Diluted Dante wrote:

Touché.

Caltech People Doing Experiments and Citing Sources Say wrote:

Alien technology? The idea of ‘Oumuamua as alien technology has been advocated in a series of papers41, 78, 79. The authors argue that the dimensions needed to explain the observed solar radiation pressure are consistent with a “solar sail.” While this fits some aspects of the observations — the basic idea of ‘Oumuamua having a highly flattened shape was previously considered17, 18 — it appears unable to explain other key aspects of the observations, and some arguments in favor of this hypothesis are simply wrong.

The key argument against the solar sail hypothesis is ‘Oumuamua’s light curve amplitude. In order for a solar sail to cause the observed non-gravitational acceleration, it needs to remain properly oriented towards the Sun. However, in order to yield the observed brightness variations, its orientation would need to be varying as viewed from Earth.

Furthermore, since the actual dimensions of the solar sail would be > 10 : 1, the orientation as viewed from Earth would need to be very nearly edge on, and remain so throughout the observations despite viewing geometry changes. It has not been shown that an orientation exists that can achieve all of these constraints imposed by the observational data.

Furthermore, as discussed earlier, the shape of ‘Oumuamua’s light curve, with broad maxima and narrow minima, is consistent with an elongated ellipsoid.

The claim78 that ‘Oumuamua must be at least ten times “shinier” than all Solar System asteroids to make the Spitzer Space Telescope data consistent with the ground based observations is incorrect. The Spitzer observations are consistent with geometric albedos 0.01 ≤ pv ≤ 0.5 3, with a most likely albedo of pv ∼ 0.1. Comets have geometric albedos of pv = 0.02 − 0.07, carbonaceous and silicate asteroids have pv = 0.05 − 0.21, and the most reflective asteroids have pv ∼ 0.5 80, 81. Thus ‘Oumuamua’s measured reflectivity of ∼ 0.1 is entirely consistent with normal Solar System small bodies.

Finally, it was argued that ‘Oumuamua was deliberately sent toward Earth based on its “unusual” kinematics and presumed scarcity41. While provocative, this argument is baseless. First, ‘Oumuamua’s trajectory is consistent with predictions22 for detectable inactive interstellar objects. Second, the measured number density cannot be claimed to be at odds with expectations because of our ignorance of the size distribution of interstellar objects.

Thus, we find no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation for ‘Oumuamua.

Roujin wrote:

I hereby challenge all the shy professors of astrophysics from harvard to defend their Oumuamua ideologies.

Roujin wrote:

No I am very weak, I will simply sit here and quote excerpts from the paper at them until they give up.

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

I saw that and didn’t even for one second not realise that I hadn’t just seen a poltergeist disaster on live tv.  Scared the fuck out of me.