An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees | Hacker News Reader

An astronomer thinks alien tech could be on the ocean floor. Not everyone agrees

npr.org

13 pointsisaacfrond23 comments

The astronomer is Avi Loeb, who also wanted the 2017 object Oumuamua (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua) to be technological in origin.

Is this just a case of Loeb going off the rails in a photogenic fashion, or is there something here?

I’m getting more and more sucked in by alien conspiracy theories

You could be interested in Erich von Däniken's books. Take them with a grain of salt, though.

Von Daniken's theories are transparently false. I read his books in the 1970s, and they were bad fiction even then.

I'd say that the sea floor or dark side of the moon are good places to hide things. That doesn't say anything about motivation or probability though.

Oumuamua was very curious and unusual object, if you were to probe a remote star system this seems like a really good and stealth way to do it. But we will never know if it was an outlier space rock with strange with strange path.

Cant prove it was alien so unusual rock is the most probable assumption.

There are suggestion’s that we could catch up to it in 26 years if we launch a probe.

That’s be an excellent way to dispel doubt

At the very least, there is scientific value in gathering composition data about interstellar objects happening to fall down onto our planet.

Even Loeb acknowledges that alien technological origins would be a long shot - it's probably more about raising awareness and making some headlines.

The fact is we don't see any alien activity in our galaxy as far as we can discern. If a random piece of interstellar material turned out to be of alien origin, a couple of interesting things would follow from that: either the creators are long dead (in which case: why can't we see their structures out there?) or they have somehow learned how to overcome thermodynamics.

Again the null hypothesis here is that we're just a very, very early civilization. Possibly the first one to arise in our galaxy. Let's assume that we're it and act accordingly.

I would expect an interstellar technological object would at least not crash at 60,000 kph. It got this far, it took at the very least centuries, most likely millenia, and braking now that it has less reaction mass is much easier than accelerating ever was with all that propellant to push around.

I think the odds it's technological are 'astronomically' slim.

That said, there are all kinds of reasons a technological object could crash into us. Brake failure, course correction failure, sensor failure; or more interestingly, a fearlessness of impact and high heat due to advanced technology.

I know it's framing things from a human perspective, but I've always considered if we put a bunch of objects far out into the universe that we'd probably accidentally ram the satellite equivalent of a 737 MAX or something into a planet at some point.

> I would expect an interstellar technological object would at least

Why do humans always assume alien tech to be all-or-nothing? Do you know the farthest objects we ourselves have sent out, and what sort of tech they're running on?

In all likelihood the first aliens we meet are going to be bumbling idiots like us.

Everybody should agree with that statement because it's true. The astronomer is merely claiming that it could be alien technology. It's unlikely that it is alien technology but it could be.

What’s the value in that?

It’s like claiming the Egyptian pyramids _could_ be alien technology.

Do we have to go through a list of things that could be alien in origin and then have to go about disproving every one?

We have thoroughly studied the pyramids and know how they were constructed. Here, we are talking about a mostly unknown object from outside of the solar system.

> What's the value in that

Acquiring funding using technically true statements? Putting scientists who make claims without evidence in their place?

This is overly pedantic. If you are a computer, "X could be" just means the chances are >0. In natural language, "I think X could be" implies an amount of suspicion not infinitely close to 0, and it is fair for others to have different opinions on those chances.

This is not the first article about this I see. But as with the first one, I still don't quite understand what makes Loeb think that those objects could have been made by alien intelligence instead of being simple rock fragments.

Does someone have a better clue on that?

Loeb's primary argument that I can remember was that the object accelerated in a peculiar way as it moved away from the sun. This was thought to be attributable to off gassing caused solar radiation. However, no gases have been observed and other analyses have suggested that this would have caused the object to spin--perhaps enough to tear it apart.

Edit: I realized that you were asking about the object at the bottom of the ocean, not Oumuamua which was the subject of my response. But the two are related. If, as Loeb believes, there is evidence that the first extra-solar object that we ever closely observed, Oumuamua, was extraterrestrial technology, then the limited number of other known extra-solar objects also become of interest. We don't know what proportion of extra-solar objects are, in fact, alien technology, but Loeb's views about Oumuamua give him reason to think it might be reasonably high, high enough to warrant an expedition to the bottom of the ocean.

We also know that the object is not a simple rock fragment because we can infer its density, which appears to be greater than iron.

According to the article the object is moving too fast to have come from our solar system. It's pretty rare for an object to come in from outside of our solar system. We have no idea how common technologically advanced aliens are. But you could argue that if they are common, if an object comes into our solar system from outside it's more likely than not alien tech. Although if it was from an advanced civilization, why would it crash? So maybe not.

There could be alien tech hidden in their left nostril. Surgery is in order.

Because new viruses appear after Oumuamua fly-by, they may contain some alien code - right?

But if it didn't stop at atmosphere it's 70% chance it's under water.

Just reading the headline, I said to myself “I bet it’s Avi Loeb.”

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