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Comment by briffid | Hacker News Reader

So is it a spaceship or not?

Why would do think it would be a spaceship?

I doubt they're serious but some wackos thought Oumuamua was an alien probe due to its unusual shape, and since this new interstellar object is arriving shortly after Oumuamua has left it must be the mothership.

I feel like it's more of a meme than a serious thing for most people.

The Ramans do everything in threes.

I'm looking forward to the braking!

The books, unfortunately, didn’t stop on the first.

I didn't hate the rest. it gave me an interest in robots and nanotech. I even did a summer project on baking nanotubes and taking their pictures with an electron microscope as a result.

It wasn’t a wacko theory at first. The wackos are the people who still believed it even after evidence emerged to the contrary.

There are many more rocks in our own solar system than there are interstellar spacecraft. Assuming similar proportions elsewhere makes us conclude it’s never aliens.

Heuristcs that almost always work are right up until they're not.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...

That’s why they’re called heuristics and not deterministics

I mean, sure, but no one I've invited in my home is a vampire so far and I think that heuristic is solid.

You wouldn’t know unless they told you. They could have had a snack someplace else.

I am getting bombarded with yt videos about this object being half the size of the sun passing our system with the planets aligned in a 0.01% chance perfect geometry etc etc. millions of views. It's incredible what people believe these days. Not a grain of skepticism.

Science teachers have failed their students.

Let's put science teachers in charge of the youtube boost juice and see if the situation improves.

Do all of the views necessarily translate 1:1 to the number of people that believe it? Some people watch just to see what kooky nonsense people are falling for.

I think the number of wacky believers hasn't changed that much. It's just that now the countless outlets and algorithms venting this nonsense have ballooned to galactic proportions! My dad used to buy these 70/80s UFO magazines back in the day and they were just as nutty.

A lot of quacks online are saying it could be, or by proxy that “it’s like nothing we’ve ever seen”

Looking at you Angry Astronaut.

They are asking if it is or not. They didn’t say they think it’s a spaceship.

In any case, assumptions shouldn’t be made either either way what it might be, which is the reason to gather more data.

Sure but it's also not a pink elephant and not a flower pot. It's none of those things. We have just as much evidence of those objects flying through space as we have of alien spaceships so far. So it's odd asking "So is it a spaceship or not?" just like it's odd asking "so is it a flower pot?".

Is Musk's red car a spaceship btw? Because if we are able to send such stuff to space, other intelligent beings would most probably do the same. Or they are more intelligent?

That's my point! Anything could be in space, elephants, flower pots, EVs. But they picked a particular thing out of the possible universe of objects so was curious why they picked that. It's an asteroid emitting Ni atoms based on the paper. Do we have any evidence of alien spaceships doing that that?

It is never aliens.

Until it is. ;-)

This is a report about the volatile composition of interstellar objects (ISOs) passing through the Solar System.

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