An Alien Probe

Oumuamua (O-mua-mua) is the name it was given. It's a Hawaiian word which means “messenger sent from the distant past to reach out to us.” It was some 33 million kilometers (20 million miles) from us when first discovered in October 2017, the first known interstellar object to visit our solar system.

Certainly an exciting discovery for astronomers but it has also encouraged speculations from both scientists and the general public, especially when Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard's astronomy department, speculated that a “hypothetical propulsion devise” could explain its, er, strange trajectory. Propulsion devise? Was he suggesting something artificial in origin? Loeb has not wavered in his original opinion.

It turns out that this cigar-shaped object, slightly less than a half-a-mile long, is an unusual shape for a naturally occurring asteroid. Well, could it have been a comet, as some have suggested. But others responded that it had no “out gas,” which comets have. Most curiously, Oumuamua accelerated ever so slightly as it left our solar system. Why would it have accelerated—and how? Endless questions for astronomers to ponder.

The reality is that our solar system is not isolated. Why couldn't we have been visited without anyone knowing it? It was only in 1925, not quite a hundred years ago, that half of all homes in the United States had electrical power. The first commercial airline flight in the U.S. took place in 1914 from St. Petersburg, Florida to Tampa, Florida, which is a 25 minutes automobile ride today.

In the U.S. alone, imagine all the scientific discoveries and technological advancements that have occurred in the last 100 years, which would have been unimaginable to Americans at the end of the First World War in 1918. Now consider the changes that have taken place on planet Earth in 500 years or a 1,000 years or the beginning of the Neolithic era 10,000 years ago, when we humans settled down, developed agriculture, built cities and created our cultures.

Is it conceivable, in spite of vast distances, that civilizations far more technologically advanced than ours could have visited our solar system in person without being detected or managed to do so with a very sophisticated satellite of some kind? Well, we can speculate. Now imagine a civilization 150,000 years older than ours, roughly the time we humans might have been able to recognize our own ancestors in Africa.

What might our first encounter be like? Well the track record for us humans is not especially positive in so many ways. On the other hand, our alien visitors who manage space travel could regard us as curiosities, nothing more, and decide they have more important things to do. This strikes me as the best outcome in the long run. I wouldn't want our space visitors to be searching for a new food source and we're it.

But, the more likely outcome is probably not so interesting. Our technology has far outstripped our evolutionary development. We may now have the means to turn Earth into an unlivable planet because we haven't developed the cognitive skills to avoid such total stupidity. Imagine our alien probe reporting back that Earth is merely another dead planet of no interest to anyone. Sort of like we never existed in the first place.