A Possible Link Between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena | Hacker News Reader

A Possible Link Between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena

scientificamerican.com

29 pointsthomas1132 comments

The "possible link" is that the author thinks 'Oumuamua might be aliens, and UAPs might be aliens, and therefore the two might be linked. That's it.

There, saved you a click.

This is quality "many people are saying" content.

Incredibly, the author is a professor at Harvard.

Would still be a worthy plotline in a Sci-Fi movie about Mankind being watched by ambivalently benevolent aliens who wish they could blend in and steer our evolution towards some unspecified lofty goal, except they’re stuck doing fly-by-wire inspections of military bases using their equivalent of quadcopters.

>Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that the U.S. government believes that some of these objects are not human in origin.

Huh??? How is that 'reasonable' to conclude.

>This leaves two possibilities: either UAP are natural terrestrial phenomena or they are extraterrestrial in origin.

Or a third option: Something else we aren't clever enough to think of. Maybe it's a sensor issue coupled with active human imagination. Or... something else entirely.

The specific claim is that if the US is acknowledging these objects publicly as real and denying they are of US origin, then it is likely they are not human in origin, because if they could possibly be adversaries, this would not be being disclosed.

This is sound reasoning, but is based upon the beginning assumptions which are not yet fully determined to be true, and if determined to be true would not rule out non-human, natural origins.

>The specific claim is that if the US is acknowledging these objects publicly as real

'Real' as in those are 'real' videos (i.e. not created in photoshop or after effects). Not 'real' as in 'advanced technology like nothing else on Earth'.

>then it is likely they are not human in origin, because if they could possibly be adversaries, this would not be being disclosed.

No. If you see some phenom and it's not X, not Y, not Z, you can't say THEREFORE it must be 'Aliens'.

The default position is 'I don't know', not 'aliens'.

No, you're not understanding anything I wrote.

The "if" is "if the US claims they are real", as in, the military claims specifically the most plausible explanation of the evidence to them is that these objects are physical, solid objects, not illusions or artifacts.

Something real in this sense but unexplainable and not originating from humans does not mean space aliens. Just like it doesn't mean leprechauns or unicorns. Where'd "aliens" come from? The answer "I don't know, but we can rule out humans" is an insane possibility, but is one which seems both increasingly likely to be the truth and also much less insane than "it's aliens."

>If UAP originated from China or Russia and were a national security risk, their existence would have never been revealed to the public.

I agree with that part.

However, I think it's more reasonable to assume it belongs to the US Government, which would perfectly explain why they don't really view it as a threat.

I don't think it's reasonable to assume it belongs to the US Government under the condition that these objects are confirmed to be real and capable of pulling, say 100G. I think that reality, if confirmed, would leave us rather short on low-surprise explanations fully consistent with it.

If it's confirmed that these objects are performing controlled maneuvers at 100Gs, then that would also confirm such a thing is physically possible here on Earth. Why would we need to make the leap that someone somewhere else must have brought them here?

I didn't. But if these are determined to be solid objects performing 100G then it's very, very unlikely humans have developed this technology, particularly if the world's militaries explicitly deny it.

Saying humans didn't create it is a lot different than saying anything about where it came from.

> I think it's more reasonable to assume it belongs to the US Government, which would perfectly explain why they don't really view it as a threat.

You can't just conclude this. It could be other things like a sensor glitches. Or sensor confusion (e.g. tracking a bird heading in the opposite direction, or out of focus commercial plane). Or it could be something else entirely you aren't creative enough to think of.

The default position is "I don't know", not "Aliens" or "US Government" or "Unicorns"

> "In fact, there should be a quadrillion ‘Oumuamua-like objects within the solar system at any given time, if they are distributed on random trajectories with equal probability of moving in all directions."

There is always the possibility that we only observed a very, very rare event. Just by enough very rare events being possible, it is bound to happen that we observe one of them one day. All in all it just reminds me a bit of p-hacking/data fishing.

This article is hot garbage. Boo on Avi Loeb and boo on Scientific American.

This article is an ad for the guy’s book. If the article is representative then the book is not very good.

The book is not very good. It sounded interesting so I bought it – and it was the first book I've read where I was so disappointed that I wrote a one star review on Amazon. The review was rejected.

Avi Loeb was on Event Horizon earlier this week talking about this. It was pretty disappointing. When he first started on this whole 'Oumuamua is a space craft thing, I thought it was an interesting but unlikely hypothesis and he was acting in good faith. After this latest round of press from him about UAPs and other nonsense, I am sure he is just cashing in. Just watch... he'll be an 'expert' on Ancient Aliens next.

>As noted in my recent book Extraterrestrial, I do not enjoy science fiction stories because the story lines often violate the laws of physics

And there it is. Shame on the Scientific American

This article makes a lot of leaps but I think it does show that the reach of the implications of any kind of tacit confirmation of the "UAPs are real, solid objects flying around at high Gs" hypothesis would have pretty broad reach in terms of consequences to other observed, unexplained phenomena.

I stopped reading on this sentence:

"It involves fresh scientific evidence that we are not be the only intelligent species in the cosmo."

If they can't even proofread their article, I'm not going to bother reading it.

I’ve read the article twice now and I’m unclear on the link. Is it simply that these UAPs are appearing after the Oumuamua came by? Like the coincident time of the UAPs post the 2017 passby?

His "possible link", as far as I can tell, is that because Oumuamua is flat and tumbling, it could be a receiver, and because it could be a receiver, UAPs could be transmitters.

So, you didn't miss the link, because there isn't one.

So those aliens who would have very restricted numbers have no problem with abandoning a lot of them on Earth while the rest of them go flying away into the sunset?

Yeah. Right.

I can’t see the article through the pop-overs, it jumps to trying to sell me magazine subscriptions

EDIT: hitting the back button brought me to the article

ublock origin.

iPhone :(

Brave.

Firefox Focus.

Your ad blocker is doing its job as the whole article is just an ad for Avi Loeb’s book

You haven’t missed anything of substance.

so in other words, who knows

Yeah, this article is the possible link between those.

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