Is It A Comet or Alien Technology?

Aliens paying us a visit from another

star system. What's up with that?

Let's go back a few thousand years.

Consider that

people tried to understand the world

around them. And in so doing, every time

they got to a point that they didn't

understand,

in came the power of a god. Let's go

back to ancient Greece. Storms rose up

in the seas. Where did that come from?

How? Why? Do they have meteorology? No.

Do they understand barometric pressure?

No. Did they know anything about the

atmosphere? No. But they knew the will

of Poseidon. Poseidon would be rage

enraged by the behavior of people on the

shores. And that would account for what

they saw.

This assigning the glory and the wrath

of a deity to things we don't understand

is coined by philosophers as the god of

the gaps. It's actually got quite a

noble history when you think of it. One

of the greatest works of science ever

is Principia Mathematica. In there,

Newton unleashes the three laws of

motion, the laws of gravity. He's

figures out how the solar system works.

He's figuring out how do these planets

sustain their orbits. Are they pulling

on each other and in what way and how?

He figures all this out. But wait a

minute. Every time Earth goes around the

backside between the sun and Jupiter,

Jupiter's going to tug on it a little

bit. Comes back around again. Jupiter

tugs on it again. Jupiter has a strong

gravity. What's going to ultimately

happen to Earth's orbit in this

scenario? Earth's orbit will become more

and more elongated. The gravitational

tugofwar between the sun and Jupiter

will yank Earth out of its orbit,

destabilizing the solar system. Not only

Earth, the other planets as well. He

said, "Oh my gosh, this will take time,

but clearly the solar system is stable."

So he writes, "I don't can't understand

why it's stable cuz I know my equations

work.

So God must step in every now and then

to fix things." Now, you got to be

badass to invoke God at the limits of

your knowledge when you explain so much

with the equations you wrote. That by

Newton was a god of the gaps invocation.

He brought in God when there was

something about the natural world could

not explain and did not know. Notice

Newton did not invoke God to explain the

force of attraction between Earth and

the moon. He he nailed that. He wrote

down that equation that was working. He

didn't invoke God when he talked about

his three laws of motion. Force equals

mass times acceleration. That works. We

still use it today. He only invoked God

at the limits of his knowledge. So,

let's fast forward to the second half of

the 20th century on into the 21st

century. What happens? Well, we have

Hollywood. Nothing better than a good

sci-fi movie with aliens in it. And

aliens. They're aliens. So, they got

better technology than us, better

spaceships. They do stuff we can't do.

It appears to me that we live in a time

where God of the gaps has been

supplanted by alien of the gaps. I've

had people come up to me and say, "Where

did the pyramids come from?" And I say,

"Well, thinking the ancient Egyptians

built it. How could they have possibly

built that? That's too complicated. They

must have gotten help from aliens. Alien

of the gaps." So, this urge is strong

and I I get it and I I I feel it and I

want it to be true as well. I don't want

to use it as a substitute

for continuing to ask questions about

what you're looking at. I don't want to

use it as a substitute for the simple

statement, I don't know what it is.

That's powerful. If you don't know how

to say, "I don't know." That means

you're going to walk through life

requiring answers to everything. And you

know something, some of those answers,

many of those answers will just be shown

to be wrong because you are invoking an

answer when there isn't evidence to

support it. We see things in the sky we

can't explain. There's a light in the

sky and it moves rapidly. I I don't know

what it is. Investigate it. Let's get

more data. I'm all in. But the moment

you say, "I don't know what I'm looking

at,

therefore I know what I'm looking at.

I'm looking at aliens." That is a leap.

Oh my gosh, that's a leap.

And it's a leap I'm not prepared to

take. What's gotten a lot of attention

of late, deservedly, is we've had now

three visitors from interstellar space.

Love it. We've been looking for these

puppies for decades, by the way.

Everything in the solar system, the

planets, the moons, the comets, the

asteroids, all of it. If you calculate

how much energy it has,

it is contained within the solar system.

None of these objects have enough energy

to escape the gravitational pole of the

sun. The sun owns them. That's our

family. It's the solar system. So, we

learn about the planets. We go there. We

land on them. We land on the moons. We

land on the on the asteroid. We landed

on comets. We get data. So, we get a

sense of what these objects are. That

goes into our cataloges. We form our

hypotheses. We have some theories that

get tested. That's how science works.

Now, we have visitor from another star

system. Again, we've been looking for

these for decades. We expected it to

show up at some point. Here's the solar

system in orbit around the center of the

galaxy, drifting through space.

Something's bound to visit us that

escaped another star system. By the way,

models for the formation of our solar

system suggest that we might have been

born with many more planets than eight.

Upwards of a dozen, 15, 20, possibly as

many as 30 planets started in this solar

system. many of which had unstable

orbits, crashed into Jupiter, crashed in

the sun, or got ejected. You get ejected

with higher speed that could be

contained by the sun. They're out there

somewhere. We think that happens in

every star system that formed. So, some

of that junk at some point is likely to

pass through our star system, the solar

system. Okay, so three objects have been

found in the last decade. Okay, three of

them. And

they've had some anomalous features.

Fun. I love it. The first of these MUA

MUA discovered with telescopes in

Hawaii. That's a Hawaiian word for first

scout basically. So that as it came

through the solar system, we said all

right, we know what trajectory an object

with that speed and that direction

coming in should take as it rounds the

sun. Then there was the actual

trajectory which was different like whoa

whoa. Well, comets have a way of

outgassing when they get near the sun,

and that puts an extra little sort of

force on their arc of motion that has

them move in ways that are not purely

gravitational. And that's true for all

comets. So, we maybe that's outgassing,

but suppose you look and there's no

outgassing. So, what's going on? Well,

that's fun.

We don't understand it. Not initially.

So, what's your first thought? Is it

aliens? That could be. Like I said, it's

not my first thought. It I promise you

it will be my last thought, but it's not

not in the list. It's in the list. This

is way down based on the history of

trying to understand things that we

don't understand. We have two more

objects that have come through and they

have some weird properties. The

brightness, the rotation rate, and so

they don't match some of our models for

what comets and asteroids should do.

Whatever anomalous behavior these

objects exhibit, I'm delighted that

they're finally in the catalog and we'll

figure it out one day, maybe.

And but while my first thought is not

that it's aliens,

I promise you that is one of my

thoughts, but it'll be last on the list.

It's easier for me to recognize

that interstellar objects are

fundamentally different from anything

we've studied in the solar system

before. So we have to

derive a new understanding

of what an object can be as it moves

from one star system to the next.

It's easier for me to think this is a

new kind of object that requires way

more study than we've given it thus far

than to say aliens did it. aliens.

Based on my read of history, and I do a

lot of reading of history, I have a

certain resistance to swapping out God

of the Gaps and replacing it with Alien

of the Gaps.

That's just me. Regardless,

in science, you always want more data.

Always. You need more data. You want

better data. You want different kinds of

data, different kinds of telescopes,

different kinds of observations,

different people observing it. Often a

person might have a bias that can

influence how they interpret what they

see or how they even measured what they

see. The good thing about science is we

have built-in error-checking mechanisms.

One of them is peer review. That's one

of them. Someone looks over your

shoulder say, "What are you doing?"

That's one kind of peer review. Street

peer review. What the hell are you

doing?

No, it's more formal than that

obviously, but you get someone else to

sort of check up on you. They're really

checking for your biases because as

science, we know we are humans just like

anybody else and we carry biases. So,

you don't want your bias creeping into

either your acquisition of data, your

analysis of the data, or your

interpretation of the data because some

other scientists will call that out.

You wanted to be sort of as straight as

you can.

And once you did all your homework,

sure, you can speculate. Go ahead. But

the speculation should trigger more

observations. Good speculations will do

that. You want to know what's up with

that aliens coming to visit Earth?

Maybe,

but based on my read of history,

unlikely.

And that's another edition of Star

Talks. What's up with that? Till next

time, keep looking up.