*I'm not saying it's convincing, but as a rational line of argument, marshaling what facts there are, there's nothing wrong with it. It's not like the guy's blustering and handwaving like a saucer contactee.
*You might argue that, as intelligent probes go, it didn't seem to do anything intellectually ambitious while it was zooming past us, but maybe its owners are long-dead and the thing is a hulk. Occam's Razor would suggest otherwise: if it's intelligent but it's dead, why not just have it be an inert rock from the get-go? But to have one's first-contact with aliens be a dead thing, that does have a rather Lovecraftian sensibility to it, or maybe, rather, since it can't even be bothered to rise from the dead and notice us, it's more Clark Ashton Smith.
Aliens invade the pages of the New Yorker, because why wouldn't they
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Your explanation of why ‘Oumuamua might be an interstellar probe may be hard for laypeople to understand. Why might this be the case, beyond the fact that lots of things are possible?
There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua.
There is another peculiar fact about this object. When you look at all the stars in the vicinity of the sun, they move relative to the sun, the sun moves relative to them, but only one in five hundred stars in that frame is moving as slow as ‘Oumuamua. You would expect that most rocks would move roughly at the speed of the star they came from. If this object came from another star, that star would have to be very special.
What are some of the other strange facts?
When it was discovered, we realized it spins every eight hours, and its brightness changed by at least a factor of ten. The fact that its brightness varies by a factor of ten as it spins means that it is at least ten times longer than it is wide. We don’t have a photo, but, in all the artists’ illustrations that you have seen on the Web, it looks like a cigar. That’s one possibility. But it’s also possible that it’s a pancake-like geometry, and, in fact, that is favored.
What would be the meaning of a pancake-like geometry—
Wait. The most unusual fact about it is that it deviates from an orbit that is shaped purely by the gravitational force of the sun. Usually, in the case of comets, such a deviation is caused by the evaporation of ice on the surface of the comet, creating gases that push the comet, like the rocket effect. That’s what comets show: a cometary tail of evaporated gas. We don’t see a cometary tail here, but, nevertheless, we see a deviation from the expected orbit. And that is the thing that triggered the paper. Once I realized that the object is moving differently than expected, then the question is what gives it the extra push....
