Harvard professor says an alien visited in 2017 – and more are coming

> He and a colleague crunched the numbers and hypothesized that ‘Oumuamua was not actually cigar-shaped but possibly a disk less than a millimeter thick, with sail-like proportions that would account for its unusual acceleration as it moved away from the sun.

Just a q: I guess we didn't have the certainty about the object's shape that I assumed we did? It's pretty fascinating if we weren't even really certain that it was cigar-shaped, or at least if there was some wiggle room on the idea.

The other factors mentioned are also intriguing:

> It was at least “ten times more reflective than typical solar system [stony] asteroids or comets,” the author writes.

Huh. Fun to think about the possibilities. As for probabilities though, no idea there. After all, what we think is probable is basically anchored in our extremely short past as a tech-savvy human civilization, a temporal blip to say the least, on the chrono-spatiograph which is the wider universe.

It would have been amazing if we had something like Hayabusa2 at dispatch, could send it up there, catch better pictures and maybe a sample and return back to earth [1] . It „could be“ that it was alien waste but IMHO there are so many assumptions in that research that it‘s close to „everything is possible“.

[1] https://www.space.com/inside-hayabusa2-asteroid-sample-capsu...

Valid questions and arguments inside. Like the caveman parallel.

The article is just a rehash of the idea that the ‘Oumuamua is a solar sail by the same solar sail specialist that proposed the idea a few years ago.

Looks like Rupert Murdoch's little paper is having more circulation problems. What with Fox on the decline and all.