Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In today,
we're bringing you a follow up, a rare, long awaited
follow up on an episode from last year that was
(00:24):
about a messenger from another solar system. Oh yes, muamua.
That's right. So in this episode from last year, it
aired in December, it was called first Messenger from an
Alien Star. We discussed the first ever extra solar object
known to enter our solar system, which has come to
be known as Umuamua. Now, of course, as usual, the
(00:48):
big question whenever there's something interesting that happens in space
is is it aliens? And that's what people wanted to
know back then. Of course, back then the answer seemed
to be no. The answer, as a spoiler, I think
still seems to be no. But the question has gotten
a little more interesting even though the answer does still
seem to be no. Yeah. Basically, it was a weird
(01:11):
object when it was first observed, and it continued, it
remained weird, It continued to do weird things. And then
there's one paper in particular we're gonna be talking about well,
actually a couple of papers that put some some some
some fascinating spins on it that hypothesize what could be
going on with the Mua mua, and one of those
hypotheses involves the concept that it's an alien spaceship. So
(01:34):
the the idea that it is aliens has not completely
died away, and we're talking about among um reputable scientists,
not merely you know, people on the outskirts that they
just want to see aliens in everything. Right. Well, of course,
as we discussed in the last episode, anytime there's anything
weird in space, the Daily Mail is going to break
out It's aliens as their headline, and people are gonna
(01:57):
be popping there it's aliens Champagne. It's not time to
out the Champagne. But we did promise in that last
episode that if future research came along and proved us
wrong and saying it was an aliens, we would of
course do a follow up episode. Has that happened, Well, no,
it hasn't been proven to be aliens, but the object
has continued to appear even more strange and even more
(02:17):
interesting all the time, and plenty of media outlets have
have used a new paper by astrophysicist Abvie Loebe and
Schmoolbiali to run with the Okay, now it's aliens headlines.
And obviously some people have flagged these articles for us
on social media, so we thought it would be worth
a look, come back, revisit it and uh and see
(02:37):
what's happened since last year. And now I have to
go ahead and remind everyone that we're we're not against
the idea of it being aliens necessarily, Like that would
be really interesting if that were to come to pass.
I don't know about you. I hate aliens. I just
h well, the idea, it just curdls my blood. It
would be a huge change, obviously, and change is scary.
(02:59):
It would it would definitely messed with some of our
science fiction. That's probably where I feel the most threatened
by it is. Um, you know, I've got I've got
some some stuff pending that that might be messed up.
If if if aliens are suddenly a reality, uh, and
then then all of our sci fi has to be
like alternate reality sci fi, like this is what the
future might have been like had there not been aliens
(03:20):
as we know them to be. That's a really good point.
I mean, this was why when it makes all first
contact stories alternate histories. Yeah, I mean I'm not sure
if this is I haven't verified this, but I remember
reading that when two thousand and one Space Odyssey was
in production, Stanley Kubrick either did or tried to take
out an insurance policy, uh in the event that alien
(03:42):
life was discovered before the film came out. Um, so
you know I'm not alone in my paranoia. Oh that's good,
but no, no, once again, today is not going to
be an It's Aliens party, but it is going to
be a fascinating exploration of a very weird thing in space, right,
and we will consider the possibility because that's going to
be part of this episode is talking about the idea
(04:04):
that it could be an alien spaceship. Okay, brief refresher
crash course on this object. On October nine, the Pan
Stars one telescope in Hawaii on Haliakala caught sight of
a small object that was moving rapidly through the Solar System,
and so of course they called in other observatories to
(04:26):
look and confirm what they had seen, and at first
it was believed to be a comet, and then later
it was determined to be some kind of interstellar object,
asteroid like object, traveling at lightning speed into and then
back out of our Solar System. So how fast was
the thing going? Well, at its fastest when it made
its nearest approach to the Sun on September nine, it
(04:50):
was going about hundred and ninety six thousand miles per
hour or eighty seven point three kilometers per second. Last
I heard, it's already headed back out of the Solar System,
and somewhere around seventy thousand miles per hour already passed
the orbit of Jupiter. I think I read nearing the
orbit of Saturn, or it might be there by now.
In another four years it will pass the orbit of Neptune,
(05:10):
and it will basically be heading way back out into
interstellar space. Whatever it is, it ain't local, so the
speed is already weird. Then you've got the trajectory, so
it apparently entered the ecliptic plane of the Solar System,
the the relatively flat orbital plane that things where things
go around the Sun at an inclination of about a
(05:32):
hundred and twenty three degrees, and things in our Solar
System are generally not like that though some comets have
pretty tilted orbits, this object basically shot into our Solar
system from above or from below. There is of course
no upper down in space, but from an angle perpendicular
to the flat plane of the Solar system. And it
(05:54):
passed very close to the Sun inside the orbit of Mercury.
Then Sling shot it around the Sun and headed back out.
Its orbit is what's called hyperbolic, meaning it will not
be returning. It's it's going right. And so so when
we talk about it, uh, passing the orbit of Saturn,
we're not talking about it sort of sailing past Saturn
in a sort of star trek the next generation uh
(06:16):
you know, solar vista kind of way. We're talking about. Uh,
this this trajectory that shoots above the solar plane right
if you zoom way out, it would look kind of
like a big v where it goes straight down right
by the Sun and then just straight back off into space. Now,
what is this object up close? That's that's obviously what
people are wondering, like, is it a pegasus, is it
(06:39):
a flaming sphere? What is it? So we can't see
any details about the surface or geometry of the object,
because it is purely a point like light source. It's
very small, and it's very far away, and so with
our telescopes all we can see is a point of light.
But we can learn things from that point of light.
One of the things we can do is look at
(07:01):
variations in the brightness of that point of light and
look at the patterns of those variations, and using those
patterns we can we can do what's known as a
light curve analysis, and this is just like a graph
that shows the intensity of the light coming from an
object over time. Based on this kind of light curve analysis,
we have come up with some very weird conclusions about
(07:23):
how this object is shaped and how it's moving. It
appears to be a very narrow, elongated object, maybe at
a roughly ten to one length to width and depth ratio,
so imagine. People have often called it cigar shaped. I've
seen it called baguette shaped. There are other analyzes that say, well,
(07:43):
maybe you could produce this kind of light curve if
it's some kind of flat, pancake like shape. Whatever it is,
it is not a normal roughly spherical or even slightly
roughly spherical object. And of course this is one of
many things that leads uh, that lends itself to the
to the inter protation that it's some sort of artificial structure,
that it is a say, a space ship, or more specifically,
(08:05):
maybe I'm thinking the sarcophagus of a robeast launched from
the planet, doomed towards Earth to battle earth mightiest heroes
in a giant robotic suit. It's a space mummy. It's
on a cosmic journey. Now, if it is a space mummy,
I would hope the space mommy doesn't get car sick
because another thing about the what we can tell from
analyzing the light emitted by this reflected by this object,
(08:28):
is that it is tumbling. It is not rotating around
a principal axis. It's tumbling in an irregular way. It
appears to be rotating once every about seven point three hours.
The coloration on it is kind of interesting. Light reflection
analysis indicates that there's a red coloration on its surface,
consistent with objects in our Solar System, like asteroids that
(08:51):
have been bombarded by cosmic rays. Now, another question people
wondered is where did it come from? And the answer is,
we don't know. On it's a pro trajectory. It seems
like it was coming basically from the direction of the
star known as Vega, which is in the constellation Lira.
But that doesn't mean that it came from anything around
the star Vega, because we have to remember that our
(09:13):
view of the night skies moving, and so whenever whenever
it came from where Vega is now, Vega wasn't there yet.
So even if you don't follow space news very closely,
you can probably guess. We did not conclude it was
aliens in November of last year when there was all
the hubbub about this, though people did listen for it
to emit radio signals and nada, we didn't hear anything.
(09:37):
With multiple radio observatories at different times, there was nothing,
all right, So if it was, it was slash it
is an alien ship, it was certainly wasn't trying to
communicate with us in any um detectable sense exactly. And
so that is about where we stood last time when
we did the first podcast on this object. But there
have been a lot of development since then. So I
(09:59):
want to start by looking at a very curious NASA
press release from June of this year. So earlier this year,
using observation data from a number of observatories, including the
Hubble Space Telescope. He had a team of researchers that
found that Umu MUA's trajectory was different from what we
would expect based on gravity alone. Marco Mischelley of the
(10:22):
ESA S Space Situational Awareness Near Earth Objects Coordination Center
in Italy said, quote, our high precision measurements of Umu
MUA's position revealed that there was something affecting its motion
other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and the planets.
By the way, Marco also stated that quote, we think
(10:43):
it is a tiny weird comment, a tiny weird comment
which which I think some things up nicely. Well we
uh So, last time we talked about the object, I
think we were speaking at a time when the consensus
was around it being an asteroid like interstellar rock key body,
and now things seem to be coming back around to
(11:04):
the idea of it being some kind of comet like body.
Now again to establish the difference an asteroid versus a comet,
and asteroid tends to be a rocky or metallic body.
A comet is more ice and dust has more volatile
materials in it, And when a comet gets heated up,
it will tend to lose mass, things will get ejected
off of it and out gasses, and that's where you
(11:25):
get a comets tail exactly. Now, if you're making a
connection there with the speed boost that Michelle just mentioned,
you you might be on the right track. David fair
Nokia at NASA JPL found that the speed boost observed
on Umumua was consistent with what you would see from
the out gassing of a comet. So, so how does
(11:46):
that work? Well, The speed boost on a comet works
by the same principle as a rocket. Actually it works
by reaction propulsion. A rocket ejects gas out the back
of it to push the front of it forward, or
I guess that actually push the whole thing forward, to
push it forward in the opposite direction of its emissions.
And a comet likewise, has volatile material on it and
(12:09):
within it, and when it gets close to the Sun,
that material heats up and gets ejected in jets of
gas and dust, and these jets form a kind of
natural rocket engine which pushes the comet through space, adding
speed in addition to the comets original momentum. So there's
absolutely nothing out of the ordinary there right, sometimes comets
(12:30):
turn into little rockets that can alter their own speed
as they pass near the sun. Except researchers weren't expecting
to see any speed boost of this kind due to outgassing,
because there was otherwise no direct evidence about gassing at all.
In fact, this is why people were concluding earlier on
that it was some kind of rocky object more like
(12:51):
an asteroid, because they thought if it was some kind
of comet like object, they should be seeing these these
gas and dust emissions. You'd see the tail, like, where's
the tail? Let's I mean, every every child knows that, right,
if you're drawing the comet, it needs to have a
tail or some kind of visible emission. There should be
something you should see, and they didn't see anything like that.
(13:12):
So whatever it is, you should you should be able
to see it happening with your telescopes. But nothing. So
the team in the in this research hypothesize that maybe
what's going on is that Umumua is out gassing released
very little dust enough to give it a speed boost,
but not enough to see reflecting the sunlight in a
(13:32):
way that our telescopes could pick up. The University of
Hawaii astronomer Karen Meach, who was the head of the
team that announced the discovery of the object last year.
She suggested that maybe small grains of dust that you
would normally find on a commet within our solar system,
those things had all been blown off of a mummua
as it hurtled through the interstellar void for all those
(13:53):
thousands or millions of years. Yeah, and that I've also
read that they would just leave like larger grains of
dust and that that's that's what would be um outgassing here. Yeah. Yeah.
So so there are a couple of different ways you
can think about it. You could think that what's getting
ejected from the this comet like object could be large
grains of dust that don't reflect light as well as
(14:14):
many smaller grains would, and that's why we can't see them,
or it's just it's just been stripped of dust and
what's being ejected has mass enough to give it a
speed boost, but it doesn't it doesn't reflect light in
the way we can see. In any case, whatever is
going on with it is weird, Yes, a tiny weird comment, Okay,
But I want to move on to another another piece
(14:36):
of news, another NASA press release again this time from
November of this year, and it said that in November
of researchers used NASA's infrared Spitzer space telescope to look
for the object after its original sighting. So this is
an infrared telescope. It's looking at the infrared part of
the electromagnetic spectrum, which usually indicates the emission of heat
heat energy, and Spitzer looked for more than two months
(15:00):
and was never able to detect the object. These results
were published in the Astronomical Journal by Trilling at All
and believe it or not, the fact that it couldn't
see the object was actually a very useful result, despite
the fact that there was no data we could gather.
The fact that we couldn't see it with an infrared
observatory tells us something about the object. First of all,
(15:23):
it must be very small, and this is actually consistent
with without gassing like a comet, providing the speed boost
to change its trajectory in the way that we saw it.
Had originally been concluded that the object must be no
longer than two thousand, six hundred feet or eight hundred
meters in its longest dimension, but the Spitzer result limits
its size even more. Quote Spitzer's non detection limited Mu
(15:48):
mu a spherical diameter, and that spherical diameter is is
just based on the way they were looking for it.
Obviously they do not think it's spherical, but they have
to sort of average it and treat it as if
it were a sphere. It limits that diameter to forty
feet or four hundred forty or four hundred and sixty
feet or a hundred and forty or perhaps as little
(16:09):
as three hundred and twenty ft or a hundred meters,
and it must also be highly reflective, and this non
detection means that it may reflect up to ten times
more light than solar system comments. And you can tell
this because of how cold it is. It's too cold
for the infrared telescope to detect. And of course you
(16:30):
know from experience, dark surfaces have a lower albedo, meaning
they reflect less light and absorb more heat. If you
want to get hot, dress up in a dark suit,
and lighter surfaces have a higher albedo, meaning they reflect
more light and absorb less heat. And the object apparently
reflects a lot of light and absorbs very little heat.
Trailing and his co authors that they point out that
(16:52):
this might be due to a coating created by outgassing
from its close approach to the Sun prior to its discovery.
And this, they remind us, following millions of years worth
of travel through that interstellar void far from any star
that could have refreshed its surface. Yeah, exactly so. So
they speculate that maybe as a Mumu made its close
(17:12):
approach to the Sun, the heat from the Sun warmed
up the ice on its surface, turned it into gas,
blew away everything, and then it released some gas that
recovered the surface of the object with a bright layer
of ice and snow, and this made it highly reflective
in a way we could see while remaining very cold
and non absorbing. So at this point it seems pretty
(17:33):
reasonable to me to conclude that the object is is weird.
It's not like things were you know, we normally see.
But it's probably some sort of interstellar comet like object
behaves sort of like a comet, but sort of not
like a comet from within our own solar system. And uh,
and that's maybe all we'll get to know about it,
because another thing about it is that it's it's on
(17:55):
the way out. We're not we're probably not going to
be able to gather any more information about it unless
we go chase it down, and with the propulsion systems
of today, we can't do that. Well there, we'll get
to some of the some answers on that in a
little bit, because there are some people who think that
that we can catch it well with the propulsion systems
of tomorrow, right well with while they're looking at within
(18:17):
three to five years, Like they're basically talking about what
would happen if we got serious about catching it now,
and therefore we're able to launch a mission and say
what could be what could be feasible? Well, I think
we'll have to come back to that later in the episode.
We should take a break, let's do it. Thank alright,
we're back. So again, everything that the that Mumu is
(18:41):
doing has thus far been explained rather well given what
we know about the behavior of of comments and other
astronomical objects. Right, it doesn't behave exactly like we would
expect a comment to. You know, there's some observations that
don't quite match up, but you can at least say, well,
here's why I think it might not be matching our
(19:02):
normal expected observations for a comet like object. It's weird,
but within the parameters that have been that are that
are in place, without having to dragon the idea of
of alien intelligence. Before we get into alien intelligence, I
just wanted to visit a little bit of other weirdness
that I came across. This first one was in a
(19:23):
speculative astrophysics paper I came across. It's just too odd
to pass up. So this is This was published and
of course the archive preprint server called could one eye
and that's that's a designation because it's the first interstellar
object one I slash umuamua be macroscopic dark matter and
(19:44):
this is by Cincinnaties at all. So I'll try to
do this quick because I have not found any experts
who think this answer is likely. This is basically just
a paper sitting in the void, though it was too
fun not to mention. So the authors ask, what if
it's not an asteroid or a comet but some type
of quote macroscopic chunk of dark matter. The very short
(20:10):
version on dark matter. When you look at galaxies and
galaxy clusters way out in space, you can detect how
much mass they have based on gravitational effects. But at
the same time the galaxies we look at appear to
have far less normal matter in them than we would
guess based on those gravitational effects. So people have come
(20:32):
up with this idea, well, there must be some other
kind of matter that's actually there's much more of it
out there than there is normal matter, and this is
dark matter. The most common version of dark matter people imagine,
I think, is usually some kind of quote, weakly interacting
massive particle. Meaning you've got these elementary particles out there
that have mass, and they have gravitational effects, and they
(20:54):
can affect the gravity of things around them, but they
don't interact with regular matter in other ways, so they
can pass right through it. They don't reflect or absorb
electromagnetic radiation, and so forth. But the authors of this
paper right quote. Contrary to widely held misconceptions, dark matter
need not be in the form of weakly interacting elementary particles,
(21:16):
but might instead be found in much larger pieces, with
masses best measured in grams or kilograms and cross sections
best measured in cinemeter squared. Specific candidates include primordial black holes,
strange quark or baryonic matter, and other speculative approximately nuclear
(21:37):
density standard model or beyond the standard model objects. So
given that this object reflected sunlight, because we could see
it with telescopes, we know that Umumua was not a
primordial black hole, so they propose it is some form
of strange matter of quote nuclear density, and this means
the density of the nucleus of an atom, which is
(21:58):
of course ridiculously dense. One point of comparison I found
is that it's more than two point one times tend
to the fourteen times greater than the density of water.
All right, So that's pretty dense. A little bit dense, okay,
so that's some hard water. There's a nice part about
this weird hypothesis, though, unlike aliens, you can actually falsify
(22:21):
this one because they said, wow, if an object that massive, uh,
that big, a hunk of dark matter where to pass
through our solar system like this, it would gravitationally alter
the orbits of mercury, the Earth, and the Moon in
ways that you could detect. And I have found no
evidence that anyone has detected shifts in our orbit or
the orbit of mercury or the Moon. So as fun
(22:41):
as this one is, I think we can ignore this hypothesis,
all right, how about one more strange yet cool hypothesis
uh from Mattie Chuk in Astrophysical Journal Letters. In this
one is called one I Umumu as a title disruption
Fragment from a Binary Star System short version. Here the
author models various scenarios and speculates that Omuma was once
(23:06):
part of a planet. That planet was quote tidally disrupted
in a catastrophic encounter with some kind of extremely dense
red dwarf star and then ejected into interstellar space from
a binary star system. Yeah. I think this seemed to
be working on the conclusion. I could be wrong, but
I think this seems to be going on the basis
(23:27):
of the idea that Mumu is more likely a rocky
asteroid type object rather than a volatile comet type object.
So this might not be as plausible now as it
was when this was published. But okay, I think it's
time to talk about the Aliens paper. So the authors
here are Avy Loebe and schmool By Alley. Avy Loebe
(23:48):
is a Harvard astrophysicist, very very you know, not some
internet cook, very well respected working astrophysicists, superactive in the
field all over the place, involved with the Brazilian projects
I could find. Uh, So you know this is not
timecube guy, right? When when when this individual speculates on aliens?
(24:10):
You listen. Yeah. But at the same time, somebody's credibility
within a field or authority shouldn't make you just like
take whatever they speculate on at face value. So let's
take a look at it. These authors wrote a paper
called could solar radiation pressure explain Mumu was peculiar acceleration?
Acceleration in the Astrophysical Journal Letters UH in two thousand
(24:33):
and eighteen. It was just recently published. Now I have
to say, it's always a good sign when the the
alien hypothesis is not mentioned in the headline. I don't know.
It sometimes gives one hope, I think. Okay, So picking
up on the fact that Umu Mua quote showed deviations
from a Keplerian orbit at a high statistical significance, and
(24:56):
they're they're just saying it had a trajectory that was
not it would not have been powered by gravity alone.
It got the speed boost we've been talking about. And remember,
of course that previous researchers concluded it must be some
comet like object receiving a reaction boost from out gassing
in some unusual way that we can't detect. Loeb and
(25:16):
Bally right quote. Such an acceleration is naturally expected for
comets driven by the evaporating material. However, recent observational and
theoretical studies imply that Umu Mua is not an active commet.
We explore the possibility that the excess acceleration results from
solar radiation pressure, in other words, being pushed by the
(25:38):
radiation emitted by the Sun. And we'll come back to
that in a minute. And just to go back to
our earlier, earlier ideas about comets and outgassing, this would
be inverse acceleration consistent with the behavior of outgassing comets
again despite the lack of visible outgassing. Yeah, and oh
and one thing that has been pointed out is that, yeah,
this acceleration is seems to be the acceleration is decreasing
(26:03):
at a rate consistent with the inverse square law. Now,
the inverse square law, of course applies to like the
intensity of radiation as you get farther away from a
source of radiation emitting in all directions. I mean, a
terrible way to describe this, probably it's like the further
way you get from the sun, the less solar radiation
there is pushing you, in the same way that the
(26:24):
further paper airplane gets away from a uh, you know,
a fan or an air conditioner unit, the less it's
going to be propelled by that air well. Yeah kind of,
because yeah, the force is spreading out in all directions.
It's spreading out across two dimensions as you go back
in one dimension, and so that that's the inverse square law.
But of course what would also be pointed out by
(26:46):
the comet like object proponents is that basically an inverse
square law type slowdown in the acceleration would also be
consistent with the commentary outgassing, because as you get far
they're away from the sun, the heat on your surface
also decreases, and there's less heating of the material, less
heating of the material, and therefore less outgassing to create
(27:09):
that natural rocket propulsion. So that could be consistent with
either one with it being some kind of a radiation
pressure thing getting blown by the solar radiation or the
outgassing the natural rocket. So nobody's saying, oops, it looks
like it turned on. It's a photon thrusters or no. Now.
In fact, even I haven't come across anybody saying that
(27:32):
it looks like it is artificial propulsion due to a
reaction drive. The only things I've seen are natural reaction
propulsion and artificial solar radiation propulsion. So anyway, I listened
to a brief interview with av Loeb that helped clarify
his thinking for me. So basically, he talked about how
(27:52):
Mumu is weird. We've never seen anything like it before
apart and that's apart from the fact that it is
extra solar in origin, and so we pointed out several
things that make it make it seem like maybe this
could be an alien spacecraft. First of all, there is
the weird shape we know based on the variations in
in the way it reflects light, that it's extremely long
(28:13):
and narrow, moving through space in a tumbling pattern. He
mentioned one thing that the object seems to be at
the quote local standard of rest, and this basically means
that it is moving along with the average of all
stars in the our solar neighborhood. So if you look
at all the stars around us and how their movement
(28:35):
averages out, that's basically how this thing is going. Now,
Loebs says, quote, if you think about it, that's the
best frame to camouflage yourself if you don't want anyone
to know where your origins are, because there is no
star that is exactly at rest in that frame. But
this object seems to be there, so I don't know
about that. We can come back to that reasoning in
(28:55):
a bit now. He mentions also that it's cold, right,
so the infrared search with the Spitzer telescope revealed no
thermal emission, and you know, it's just very cold object,
meaning probably that it reflects rather than absorbs sunlight, so
it's highly reflective. There is, of course, the trajectory indicating
a speed boost more than what it could receive from
(29:15):
the gravity of the Sun and the planets alone. And
of course Loeb thinks that the speed boost cannot be
due to commentary out gassing, and he and here's why.
He says, First of all, we can't see any evidence
about gassing. A comet has a detectable tale from out gassing,
and we couldn't detect anything like that on a mom
on no images of it. Number two, he says, the
(29:37):
fraction of its mass that it would need to lose
in order to get the speed boost it has is
pretty significant. And then third, he says that outgassing from
comets tends to change the spin period. So if you
think about this thing about it being this weird elongated
commet that's tumbling through space, and then jets start shooting
(29:58):
out of part of it to increase its movement through space,
this would seem to probably change it's tumbling. Right. If
you imagine turning on some random air jets on a
spacecraft in orbit, Yeah, you would think that if it's
spinning faster, you'd get like a sonic the hedgehog situation,
right yeah, Or or it would stabilize it in one
direction or another. You'd see some kind of change, which
(30:18):
due to this out gas. Yeah, and so uh so
do we see anything like that? Well, Loeb says no,
there's no detectable change in the spin period of this object.
So what gives Mumua the extra push? Loeb and b
Alley's paper, as we said, hypothesizes that it is behaving
like a light sale also known as a solar sale,
(30:39):
and this would mean that the object is in fact
in this They work this out in a way. That's
also consistent with the light curve we saw in it.
The object is in fact less than a millimeter thick,
but with the surface area of twenty meters or more um.
And it's just it's highly reflective on at least one
surface when it's you know, because it's supposed to be
(31:00):
reflective as a solar sale. And so this is a
really interesting thing to consider, at least even if it's wrong. Yeah,
because the idea would be that this is, uh, this
is an artificially created solar sale, this is this is
a probe powered by solar sale propulsion. Yea, So what's
the deal with a light sale? Yeah, let's let's back
(31:21):
up and just talk about what a light sale is,
because it's it's an it's awesome concept. I believe we've
talked about it on the show in the past, but
it's always great to revisit it. So the concept itself
actually dates back to astronomer and mathematicition Honnes Kepler in
the sixteenth century, and it has to do with comets.
He noted that comet tales always point away from the sun,
(31:41):
and he inferred that sunlight itself was pushing them around
like cosmic wind socks. So essentially he predicted the so
called solar wind. We talked about solar radiation, uh, you know,
blasting out from from the sun in all directions. Now,
I think we want to be careful not to confuse
the idea of the solar radiation being the wind in
this analogy with the solar wind, which is the charged
(32:04):
particles string from the Sun, which is usually how if
an astronomer today talks about solar wind, I think they
mean that stream of charged particles. But this would be
something that's pushed along just by the radiation pressure of
the of what's coming off of the Sun. So so
how does that happen? Well, it has to do with
the photons. So a lot of the star is made
(32:24):
up of photons. And while photons don't possess mass, they
do have linear momentum and when they bounce off of
a reflective surface, they push against the surface. So all
you need is a reflective surface in order to have
a sail. And now we've u and this is not
just like purely hypothetical. We have experimented with solar sales.
(32:45):
The Mariner Tin Probe successfully demonstrated this technology in nineteen
four that the craft had solar arrays that were used
as impromptu sales, and then further experiments have proved it
out completely and it was used as a primary means
of propulsion on the Icarus probe. That's I K A
R O S. That was a Japanese probe. But yeah,
that was that was the Jackson probe, an interplanetary kite
(33:08):
craft accelerated by radiation of the Sun. Oh that's what
the acronyms. Yeah. Uh so. One of the things though
about sailing uh on the on on the rays of
the Sun is that you need to be patient if
you're using it as your primary means of propulsion for
interstellar travel. If you want a Mario Kart analogy, it's
(33:31):
like being Donkey Kong or Bowser. I think like you
get you get a better top speed in the end,
but it takes you a little while to get there.
Yeah yeah, slow, bit dependable, right um or it's in
the in the initial stages anyway. So based on our
technology technology we have now, a journey to the nearest
star would take about seven thousand years using solar sales. Now.
(33:55):
I chatted with noted solar sale authority Dr Gregory L.
Matt Off about all of this, I think eight years ago,
and at the time he thought that it was possible
to maybe get that down to two thousand years with
the right kind of solar sale construction, uh construction that
we need to take place in orbit, and then we
might might be able to eventually get below a thousand years.
(34:19):
But below a hundred he said, that stretched all believability,
you know, from his standpoint. So, but I have to
stay this is unless you had a laser or particle
beam accelerator that was that was essentially creating its own
wind for the vehicle to try to travel on, and
that has been proposed. Yeah, so the idea here is
(34:39):
wine de pinned on the sun to push your sail
when you can use some sort of high powered laser
or particle beam accelerator to create a new like laser
highway for your solar sale vessel to sail upon. This
is a concept I believe we actually saw demonstrated, or
at least maybe not demonstrated, but they illustrated a little
(35:02):
bit in the Tron movies. I believe there's a solar
sale looking vessel. Oh, it's kind of flowing through the
what the internet? The computer world of whatever they call
super monorail? Is that what they called it? No? I
know now of course, in contemplating the possibility of a
space pro hope created by an alien civilization that's thousands
(35:22):
or millions of years older than us, Uh, some manner
of advanced solar sale need not be the only propulsion
technology and play. Uh. But but then again, I guess
it could be like a trolling motor, or maybe it's
the primary propulsion system and we're just letting human more
moral mortality or morality get in the way of our
(35:43):
understanding of of the time frame involved. Right, Um, you
know we we even today we tend to I think
we can fall into the trap of thinking like, well,
what kind of people are on this vessel or what
kind of people are waiting to hear back from it?
And certainly, if you if you push your idea of
um of intelligence in the universe beyond like the human lifespan,
(36:06):
you can certainly play with models uh that don't need
to hear back from their probe anytime soon. Yeah. And
I mean, of course, if you're thinking about it being
like a crude spacecraft with passengers, I don't know, were
we allowed to just play with our intuitions here. My intuition,
not based on evidence, is that if this were an
(36:27):
alien probe, which I don't think it is, it's probably uncrude. Right,
it doesn't have people, and it it doesn't have space
people not living ones anyway, maybe like a dead alien king. Right, Yeah,
But I don't know what are our intuitions worth. Maybe nothing,
nothing when it comes to aliens. But just if we're
if we just stick to the human answers for why, uh,
(36:49):
some civilization would send something like that out? I mean
we we can look to examples of you know, the
time capsule, a a tomb, a simple hey is there
anybody else in the universe? A message sent out into
the voice survey. Yeah. Yeah, So I think all of
that is possible, just to get based on the human
experience extrapolated to try and understand why an alien might
(37:11):
do something like this. But even backing out and not
trying to imagine alien psychology, if you just look at
it as a piece of technology, which is basically all
that Bali and Loweb were doing, they don't start talking
about civilizations. They're just saying, like, is it plausible that
this is what it is? And they conclude, yeah, if
you take that as a would it be plausible? They
(37:34):
do think it's plausible. They do some calculations to say,
would a light sale that matches the kind of acceleration
we saw on Umuma, would it make it through the
interstellar journey? And they say yeah, probably would. Would it
match the things we've seen so far, they say, yeah,
probably would. The question is do you have reason to
conclude that it is a light sale in the first place?
(37:55):
And we should also throw in here that that this
is part of kind of the Setti approach to to
looking for evidence of alien life is is not only
looking for transmissions, but looking for the signatures like this,
like what where is an exist what's an example of
something something out there in space doing something unexpected? Uh,
(38:15):
either in its its movements or how it's emitting h energy,
how it's visible or not visible to us, et cetera.
I mean, so many of the coolest things in the
history of astronomy that people have thought, well, maybe that's aliens.
It's always just something weird and we can't really explain
We don't know the best way to explain it without
(38:37):
invoking aliens, even though there's no clear indication it's aliens.
It's just kind of like, well, I don't know what
else to say about it. That's you know, that's the
thing with the Wow signal, Like there's no clear indication
that it's aliens, but it just like has defied a
lot of other natural explanations, so people keep obsessing about it. Yeah,
I mean to a certain extent, it's it's kind of
(38:58):
like ancient people staring up into the sky seeing something
unexplainable and then attributing it to the gods, like the
alien aliens are our our modern gods and in many respects,
and uh maybe there's even like a subconscious uh need
to to explain things in the in that in that way,
you know. And of course, as the ancient streamed of
(39:20):
becoming gods themselves and achieving apotheosis, we are doing the
same things that we're they're currently being hypothesized as the
products of advanced alien civilizations. We're trying to put together
these light sale interstellar probes like ABVI. Loeb himself is
involved in something called Breakthrough star Shot, which is a
program to develop a fleet of small light sale probes
(39:41):
that will travel to another solar system, such as Alpha Centauri,
which is more than four point three light years away.
I should also point out that that Matt Loff, who
is a pioneer in solar sales, is also involved in
that project. Yeah, but it seems like a lot of
people are Yeah. Yeah, there's a you can go to
their their their website at Breakthrough Initiatives dot org. His
holdest of people, including Freeman Dyson, is on there. It's
(40:03):
just I mean, it's a cool project. Sober He was
the villain and one of the Bond movies, right, yeah,
I think so. Yeah, he was the one. He was
the guy who was his His grand plan was just
to be a cocaine lord. Yeah. Yeah, he was a
pretty vicious villain, but not not involved in this this
(40:24):
project at all. Let's go ahead and squash rumors that
Bond villains are building a solar sale. No, I made
that up. I'm sorry. Oh, you don't know. I should
mention some other things that have been cited as evidence
of the possible artificial origins of this object. One is
just that if it's a random piece of natural interstellar
space debris, there must be a lot more interstellar space
(40:46):
debris than our astronomical models have predicted we we generally
didn't think there was enough that we would have randomly
seen one like this, but we did. So either there's
a lot more interstellar space debreath than we thought, or
this thing probably isn't interstellar space debris, which would mean
it's either local, which seems unlikely based on a lot
(41:06):
of analyzes I've read, or that it is artificial in origin,
or or I guess you know, we're a one in
I don't know how many one in a million chance
or something. Yeah, and most i've seemed like maybe one
speculation that it ultimately isn't from beyond our Solar System.
It comes I mean from the or cloud. But oh yeah,
(41:27):
multiple people have have proposed that I saw one paper
really putting the hammer down on those hypotheses, saying, it's
just really hard to explain the characteristics of this object,
including it's it's hyperbolic trajectory and everything by reference to
things within our Solar system. The main hypothesis there is
that it's like it was some kind of or cloud
(41:47):
object that got thrown out of whack due to a
hidden ninth planet. You know, that planet acts out there,
which nobody ever really finds any evidence of uh, and
so I think that is not a favorite hypothesis. Well,
that's planet Doom. That's where the robi's come from. Oh yeah,
the space mommies. There was another thing that I thought
was funny in this interview I listened to with Avy Loebe.
(42:09):
It was on some program I found on YouTube called
Event Horizon. But anyway, so Lobe says, he makes this comparison.
He says, you know, when when you're looking at a mum,
it's kind of like you're walking on the beach and
you're picking up seashells and then you come across a
plastic bottle. It's unlike the things around it. It seems
like it could have been artificial in origin. And I
(42:29):
couldn't help but notice this is somewhat similar to the
argument that the English theologian William Paley made with the
watchmaker idea. You know, he says, you're walking across the
heath and you you kick your foot into a watch
You know it can't have been artificial. You know, it
can have been natural in origin. It must have been designed.
It's like the turtle on a fence post argument. Right,
I guess. So I don't know how it got there,
(42:50):
but it must have had some help. Now, as we've
said before, Ivy Lobe is certainly not just some internet
kok this is, And in fact I have not come
across any there may be this out here out there,
but I was looking around and I couldn't find any
experts disagreeing with the essential core mathematical reasoning in his paper,
(43:11):
which spends most of the time making the case that
it's plausible that this thing could be a light sale,
and that would explain what we see about it. But
of course a lot of people have taken issue with
the conclusions he draws from it, that we should conclude
it's possible that it's a light sale because people tend
to be skeptical about going to the it's aliens explanation.
(43:31):
So I guess we should move on to that. We
should look at some criticisms of this idea. Is it
really aliens this time? But let's take a break first
before we get to that. Let's keep you hanging. We'll
be right back. Thank alright, We're back, all right. So
we ended last time by saying, looking at everything we've
seen so far, should we conclude, yes, it really is
aliens this time? I think the answer is no, we
(43:54):
are not justified to conclude that. But it is true
that this object has gotten even weirder more interesting, and
there there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, there's nothing
wrong with the mystery. Yeah. Love has mentioned uh in
in interviews, he's mentioned Sherlock Holmes. I think this might
be a bad analogy, but we'll see. Yeah, he he
(44:15):
uh he said. He points out the Holmes quote that
is tossed around a lot. When you have eliminated the impossible,
whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And um,
you know, I think it's perhaps, based on what I've
looked at, it's evens like it's a stretch to say
that we've really ruled out all possibilities. You know, I
don't think so at all. He to make that quote work,
(44:37):
he would have to be once you have eliminated the improbable,
or something like that. Yeah. I should also point this
is one of those quotes. The Sherlock Holmes quote is
often used as a way to prop up improbable ideas
by other individuals and uh And as much as we
respect Sherlock Holmes as a fictional bastion of logic, I
think we should always remember that his creator was personally
(44:59):
taken in by a lot supernatural nonsense later on in
his life. Well, which you know that's a part of
that of course, is just a lesson that so many
of us are susceptible to that kind of thing. But also,
let's not confused shell like homes with the real person. Right,
So before we look at some the major criticisms of
(45:19):
this idea, uh, let's let's refresh on the main arguments
that Mumu is a light sale. First of all, you've
got the increase in its speed, which would be consistent
with commentary outgassing, but we couldn't see any sign of
commentary outgassing. Then you've got its weird shape, low temperature,
high reflectivity, all would be consistent with the strange shape
(45:42):
and reflectivity of a light sale. Plus the authors do
all these calculations to show that a hypothetical light sale
would be able to survive the interstellar journey and produce
the results we've observed. And they point out the fact
that it's spin period doesn't appear to change, and they say,
so if it's out gassing, if jets of gas are
coming off of it to give it the speed boost,
(46:04):
shouldn't that have changed the way the object was tumbling
or rotating in space? And we didn't see any evidence
of that. We didn't see any evidence of a change
in the tumbling pattern. Now, one critic I found was
quoted consulted by an article in NBC News, and this
critic was a Core and Baylor Jones, and astronomer at
the Max Plank Institute in Heidelberg, Germany. And Baylor Jones
(46:26):
started with a general comment saying, in science we must
ask ourselves where is the evidence, not where is the
lack of evidence, so that I can fit any hypothesis
that I like. And specifically, what Baylor Jones pointed out
that I thought was a good point was about the
tumbling motion of the spacecraft. Baylor Jones said, quote, why
send a spacecraft which is doing this? If it were
(46:48):
a spacecraft that's this tumbling would make it impossible to
keep any instruments pointed at the Earth. Of course, one
could now say it was an accident, or the aliens
did this to deceive us. One can always come up
with increasingly implausible suggestions that have no evidence in order
to maintain an idea. Well, but then again, who says
that they're interested in Earth. I mean that's well, I mean,
(47:11):
if it was an interstellar probe, what what would it
be doing if it was not trying to look for something? Yeah,
but not necessarily Earth? Right, Well, I mean what applies
to Earth would apply to anything there to see us? Right,
if it's stumbling, why would if it's stumbling, it's going
to have trouble looking at anything in particular. I mean
(47:32):
that's assuming the ship is functioning correctly and it's not
in a catastrophic spin. Right. Well, this is something that
the Lobe and Bali point out in their paper. They're like, well,
you know, maybe we shouldn't assume that it is a
functioning spacecraft. This could be a long dead, long derelict
piece of technology, and good things always come of derrelic spaceships.
(47:55):
Seen enough films to know that. But that would explain
several things. That would explain why doesn't appear to be
emitting any kind of radio signals, why it's tumbling, all
that kind of stuff. Now here's another set of criticisms.
I thought this was really good. Actually, Robert, do you
ever watch the uh the PBS Space Time show. Yes,
I've checked this out before. Yeah, So the host of
(48:16):
PBS Spacetime, which is like a video series, is the
astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd. I think he's Australian and I liked
his take on this. I thought he had a smart,
measured take. Of course, he's one of these people you
can trust not to jump to the it's aliens conclusion,
right right, he stands by the the thing it's never
aliens until it is. Yeah, And I thought his analysis
(48:38):
was pretty good. So he you know, basically he points
out that most of this light sale hypothesis would kind
of fall apart if there was just direct evidence of
out gassing. Right, So is it possible that this could
be a comet like object getting a speed boost from
outgassing in a way that's invisible to us as far
as we know. Sure, sure, that's possible. The authors of
(48:58):
that June ten paper that we mentioned earlier, they hypothesized
that either it's a comet with little to no dust
or large grains of dust that reflect less light than
many smaller grains. And so what about the fact that
the hypothetical outgassing hasn't changed the spin period of the object. Well,
that is perhaps harder to explain. But O'Dowd says, you know,
(49:19):
nobody has shown proof that the outgassing must change the
tumbling pattern in an observable way, so this argument really
doesn't sense it yet, even though it does seem weird. Well,
how about that strange elongated shape, O'Dowd says here, you know,
maybe it was created in some kind of odd event.
Think of that paper we mentioned earlier about the fracturing
of a planet due to tidal disruption from a red
(49:42):
dwarf star and then ejection from a binary system. You
can think about that maybe producing a weird shaped object
in space. Or maybe this object was somehow broken apart
as it was traveling and then reformed in an elongated
shape due to gravity during its travels through space. Something
like that. We we can't rule that out. What about
this fact we mentioned earlier that we would expect interstellar
(50:04):
debried to be too rare for us to have encountered
in the way we encountered this one, O'Dowd here says,
you know, first of all, maybe we just got lucky.
You can't ever rule that out, though I don't really
think that's a good option to resort to, since it
is by definition unlikely. Yeah, I mean you you're supposed
to approach things where along the lines that there's there's
nothing special about the about the about the Earth perspective,
(50:27):
about the human perspective. Yeah, if you're if you're saying,
maybe we just got lucky, I'm not sure that's a
better explanation than it's aliens. But the other ones. Okay,
he here we go. Maybe it's actually from inside our
Solar system somehow. For example, maybe this thing we mentioned earlier,
that it's some hidden ninth planet out there. It's sent
the object on this fast rejectory. Though as I mentioned,
(50:49):
i've seen papers tearing apart this hypothesis. It's really hard
to explain things about this object if it came from here,
So that doesn't seem very likely. Then the last option,
this does seem maybe like the one we should be
looking at. Maybe there's just a lot more interstellar junk
than we thought. Maybe, for example, stars at the end
of their life tend to shed comments in their or
(51:10):
cloud and just pump a ton of volatile stuff into
interstellar space. Another thing O'Dowd points out that I think
is a good point is this, if you just assume
that this is a broken probe that randomly entered our
Solar system traveling through interstellar space, and is not some
kind of functioning functional object. You would have to assume,
(51:31):
much like the interstellar space debriefing, that there are just
tons of these broken probes out there. Right, he gives
the number that you you'd have to expect that there's
like ten to the fifteen of them per star in
the Milky Way. That's just probes coming out the gills.
Why would there be that many probes. Also, one more
point he makes, and I think this might actually be
his best point. Uh, it's that though Mumu is moving
(51:56):
very fast by solar system standards, is actually moving very
slow by mature light sale standards. The whole point of
a light sale is that over time it can build
up speeds much greater than any known rocket based propulsion
up to you know, large fractions of the speed of light,
like the speed of light or something. That that's why
you would have a light sale for long distance and
(52:17):
interstellar travel. Donkey Kong in the early stages sonic long
term stages. Yeah, it's supposed to build up to this
incredible speed, which was you know, a move was fast,
but it wasn't anything like that. So if it were
a light sale probe, why was it going so slow? Now,
for any of these and there's some indication that Lobe
(52:38):
actually does this, for any of these criticisms, you could say, well,
maybe the aliens were just trying to disguise it, you know,
they're trying to make it look not like a probe.
What if it was tumbling to discourage us from thinking
it's an alien probe. What if it's going slow to
discourage us from thinking it's an alien probe. That's the
kind of thing that you know, that that makes it
kind of unfalsifiable. You can't rule out explanations like that.
(53:00):
But that's also just not a good way to think
about explanations. I mean, it's a fun way to think
about it, um, but you know, but by that logic,
you can believe almost anything about anything. You can always
hypothesize that there's intention behind not wanting something to seem
like what it is. Right. You see this though in
a lot of paranoid thinking and in conspiracy theory thinking,
(53:23):
where yeah, if you assume that everyone is lying to you,
then pretty much any fantastic model you're trying to present
as possible. That's what they want you to think. Man.
You know, so like, yeah, if you measured the contents
of a contrail on an airplane and you find it's
nothing but water vapor, they're like, well that you know,
they're just trying to their spring water vapor up there
to distract you from the times it's not water vapor.
(53:46):
I mean, anytime there's intentions and deception behind your explanation
of something, you can resort to that to explain why
it doesn't look the way it should if you're right.
An At the same time, I mean, you do have
to acknowledge that if to a certain extent it would
make sense to make your probe inconspicuous or not so
conspicuous that it would demand, you know, enormous efforts to
(54:10):
chase after it. I wonder if, I mean, here's a
question I haven't fully considered. Would there just be better,
simpler ways of making the same kind of probe inconspicuous?
I mean, couldn't you have probably made it in such
a way that we wouldn't have detected it in the
first place. I don't know, but maybe yeah. I mean,
of course, it depends on the how technologically advanced a
(54:34):
given civilization within a given star system would happen to
be right, because certainly there are plenty of models of
human civilization that would never have seen Mulla Mula, and
then conceivably there are versions of our future. There are
future possibilities in which we could easily check it out.
If you imagine this did come from another star system,
(54:57):
it would have to have been sent long before there
was anything like technological civilization on Earth. So it could
not be that like they heard our radio signals and
responded by sending a probe, right, and then they certainly
couldn't anticipate our level of our specifically our level of
technological advance. Yeah, it appears this thing has been out
there for thousands, millions of years. So again it comes
(55:18):
and it comes back to the fact that we shouldn't
take ourselves too seriously in trying to figure out what
this is. You know, an astrophysicist that I follow on Twitter,
Katie mack, I saw in an article that she had
some tweets that got highlighted The thought were very insightful
about research of this kind, and she she was just
basically trying to explain what causes research like this to
(55:41):
be published. Not what I'm saying, this shouldn't have been published.
But uh, you know, generally most astrophysicists are not going
to look at this and be convinced that it's aliens.
And yet at the same time we keep seeing things
like this. So she points out how you know, there's really,
for an astrophysicists not much of a downside to publishing
something like this. It's interesting and it gets you attention
(56:04):
as long as you're not fudging the numbers or something,
as long as you know your underlying logic is there.
Even if it doesn't justify the conclusion that it's aliens,
You're you're showing that something is not ruled out by
what we know. So you end up with something that
she calls quote not obviously wrong and also huge if true.
(56:24):
And so the you know, the chance that this will
backfire and really hurt your career is kind of low
because you've basically you've done your homework correctly in publishing
this paper. But there's also a slight chance that maybe
it turns out it is aliens and you were the
first person to say so, and then they name it
after you, right, And so I think that's an interesting
way of thinking about it. I don't know what our
(56:47):
base level of skepticism about aliens explanations should be, because
obviously I tend to be of the skeptical nature and
to not think, oh, yeah, it's aliens. But also I
don't think aliens explanation are on the same level as
saying like it's a ghost or something not at all.
So so what what is the bar of entry for
explanations that invoke extraterrestrial artificial origins of things? I mean,
(57:12):
as extraterrestrials are, depending on which experts you talk to,
arranges from possible to uh, you know, extremely likely. Where
the math gets limiting is is when you're trying to
decide if it's something that we could ever possibly encounter, right.
I mean, you can stare up at the night sky
and think to yourself, somewhere out there, there's a planet
and it has something on there that is that is
(57:34):
life like, that is life in a in a way
that is very much like life here on Earth to
some extent. But will we ever see it, will ever
see us well we ever have any knowledge of it?
Is it alive right now or is it long dead? Etcetera? Um,
you know that that's where it gets tricky. Well it
and certainly is it capable of traveling here and and
(57:56):
and and all the you know the complexities involved with
with thinking about interstellar travel, and would it even want to?
I mean, we always just assume space exploration would be
a goal of any intelligences. They've got to come home that, yeah,
I mean, we've got an out rushmore, we've got the
Grand Canyon, We've got all these great things. Really, they
want to come and see the whales. I don't know
the best way to reconcile this. I'm sure somebody out
(58:18):
there has done philosophical work on like what the what
the prior probability of aliens should be. I'm sure somebody's
got some smartass paper about how it should be zero
or something. But you know what I mean, Like, it's
it's just hard to know what your base level of
entry on these kind of questions is. How weird would
a comment have to be behaving before you start thinking
(58:41):
it's more likely that it's aliens then that it's some
weird comment, you know, Like how weird does it have
to get? But this brings me back to, you know,
ideas about the Dyson's fear. Yes, the idea that this
is the kind of cosmic megastructure you might look for,
or and not even necessarily seeing it specifically, but seeing
something that is behaving like a dicense fhear, well, techno signatures. Yeah,
(59:05):
but what happens if you do see something that matches
that techno signature? Then do you say, oops, well it's
a dicenspear, that's a that's some sort of megastructure created
by an alien civilization? Or do you or do you
then ask well, what else could be creating the signature
of a dicense fhere? What is it about the universe
that I don't understand that I'm tempted to um to
interpret as a dicense fhere? I think our fiction has
(59:28):
very been very poor at comparing us for the more
likely way that we would encounter alien technology, which is
in a in an ambiguous way. You know, it's always clear,
isn't it? Isn't it always clear? It's at least eventually clear.
And almost all sci fi stories, first contact stories, uh
(59:48):
like you you know, okay, yeah, it's definitely aliens. We're
getting a signal in English or something, or they're coming
here to put us in a pie. It's never just like, well,
we saw something really anomalous in space, and we don't
quite know how to explain it, and some people think
it's aliens and other people don't, and we never really
got a confident answer one way or another. But I
think that maybe that's the more likely scenario. We're gonna
(01:00:11):
be stuck with these mysteries and everybody arguing until the
end of time about whether it was aliens or not.
This brings me back to something Farranocchia said. Um. He
said concerning um a mulla mula quote. We probably know
as much about a mulla mula as we're ever going
to know. You know, it's it's points that it's gone forever,
it's on it's it's it's on its way out. It's
(01:00:32):
already as far from the Sun as the orbit of Saturn.
So what if that is the thing that ends up
in our history books. There was this weird comment, but
maybe according to to to some experts, it could have
been something else and we'll never know. Well, but wait
a minute, that that's what we're stuck with. The telescopes
(01:00:53):
and uh and powers of observation we have now but
if we were to get close to it again, if
we sent something out to catch it. We we we
talked earlier about how we would come back to this,
the idea of going out to catch it. Could we
learn more? I mean obviously there the answer is yes,
we could send a probe to try to catch it. Unfortunately,
with today's propulsion we would not be able to reach
it in time or at least with normal rocket based propulsion. Right. Well, basically, yeah,
(01:01:17):
so this is where we get to uh, what's what's
referred to as Project Lira. Uh. This is and now
this this is based on some information that came out
last November uh and uh and and basically this is
an ambitious scheme to reach a mua mua quote within
the time frame of a few decades. And the the
authors of this uh this paper, they concluded that quote,
(01:01:39):
although reaching the object is challenging, UH, there seemed to
be feasible options based on current and near term technology. UH.
And with this we're talking about generally they're talking about
launch dates of around with the X, with with the
you know, the expectation that if we were to push
forward with any of these efforts, there would in pitably
(01:02:00):
be delays as well. This comes, by the way, from
the Initiative for Interstellar Studies. It's a UK based not
for profit company with a strong emphasis on education and
if you live in the UK you should definitely check
out their website. They do a number of talk summer
schools and so forth. UH. Their website is I for
i S dot org. But this in this particular paper,
(01:02:22):
they looked at a few different ways of pulling this
off of chasing down the Mua mua UM, namely sending
spacecraft after it via a Jupiter fly by or a
Solar oh birth maneuver. So these are essentially gravity assists
by which a craft falls into the gravity well of
a given planet, star, or other object and then accelerates
(01:02:44):
out when its fall reaches maximum speed. They also looked
at using a few different current in near future launch
and propulsion technologies stuff coming online in the next few years,
like NASA's Space Launch System UH, SpaceX Falcon Heavy and
the space X Big Falcon Pocket. And they also touch
on solar and laser sales UH and UH. They also
touch on the prospect of Project star Shot, which we
(01:03:07):
mentioned already, and in all of this they calculate the
necessary mass of such a craft, including a shielding for
anything using a solar oh birth acceleration because it would
have to get closer to the Sun and then the
craft needs to decelerate as well as it reaches a muamua. Right,
So this is an interesting fairly in depth of the paper.
(01:03:27):
But I should also note that they ultimately present these
ideas as things we could put in place for the
next muamua. UH. This in part to the fact that
they would inevitably be to beat a LAS if we
were to push for one launch UH, and they want
to focus in the future on two to three more
specific plans that could be utilized. But I think the
most optimistic flight time that they specifically mentioned in the
(01:03:51):
paper is a potential laser sale propulsion method requiring three
point five years to launch, uh, though they mentioned that
five or even ten years maybe unrealistic, and then taking
seven years to reach the destination. So yeah, if if
we really wanted it, if if I want it, I
(01:04:13):
mean I want, But I mean, you know that's the
thing about magic megaprojects more. I it can't just just
be me that um enough people and governments there has
to there has to be a will to go after it,
and uh, yeah, I'm not sure we're there. And it
kind of comes back to the whole idea is it
conspicuous or not? Because if it were conspicuous, if there
(01:04:34):
was like a more of a solid argument that this was,
say a Darrylic spaceship that that fell into our system here,
then there would be probably more pushed to go and
check it out, or certainly more pushed to please stay
away from it because we've seen all the movies. Well,
I mean, I wonder if exploring possibilities that it could
(01:04:54):
be an alien intelligence in the most responsible way without
you know, running the Daily Mail headline, Uh, just exploring
you know what, if is it plausible? Could could you
work out the details on how it could be consistent
with an alien probe? If that it could help get
the kind of funding to study objects like this in
the future, like you're talking about, Yeah, that that could
(01:05:15):
be on the right track. Well, to go back to
the Daily Mail example, I mean, possible derelict alien spaceship
much better headline than weird comment. You know which one
is going to uh, you know, invoke the most interest,
get those dollars pouring in. Well, I mean one thing
I do want to say, though, I think in the
end I am not one over by the idea that
(01:05:35):
it is an alien probe, And to be very fair,
to be alien lobe, they're not saying it is an
alien probe. They're just they're playing with the hypothetical. They're saying,
if it were an alien probe, would it be consistent
with what we see, would it be more consistent than
it being some type of comment like object. And they
they're trying to make that case. But either way, I
(01:05:56):
think they are at least highlighting that, Hey, it'd be
a good thing to have a program to look for
techno signatures of potential alien technology, such as light sales.
I mean, we've talked before, as as you mentioned earlier,
about ways of looking for Dyson's fears out there among
the stars. We should also have ways of looking for
light sales that are traveling in the interstellar medium or
(01:06:18):
traveling through the Solar system, right, And we ultimately have
to keep updating the sort of techno signatures we're looking
for based on our own advancements. Yeah, but regardless of
whether MUA is actually one of these, it's it's at
least a good impetus to start thinking about how we
would detect these things. Yeah, and indeed how we might
respond to them, how we might go and check up
(01:06:39):
check it out, and how we might bring back artifacts
from it to to terrorize our planet that sort of.
But I yeah, I'm, I'm I'm certainly not one over
that the pro but I really I really want it
to be because that's like the most romantic thing, like
we wouldn't. I mean, that's what what you want in
(01:07:00):
life to to have lived long enough too to see
something that might be a spaceship, but not have to
deal with the consequences of it actually being one. So
if it is a robast sarcophagus and there is a
space mummy on there, what would the mummies curse on
that ship be? Like? Well, I mean, what's gonna happen?
Our beatles going to crawl out of my eyes? Um? Well,
(01:07:23):
that that kind of brings us back to our our
older episode. I'll never take your your helmet off on
an alien planet because there's a whole host of bad
things that could happen. Yeah, okay, well, yeah, so I
think my conclusion has to be probably not a probe,
probably not aliens, but it is one of the most
interesting things in space, right. It's a it's probably just
(01:07:45):
a weird comment, but in being a weird comment, it's
just it reveals that there's so much more out there
that we don't understand, you know, that we're just we're
continuing to to understand how the universe works, and and
that alone is amazing. It does not have to be
an alien spaceship to be amazing. Well said. And either way,
I think somebody out there should create a tiki drink
(01:08:09):
named the Muamua because I think there are a lot
of possibilities that you could have the the ice in
the tiki drink shaped like go a muamua. I think
that could be really interesting. So, any bar tenders listening,
baghette shaped ice, baggett shaped ice, Yeah, drop it in there.
Uh if you're so. Anyway, if you're a bar tender
out there, please create this drink and tell me about it.
The mold could double for some kind of novelty baghet
(01:08:33):
themed French drink, and they could also double for some
kind of novelty cigar themed Cuban drink. What else? What
else could you? Oh man, I don't know, but just
the hot dog drink a custom mua mua ice mold
like that. I'm surely somebody's working on that. They should
they should totally steal that idea from it. I think
i Kea already makes that. Actually, yeah, they've got these
(01:08:55):
like long ice straws. I don't know what it seems weird. Well,
I'll have to check that out anyway. Um. Either way,
I'm sure everyone has some thoughts on this particular episode,
so we would love to hear from you. Uh. In
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