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Comment by eightails | Hacker News Reader

How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion. This was the first object of its kind and we had very limited observations of it. From what I've read, none of the hypotheses regarding the measured acceleration (e.g. outgassing vs manufactured solar sail) can really be backed up in any substantial way. So it seems disengenuous to get into vitriolic arguments about it.

We just have to keep watching, more thoroughly and with better equipment.

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> How hard is it for people to just admit that we probably have inadequate evidence to reach a solid conclusion.

Evidence indicates: extremely hard. People are extremely uncomfortable with ambiguity and uncertainty. In a variety of circumstances, ranging from the storms another commenter mentioned to your favorite political issue, people will happily make stuff up and believe it rather than accept uncertainty. From a certain perspective it's hard to fault this instinct, since true certainty is almost never possible but we still have to make decisions in finite timeframes. If you're careful, you can probably catch yourself doing the same thing.

Well, no, the arguments are still important whether or not we can reach a definitive conclusion, because they inform what "keep watching" means. If there is a stronger consensus that it's an outgassing comet, then money/time/resources will be invested in looking for evidence of that. Likewise, of the consensus is that it's a probe, those same resources will be invested differently.

This is actually Avi's argument for considering the probe hypothesis. He's not trying to prove it was a probe, he's making a case for investing resources into experiments that could detect probes and industrialized alien civilizations, as opposed to detecting new classes of comets.

That the object could have outgassed 10% of its mass while exiting the solar system and produced a steady acceleration with no detectable change to its orbital period stretches all believability. However, I've seen similar bullshit pass as explaining such cases consistently in this field, and if anyone doubts it or makes an issue about it for too long, they get the old peer pressure applied to get them in line, or end their career. I think that is part of where the vitrol comes from. People don't like being silenced or losing their respectability because someone waved their hands a lot and said they explained something.

The reason we have inadequate evidence is the relatively low priority of SETI compared to other science.

SETI has literally been living off financial scraps for decades. If a couple of billionaires hadn't funded efforts with very generous personal donations there would be almost no SETI at all.

And if SETI had been funded properly - which would still be a drop in the ocean compared to other government spending, nationally and internationally - we'd have more observations to draw on from other sources.

This is all quite strange considering how much of a game changer and scientific motivator evidence of ETI would be.

> This is all quite strange considering how much of a game changer and scientific motivator evidence of ETI would be.

All conspiracy theories aside, there is an argument to be made that something with the potential to completely undo the status quo would, in a less-than-ideal world, have a hard time finding funding from those at the top of the totem pole of power.

>This is all quite strange considering how much of a game changer and scientific motivator evidence of ETI would be.

Well not only a motivator in an inspirational sense but if we can actually get our hands on ET debris who knows what technical leaps we might achieve by attempting to reverse engineer it/parts of it.

It could be that the government knows ETs exist, so it is pretty much of a moot point to spend money on searching for them.

Twenty years ago, I'd have been more willing to agree with that. I could see the US Gov't as some sort of sinister, hyper-competent (and even malevolent?) force that could definitely keep a secret like that forever from us, and "disappear" those that get too nosy.

Now? Not so much. Looking at who our "representatives" are - failed football coaches, regular conspiracy nuts - there's no way in hell that this "knowledge" would remain locked away for years, decades. Not with clowns like these in charge.

I think it's precisely because we don't know that people have such strong opinions. People get to fill in what they want to believe, then argue a point that can never really be proven wrong or right.

Yea.. saying "I don't know" is extremely powerful and important but it doesn't seem to be said enough.

Exactly. And in the face of ambiguity, the payoff for having a strong opinion can be fairly high because you cannot be proven wrong.

Early mankind did not understand storms and thunder and invented gods to explain the phenomenon. We still have phenomenon we cannot explain but ruled out gods. So now alternatively we like extraterrestrial life for explanations :)

I don't think it's quite the same. We know there are things we don't know from continuous discoveries of things we didn't know before.

From my perspective I want aliens to exist, if for no other reason than to resolve the Fermi paradox: one less unknown. Existence if true is easier to prove than non-existence if true.

I think some of the vitriol comes around the discussion of whether or not we should develop a mission to go visit it.

The conspiracy theorist in my wants to believe that if the military thought it could be from an alien civilization they already have a mission to reach it and would do what they can to prevent any sort of public mission from reaching it.

By this logic, the military would have started vaccinating their troops for COVID by March 2020.

How is that in any way related?

Both imply that the military has scientific knowledge that the bulk of public research does not. (about events that are not directly caused by them)

It’s pretty well documented that intelligence agencies new about the novel coronavirus very early on, and we know the vaccines were completed very rapidly after the genomic information was published — so this argument is sort of off. The US appears to have had reasons for not rushing to vaccinate its military. China, by contrast, made the decision to vaccinate their troops a lot earlier.

In other words the military clearly does have early eyes on all sorts of situations - and their action or inaction on that info is a separate consideration.

There’s no chance of catching Oumuamua. It’s leaving the solar system at 26 km/s and it has a 3 year head start.

Today no. It's clearly possible but it's probably a 50 year objective between technology development and mission operations.

Good luck finding a 200-m object at 273 AU.

There are mission profiles that could manage a flyby on a multi-decade timeline.

That's simply not practically possible. It's just going too fast. We would either have to build a really stupendously big rocket, or develop propulsion that is dramatically more efficient than anything ever done before.

That's the point. If we received some kind of undeniable evidence that it was alien technology we would have three parallel 'Contact' level operations underway to go get it.

As a mystery object we might finally get someone to develop a mission based on a science objective once some of the technology has been sufficiently developed.

Or launch a cubesat on top of a Falcon Heavy with a Vulcan Centaur kick stage and a Jupiter gravity assist.

I haven't seen anyone in the scientific community actually push for this. I'm not sure it is even what Avi Loeb is pushing for.

Of course we need to keep watching.

But at the same time why shouldn't we continue trying to understand what oumuamua is based on everything we know?

I don't think your statement and the person you responded to necessarily conflict.

>> to understand what oumuamua is based on everything we know?

Sure, but one should not make big decisions on so few data points. The data shows it as accelerating. Ok. I'm still not willing to say "alien civilizations exist and are using light sails" based on a handful of observations of a single object. One should hold off such monumental determinations until one has profound data available. So once any discussion moves from "it was accelerating" to "aliens are real", many serious scientists will just walk away. They will come back once there is a more appropriate data set for such discussions.

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