I want him to be right about these potential alien artifacts. I'm glad we are least investigating them. I understand that it's vastly more likely that these things he's been arguing about recently are just uninteresting objects. But let's at least check them out.
I agree it's very unlikely that it's something of artificial origin, but if it's just a rock it's far from uninteresting. It would be the first material recovered from outside our own solar system. It could be surprising in all kinds of ways.
Why would physics be different in a neighboring system? Are there theories here? And if it enters our system, wouldn’t it be bound to our physics? How could you even know it was different before?
Yes, it would be very interesting if there was a material in it that hasn't been discovered yet. I imagine there are conditions out there, way out there, that bring forth conditions that aren't available here that could create new things not seen here.
This is a fascinating area. Of we do have "materials" here that came from outside of our solar system because we all contain atoms with higher atomic numbers than helium, like carbon, oxygen etc, that have been through multiple solar "cycles" that gradually make higher atomic number atoms as stars go through the ages. So you and I are both made of matter that came that way, from outside the solar system.
Of course it's different if we have rocks or some such that we could tell came directly out of the solar system, and not assembled directly here.
Well no gold was formed on earth. It all comes from stars. I'm more meaning things that would be uncommon in the universe, like perhaps being very close to a pulsar for millions of years.
We don't know much, but I do think we know enough to say it's unlikely. We've never seen any evidence for intelligent life outside of Earth. Using Bayesian logic, that gives pretty good odds in favor of it being of natural origin.
Not that I think an alien artifact is likely either but an interesting question is whether we could recognize such an artifact if we found - especially if we found nothing but basically twisted wreckage.
Let's suppose we shoot a piece of steel in space and after one billion year it splashes into an alien ocean. Natives take it ashore. Would they be able to understand that after all the exposure to radiation and possible collisions it's not only a lump of iron, carbon and a few other elements but something made by people somewhere else? Would it look like a normal meteor or its composition and structure is different?
Not an expert but I'm pretty sure it'd be easily identifiable as artificial because of the uniform composition and regular grain structure in steel. I think it would not only be clear that it was refined because of purity but also that it was far more regular than something natural. [1]
It will certainly look unusual. It's not clear to me that it will look artificial (we are pretty bad at deciding that one), but it won't look like anything else around it.
Why are they even talking about it possibly being a spacecraft? Even if it was (and likely is) a mundane natural object of interstellar origin it would be of great scientific value to find it.
Because the UFO angle brings free publicity. Everything I’ve read of his about this sort of thing is always couched in language that makes it clear he’s not convinced it’s definitely aliens, he just wants to push a boundary and found a useful untapped stream of free PR and the funding that can bring so he writes regularly plausible science up, but plays up the Alien angle to get crowd attention… in part because he got fed up with even the suggestion that something being aliens was ridiculous when a large percentage of scientists consider the chances were completely alone in the universe to be quite low.
Just like how almost all planetary science projects are presented to the public as efforts to find life. This is just "manufacturing consent" messaging to ensure continued funding and public interest.
Hypothesizing about a billion year old alien remnant is not Loch Ness monster, it’s just discussing statistics about a phenomena we have no good statistics for - except we know it’s plausible since we already know interstellar space is already populated by two probes launched by a civilization of sentient creatures. I’d say its a topic solidly in the domain of scientific inquiry, but it’s not well defined yet since people trying to discuss it are labeled loonies (reminds me of atom theory and plate tectonics- two phenomena which were prominently ridiculed as well). Of course, ”alien studies” is a domain that is quite hard at the moment-and may always remain so.
And sure, there is lots of crazy talk around the topic. But the fact we have people trying to invent perpetual motion machines does not make every thermodynamicist and machine engineer looney.
Have you listened to any of his other talks? Do you understand his reasoning as to why he mentions aliens? He addresses stereotypical attitudes identical to yours.
It was travelling faster than the stars in our vicinity, which indicates it didn’t come from them. It was also observed to be tougher than other meteors that go through our atmosphere, indicating different materials or formation.
It’s still very unlikely, but it also raises interesting questions.
The toughness claims seem a bit overstated in some contexts, e.g. the paper linked in the post compares it to the average toughness but doesn't compare to other outliers not suspected of being artificial, while the Wikipedia article for CNEOS 2014-01-08 compares to other outliers but uses the the high end of the strength estimate.
I think trying to retrieve it is a good idea, but I also get a whiff of motivated reasoning in most articles describing how unique it is.
All of the heavier metals on earth came from outside of the solar system (such as, for instance, Tungsten). How much of the ore deposits on earth do we attribute to extraterrestrial technology? I'd wager none.
All our own technological signatures will be reduced to odd mineral deposits if we wait long enough. On a planet with active geology like Earth, tens of millions of years should be quite enough to do it.
I don’t see how they will find it given we at times struggle to find jets that have gone into the ocean and have much more data regarding their last know where about. This truly seems like a needle in a haystack
The reason why they know about it at all is because it was tracked using military equipment designed to track potential threats in the air. They know the trajectory of the fireball with very high accuracy and they can model where exactly it impacted the ocean.
Right, but they had the exact coordinates of that F-35 that fell off the carrier into the Med, which is a far shallower sea, and it still took weeks to find it.
I'd like to see them succeed, but it's just too unlikely they will find anything. Might get a few detailed undersea maps out of the effort though, but that's about it.
And there I was thinking we were talking about a space mission and not that money grab of trying to find asteroid rock pieces somewhere on the ocean floor...
> IM1 was faster than 95% of all stars in the vicinity of the Sun. In a second published paper, we also demonstrated that IM1 possessed material strength tougher than all 273 meteors in the CNEOS catalog. This makes it a true outlier, rarer than the product of 5% and 1/273, which is 0.0002.
Can someone explain why it's rarer than the product of the observations? Assuming hardness and speed are totally uncorrelated that would seem to be the maximum rareness. Only if they're anti-correlated would it be "rarer", but I don't see why that would be. (I would even naively expect them to be somewhat correlated, fragile fast things would be more likely to break apart.)
> it's probably not 1/273, it's probably 1/n where n > 273.
This is equally puzzling to me. It sounds like you're saying outliers are more likely to be extreme outliers than less extreme outliers, which is... not true.
The real number could plausibly be 1/250, after 10,000 samples. More than that would really call for an explanation: if it was 1/100, why didn't we find another one in the first 272?
Also, the real number could plausibly be 1/100,000.0, we've never seen a counterexample. There's nothing bounding the lower end of the range.
The distribution of these probabilities is substantially lower than 273. You can work it out precisely with Bayes' Theorem, if you'd like, this is a verbal explanation of how that sort of statistical reasoning proceeds.
> The distribution of these probabilities is substantially lower than 273.
There's no evidence for this, you can't just point to "there's a lot of numbers and we only saw 273 of them" to justify it. The distribution seems exactly what we're trying to determine; to me it sounds like a good example of when Bayesianism breaks down.
At Chernobyl, the reactor staff's badges registered everyone receiving the same dose of 100 rems. (Made-up number.) The maximum possible reading of the badges was 100 rems. What are the odds that they actually got only 100 rems?
It's a bit out of the way for North Korea to operate and I don't see any news of a lost sub recently or ever in that area. I'm also not sure if the value of getting a NK sub is worth the effort.
Other NK subs have been recovered in shallow waters off of South Korea because they were easy and had some intel aboard. Those factors don't seem to apply here.
