Techmeme Ride Home

In 2017, scientists sighted the first interstellar object, the first thing we definitively know came from outside our solar system… something that was not bound to the gravity pull of our sun. But that was just the beginning of the oddness exhibited by the object known as Oumuamua. It didn’t behave like a comet. It didn’t seem to be made of materials we expect. It was shaped in a way that nothing in nature should be shaped like. And as it curved around our sun, it actually accelerated in a way that we couldn’t account for by the laws of physics. In his new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which comes out Avi Loeb, Harvard’s top Astronomer, argues that Oumuamua was most likely an alien craft, or artifact of some kind. It likely had some sort of solar sail mechanism, and actually, suggests it might be functioning as some sort of interstellar buoy. We’re going to get into that in this episode, but stay to the end, because forget small satellites, do you know we could shoot