Still not close enough to be anywhere near likely to happen. With FTL travel capability the chance of a visitor might drop to one maybe tens or hundreds of millions. Now if we were talking about a civilization with abilities outside of current known physics things change. Given the size of space and the time window for meeting humanity it is somewhere less than one in one million trillion. While the idea of interstellar probes visiting us is intriguing given current 'known physics' and predicted & known statistics about the universe the possibility of it being true is virtually zero. This article was originally posted on Live Science. A previous version of the story said most stars in the solar system are older than the sun the text now reads "most stars in the galaxy." The sun is the only star in our solar system. About half of these have been explained as " balloons or balloon-like entities," while the other half lack sufficient data to conclusively resolve.Įditor's note: This article was updated on Mar. Since the AARO's founding last summer, the office has opened more than 360 new investigations into alleged UAP encounters reported by U.S. Still, the Pentagon has taken a renewed interest in studying unidentified objects over U.S. In 2021, a letter published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics dismissed the idea on logistical impracticalities of interstellar travel: "Given the likely cosmological timescales required to traverse between stars, we conclude that it is unlikely that 'Oumuamua has been sent by an extraterrestrial civilisation and more likely that it is just an unusually shaped rock, which has happened to wander into the solar system."Īnother study, published on March 22, 2023, explains 'Oumuamua's strange movements as the likely result of hydrogen off-gassing - again refuting the alien spacecraft theory. ![]() One Perspective article published in Nature Astronomy in 2019 said the idea ‘Oumuamua was sent to Earth on purpose was "provocative" and "baseless." Since first suggesting 'Oumuamua was an alien spaceship, Loeb has faced criticism from the scientific community. Could a spacecraft 'catch up' to interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua in just 26 years? Will we ever know the true nature of 'Oumuamua, the first interstellar visitor? ![]() fans: Interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua isn't an alien spacecraft. Searching for "resembles checking our mailbox for any packages that may have accumulated over time there, even if the senders are not alive anymore," Loeb said. A habitable planet with intelligent life could have been sending out probes long before Earth formed. Most stars in the galaxy formed billions of years before the sun. The alien civilization may not even exist anymore. It would be unlikely that it could even communicate with the probes. ![]() The alien civilization that created the probes would not need to be on the mothership. From a distance, Venus, Earth and Mars would all look appealing, with Earth being of greatest interest once aliens found signatures of liquid water. "Equipped with a large surface-to-mass ratio of a parachute, technological 'dandelion seeds' could slow down in the Earth's atmosphere to avoid burnup and then pursue their objectives wherever they land," they wrote.Īliens would likely want to explore rocky planets with an atmosphere in the solar system, the authors propose. The authors suggest the dandelion seed probes could reach Earth for exploration without being detected by astronomers as they would likely be too small to reflect enough sunlight for survey telescopes to detect. In the draft paper, Loeb and Kirkpatrick looked at Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs, the government's preferred term for UFOs) confined by known physics. could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the sun or by a maneuvering capability." That coincidence inspired him "to consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions," Loeb told Live Science in an email. (Image credit: Bjorn Bakstad via Getty Images) The interloper 'Oumuamua continues to puzzle astronomers and astrophysicists.
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