true."

I'm telling you, we have absolutely no idea, as a factual matter, how common life is to the point that we have no idea if there's a second origin or not. We literally do not have the requisite data.

[Kaleredar]

You've already said all this. Your argument is just an appeal to people's wonder. Using that as the basis for your argument, you asserted it was true:



I'm telling you, we have absolutely no idea, as a factual matter, how common life is to the point that we have no idea if there's a second origin or not. We literally do not have the requisite data.

I don’t find any objections to life existing anywhere else in the universe particularly meritorious. That we don’t have direct evidence of it existing doesn’t mean we can’t extrapolate that it likely does.

We didn’t have any evidence of black holes existing for almost 200 years since their initial proposal as a theoretical phenomenon, and yet intensive and accurate predictions were made about their properties before a single black hole was ever observed. We can say that animals evolved from other animals with great confidence without finding every transitional fossil of every interim species. These aren’t “appeals to wonder,” they’re the dealing in realistic analysis of the universe as we understand it and forming predictions because of it.

You’re unlikely to find an astrophysicist or cosmological expert who thinks alien life in some form or another didn’t likely exist at some point in the history of the universe.

Claims that us “failing to find extraterrestrial life is proof that it doesn’t likely exist” after the almost inconsequential amount of searching we’ve done is the equivalent of scooping a cup of water out of the ocean and declaring that whales must not exist because it doesn’t contain any.

[For_The_Horde]

I mean, if we're going to go full blown UFOs and conspiracy here, might as well go all out.

https://earth.google.com/web/@-54.65...d,35y,0h,0t,0r

[Dezerte]

It's never aliens. ™

In addition to what others have mentioned it's also possible that it originated from the Oort Cloud, which is technically a part of our solar system.

On extraterrestrial life I think it's one thing to say it's highly likely to exist, have existed or that it will exist given the age of the universe, how quickly life arose on Earth, what it's made of and the sheer size of the universe. But to say that it exists, or that it has visited Earth is a completely different statement that would require evidence.

[Kaleredar]

I mean, if we're going to go full blown UFOs and conspiracy here, might as well go all out.

https://earth.google.com/web/@-54.65...d,35y,0h,0t,0r

...Or it's just a block of ice that rolled down a mountainside.

[Endus]

I certainly err on the side of "what's to say it doesn't exist?"

We've no reason to believe that the sun or earth are "exceptional" in their makeup or positioning or that the elements that comprise them, the elements that lead to life forming, are "exceptional." We know that life can form under the circumstances that earth is under, because it obviously formed on earth, and we know that, statistically speaking, there are hundreds of millions if not billions of other planets that exist in our galaxy alone that also fit the exact same physical descriptors earth does.

With how common the elements that make life are in the universe (they are, in fact, THE most common elements in the universe, in order,) with how quickly life formed on earth, and then couple those with the age of the universe that is multiple times older than the existence of the sun or earth and the billions upon billions of planets in our galaxy alone, let alone billions of other galaxies that themselves hold hundreds of billions of planets each that exist in the universe, the odds that random chance would only produce life once out of the most common elements in the universe are far more staggering to me than... well, that not being the case, and that life only arose on one out of something like a hundred quintillion planets.

But again, let me make it clear. I don't believe that aliens have ever visited earth, either now or at any time in the past.

It's way more complicated than this, though, and there is evidence that the Earth is, at least somewhat, exceptional.

The most obvious example is the Moon. It's too fuckin' big. Astrophysicists literally do not have a sufficient explanation for how the Earth and its Moon formed as a system. The best extant theory is that, unlike any other moon in the solar system, the Earth's Moon formed when the Earth was smashed into by another planetoid roughly the size of Mars in its earliest days, cleaving off a massive chunk of semi-molten rock that eventually settled and solidified into the Moon we know today. We've successfully disproven earlier theories that it may have calved off due to our spin in the earliest days of our planet forming, or that it was a captured object (Earth's mass just literally is not enough to capture something the size of the Moon, like that). Our moon ends up making the Earth system almost more of a dual planet system than a true planet-moon system, which shouldn't be that ridiculous an idea, given that the Moon is larger than Mercury.

https://astronomy.com/news/2019/06/w...ur-moon-anyway

Part of the "problem" with this theory is we have no idea what that planetoid that smashed into us was. Maybe it was a piece of interstellar debris like this asteroid in the article, just MUCH bigger. Maybe it was an actual planet we shared the Solar System with, but the impact destabilized its orbit and it fell into the Sun. The physics only works out if this is what happened, but we have little evidence of it, other than the relative size, density, and compositions of the Earth and Moon.

And the Moon has been critical in stabilizing the Earth in a way that supported life.

So, if something like the Moon is a necessity, that means you need;
1> A terrestrial-type planet, that
2> Has a rotating iron core that can generate a sufficient magnetic field to shield the planet from radiation, which
3> Gets hit by a smaller planetoid, but
4> Badly enough it cleaves off a massive enough chunk, but
5> Not badly enough to disrupt our orbit or cleave off enough to make it an unstable system, and
6> Also largely manages to miss most of that core and doesn't fatally disrupt the potential for a magnetic process in that core, and
7> This has to happen before life begins, because it's pretty obvious that it happening after is a big 'ole reset button.

Bear in mind this is all just to answer the "moon problem". Which isn't remotely the most complex part of the issue. And #2 up there is another element that is likely a big separation factor, one I mostly just skipped over because it's a separate issue, but included because it's relevant to the outcome here as well.

It's entirely possible we're utterly and completely unique in the entire Universe, without so much as a protozoa or bacteria anywhere else that doesn't have its origins here. It's not even that potentially unlikely.


All that said, I lost any interest in what this professor had to say when he claimed it might be part of a fuckin' light sail. Not because that's a crazy idea; light sails work. But light sails need massive surface-area-to-mass relationships; you're trying to make an object that gets pushed around by photons. Making one out of a thick chunk of rock is just . . . so completely stupid it would never happen.

[Logwyn]

Bear in mind this is all just to answer the "moon problem". Which isn't remotely the most complex part of the issue. And #2 up there is another element that is likely a big separation factor, one I mostly just skipped over because it's a separate issue, but included because it's relevant to the outcome here as well.

It's entirely possible we're utterly and completely unique in the entire Universe, without so much as a protozoa or bacteria anywhere else that doesn't have its origins here. It's not even that potentially unlikely.


All that said, I lost any interest in what this professor had to say when he claimed it might be part of a fuckin' light sail. Not because that's a crazy idea; light sails work. But light sails need massive surface-area-to-mass relationships; you're trying to make an object that gets pushed around by photons. Making one out of a thick chunk of rock is just . . . so completely stupid it would never happen.

Life on Earth is older than the magnetic field though I thought. Magnet field is 3.5 billion years ago.
Life is at least 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years or even 4.5 billion years — not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.

[Endus]

Life on Earth is older than the magnetic field though I thought. Magnet field is 3.5 billion years ago.
Life is at least 3.77 billion years ago, possibly as early as 4.28 billion years or even 4.5 billion years — not long after the oceans formed 4.41 billion years ago, and after the formation of the Earth 4.54 billion years ago.

We know the magnetic field was around at least 3.5 billion years ago, but we don't actually know if it was around before that.

Plus, there's apparently some super-recent evidence that may push that back to 4.2 billion years, that I was unaware of until Googling just now; https://www.livescience.com/australi...c-history.html

[Hellobolis]

Loeb argues in his book that the object was probably debris from advanced alien technology – space junk from many light years away. It may have been a type of "light sail" propelled by sunlight, a technology that humans are currently developing for space exploration.

i always love it when people do the "its super advanced alien technology, conveniently very similar to something we can imagine ourselves right now", when we can't even predict what direction technology will take 10 years from now.

For those who doubt the existence of aliens, Loeb says to consider the odds.

"We know that half of the sun-like stars have a planet the size of the Earth roughly the same distance from the star, so they can have liquid water on the surface – that's the chemistry of life," he said.

"That means that if you roll the dice billions of times in the Milky Way galaxy, we're probably not alone, and moreover, we're probably not the sharpest cookie in the jar, the smartest kid on the block."

yeah and then continue the math for the chances of two intelligent civilizations:
a) existing at the same time
b) both reaching space travel tech before going extinct.
c) being within nonFTL travel range of eachother before going extinct.
d) actually noticing eachother before going extinct.

odds are already really really low at this point despite the very high odds of multiple intelligent civilizations actually existing over reasonable galactic time periods and you are only at the extremely obvious extremely simple things to put on a filter list like that.

reminds me of this comic https://theoatmeal.com/comics/oracle

[Kaleredar]

It's way more complicated than this, though, and there is evidence that the Earth is, at least somewhat, exceptional.

The most obvious example is the Moon. It's too fuckin' big. Astrophysicists literally do not have a sufficient explanation for how the Earth and its Moon formed as a system. The best extant theory is that, unlike any other moon in the solar system, the Earth's Moon formed when the Earth was smashed into by another planetoid roughly the size of Mars in its earliest days, cleaving off a massive chunk of semi-molten rock that eventually settled and solidified into the Moon we know today. We've successfully disproven earlier theories that it may have calved off due to our spin in the earliest days of our planet forming, or that it was a captured object (Earth's mass just literally is not enough to capture something the size of the Moon, like that). Our moon ends up making the Earth system almost more of a dual planet system than a true planet-moon system, which shouldn't be that ridiculous an idea, given that the Moon is larger than Mercury.

https://astronomy.com/news/2019/06/w...ur-moon-anyway

Part of the "problem" with this theory is we have no idea what that planetoid that smashed into us was. Maybe it was a piece of interstellar debris like this asteroid in the article, just MUCH bigger. Maybe it was an actual planet we shared the Solar System with, but the impact destabilized its orbit and it fell into the Sun. The physics only works out if this is what happened, but we have little evidence of it, other than the relative size, density, and compositions of the Earth and Moon.

And the Moon has been critical in stabilizing the Earth in a way that supported life.

So, if something like the Moon is a necessity, that means you need;
1> A terrestrial-type planet, that
2> Has a rotating iron core that can generate a sufficient magnetic field to shield the planet from radiation, which
3> Gets hit by a smaller planetoid, but
4> Badly enough it cleaves off a massive enough chunk, but
5> Not badly enough to disrupt our orbit or cleave off enough to make it an unstable system, and
6> Also largely manages to miss most of that core and doesn't fatally disrupt the potential for a magnetic process in that core, and
7> This has to happen before life begins, because it's pretty obvious that it happening after is a big 'ole reset button.

Bear in mind this is all just to answer the "moon problem". Which isn't remotely the most complex part of the issue. And #2 up there is another element that is likely a big separation factor, one I mostly just skipped over because it's a separate issue, but included because it's relevant to the outcome here as well.

It's entirely possible we're utterly and completely unique in the entire Universe, without so much as a protozoa or bacteria anywhere else that doesn't have its origins here. It's not even that potentially unlikely.


All that said, I lost any interest in what this professor had to say when he claimed it might be part of a fuckin' light sail. Not because that's a crazy idea; light sails work. But light sails need massive surface-area-to-mass relationships; you're trying to make an object that gets pushed around by photons. Making one out of a thick chunk of rock is just . . . so completely stupid it would never happen.

But on that same token we have the otherwise "exceptional" planet of Uranus that spins on its side because it, too was likely impacted by an enormous celestial body (thought to be roughly the size of earth) that tilted it so heavily. It's also theorized that this impact in Uranus' history also helped create a number of its moons.

Pluto and Charon are tidally locked, and Charon is thought to have formed in a similar manner to how Earth's moon formed: an enormous impact event tearing off a chunk of Pluto's crust.

If these enormous planetary collisions can happen three times in the same solar system in a way that generates moons, literally out of a sample size of nine... (counting Pluto because it's relevant here) there's no reason that in the qunitillions of other planets in the universe that that couldn't have also happened many, many times.

And that, of course, presupposes that a tidally-locked moon in the exact same form as earth's moon is A-1 critical to life.