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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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