An Alien Spaceship May Have Passed Through
In 2017 for the first time we humans noticed an object travelling through our solar system, that is to say an object whose velocity was such that the sun’s gravitational attraction could not capture it.
Although such a thing was new to our experience, science fiction had already predicted it. In particular Arthur Clarke’s book Rendezvous with Rama was about an alien space craft speeding through the solar system on its way to someplace else and having no interest whatsoever in us.
There are all kinds of SciFi. Clarke’s novel is called hard science fiction. We read and write this kind of SciFi to make plausible projections of what might happen within the next century or two.
Back in the real world Harvard professor Avi Loeb has recently published a book explaining that the object observed in 2017 may have been a space ship such as Clarke described. His argument is partly based on the way the object travelled through our solar system. The mathematics of space navigation tell us that using the gravity of a large object like a sun to turn a corner is a fine idea. Beyond the usefulness of the orbit taken by the object, there is evidence in what we have been able to surmise about its shape. That shape is very odd for a natural object and is consistent with the construct of an alien civilization.
The object did not call attention to itself. This is consistent with a theory of hard SciFi that says the universe is a dangerous place where older, more powerful civilizations stamp out younger up and coming ones before they have a chance to become a threat. Interstellar distances being what they are, such stamping out might take centuries rather than decades. No civilization knows if it has been targeted and therefore it is a good idea to keep as low a profile as possible.
We homo sapiens are both carelessly broadcasting signs of our own civilization into space and listening for broadcasts from others. The listening involves radio telescopes and lots of data processing. When the data processing was begun there was such a backlog of data to go through that researchers of the Search for Extraterrestial Intelligence (SETI) organization requested people like you and me to volunteer our computers. Volunteers downloaded software that took over their computers when they were not in use by their owners. During this time calculations were made for the SETI organization. After some years, this project caught up with the backlog of data and in 2019 the program was ended. SETI is still searching for signs of intelligence out there. But there is a lot of sky and the radio telescopes cannot cover very much of it at one time.
This has not prevented SciFi writers from thinking up other reasons why we might not be finding signs of an alien civilization. Maybe advanced civilizations only exist for a brief time before they self destruct. Perhaps brains evolved to conquer a planet and build a civilization like ours are insufficiently oriented towards future consequences of present actions. So when civilizations get to the stage ours is in, they unwittingly do things that kill themselves off. There are many ways this could happen, atomic wars, environmental destruction, plagues enabled by insufficient research into the effects of overcrowding, and so forth.
Obviously any civilization that dies this way hasn’t been paying attention to its SciFi writers.
By the Way
The image at the top is an artist’s rendition. All the astronomers saw was a blip. They can make some judgements about its shape by the way the blip changes color. Those judgements are not very precise. The above picture could be accurate. So could a large, very thin sail-like shape used to propel the ship with solar rays.
Added March 2021
This space visitor (it has been named “Oumuamua”) continues to draw interest and controversy. Astronomers Alan Jackson and Steven Desch of Arizona State University have another explanation. Oumauaua is a chip off a pseudo planet like Pluto from some other solar system. It consists mostly of nitrogen most of which is now gone, either from impact by cosmic rays during its long journey here or from melting (sublimating) from the heat of our sun. It accelerated after it passed sun not because of a solar sail but because of the sublimating nitrogen.
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