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Comment by Zigurd | Hacker News Reader

He was interviewed for the Kotke Ride Home podcast. He has a book coming out about Oumuamua. I will probably buy the book because Loeb is apparently brilliant. His evaluation of Oumuamua is very interesting.

BUT the data about Oumuamua is really really tiny. The science of interstellar objects is nascent. Other than to say "If it is a natural object it is super-strange" I am not sure what else there is to say.

In the interview he was articulating theories about it being a cosmic "buoy." So I am anticipating a couple chapters of solid science followed by a lot of speculation, even if it is highly informed speculation.

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The Washington Post has a review of the book: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/an-interstellar-accid...

Two excerpts from the review: "While this exotic explanation of the object serves as the backbone of the book, Loeb’s broader argument grows out of his bewilderment with the blowback to his hypothesis; he regards it as an omen of imaginative decay and anti-alien bias in the scientific community. ... While it’s tantalizing to imagine that ‘Oumuamua was our first brush with aliens, Loeb writes most memorably about collecting shells on the beach with his daughters, brainstorming trippy new studies with his many proteges and seeking comfort in the view of the night sky from our lonely planet."

His scientific perspective very much reminds me of early Einstein’s. Refreshingly idealistic and foolish.

My concern is that we aren't going to get much more than what was said in the articles already.

I think the beneficial outcome of all of this is that we can identify what to look for next time, and hopefully get funding to do that.

I also wonder if, as our tracking tech gets better, it would be relatively cheap to land a bunch of sensors on these and have them go on a ride somewhere in space for much cheaper than launching our own and trying to accelerate it to that velocity, even considering the costs of interception.

If you can intercept an interstellar object to land something on it you can by definition also just launch the thing to the same trajectory.

Unless your payload is advanced enough to use the mass of the object for something (fuel, radiation shielding, construction materials, etc.) there is not much benefit in landing on an interstellar object if you just want to launch an interstellar probe.

Maybe actually if you wanted to send a really long range message it could help to put it on an interstellar asteroid - much more likely someone would notice a huge mountain flying through their system than a piano sized piece of metal, even if both hold the same message.

If you had really good shock absorbers you could intercept at an orthogonal trajectory and have the impact knock you into the desired trajectory... not practical but fun to think about.

The ultimate egg-drop challenge.

I'm imagining some Vehicle Assembly Building-sized cloud of aerogel with a paperclip-size payload at the center.

The other argument is mass - most of the sensor could bury itself in the mass for safety.

Yes on trajectory, but no on same trajectory, with same mass. Of course, this might be a moot point, because other than hiding from some radiation and micro-scoping impacts, as well as leaching resources (which we aren't really advanced enough to do), there is no benefit.

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