Various Life Forms....
Feb. 2nd, 2021 05:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblog♫Oumuamua! Doo-doo, dee-doo-doo....♫
Our New Yorker snafu appears to have cleared itself up. We wound up missing three issues including a double, but caught up with most of them online and got something like a two-month extension on the subscription, so it's all good. One of the pieces we both found fascinating in last week's issue was a review of a recent book along with some history associated with it:
On October 19, 2017, a Canadian astronomer named Robert Weryk was reviewing images captured by a telescope known as Pan-STARRS1 when he noticed something strange. The telescope is situated atop Haleakalā, a ten-thousand-foot volcanic peak on the island of Maui, and it scans the sky each night, recording the results with the world’s highest-definition camera. It’s designed to hunt for “near-Earth objects,” which are mostly asteroids whose paths bring them into our planet’s astronomical neighborhood and which travel at an average velocity of some forty thousand miles an hour. The dot of light that caught Weryk’s attention was moving more than four times that speed, at almost two hundred thousand miles per hour.
...It was an “interstellar object”—a visitor from far beyond the solar system that was just passing through. In the dry nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union, it became known as 1I/2017 U1. More evocatively, it was dubbed ‘Oumuamua (pronounced “oh-mooah-mooah”), from the Hawaiian, meaning, roughly, “scout.”
Most Veddy Respectable Scientists identified the object as being either a miniature comet or some other form of frozen hydrogen floating around the celestial neighborhood. But a Harvard astrophysicist named Avi Loeb broke with the conventional wisdom and said out loud what we've all been wondering about and maybe hoping for:
‘Oumuamua didn’t behave as an interstellar object would be expected to, Loeb argued, because it wasn’t one. It was the handiwork of an alien civilization.
In an equation-dense paper that appeared in The Astrophysical Journal Letters a year after Weryk’s discovery, Loeb and a Harvard postdoc named Shmuel Bialy proposed that ‘Oumuamua’s “non-gravitational acceleration” was most economically explained by assuming that the object was manufactured. It might be the alien equivalent of an abandoned car, “floating in interstellar space” as “debris.” Or it might be “a fully operational probe” that had been dispatched to our solar system to reconnoitre.
As anyone who's seen a mad scientist movie knows, this did not go over well with his peers, so he's now taken the tale directly to the public:
It looks, as Spock would say, fascinating. The review then gets into the even more interesting question of why, despite odds being much in favor of there being life Out There, we've yet to get at least a publicized visit. One plausible answer to that came two years ago at a workshop on the subject
held in Paris in 2019, a French researcher named Jean-Pierre Rospars proposed that aliens haven’t reached out to us because they’re keeping Earth under a “galactic quarantine.” They realize, he said, that “it would be culturally disruptive for us to learn about them.”
So, ah, the Prime Directive IS universal. Either that or the past four years have imposed another form of quarantine on us wherein their civilizations would find it culturally disruptive for THEM to learn about US. You know, Jewish Space Lasers and all that. Or along similar lines, maybe either aliens, or our own time-traveling descendants, have already been down here and found things, um, a little scary:
The piece ends with some recollections of prior explorations of these possibilities, including one going back to a 70s book called Chariots of the Gods? that got made into a quasi-documentary I remember watching on the tv back then titled In Search of Ancient Astronauts. The review reminded me that Rod Serling hosted the series, and it featured the book's Swiss author, Erich von Däniken, laying out his arguments about the evidence of prior alien visits- in pyramids, legends, and literal lines in the sand. So the reviewer sought him out all these years later:
I figured that von Däniken would be interested in the first official interstellar object, and so I got in touch with him. Now eighty-five, he lives near Interlaken, not far from a theme park he designed, which was originally called Mystery Park and then later, after a series of financial mishaps, rebranded as Jungfrau Park. The park boasts seven pavilions, one shaped like a pyramid, another like an Aztec temple.
Von Däniken told me that he had, indeed, been following the controversy over ‘Oumuamua. He tended to side with Loeb, who, he thought, was very brave.
“He needs courage and obviously he had courage,” he said. “No scientist wants to be ridiculed, and whenever they deal with U.F.O.s or extraterrestrials, they are ridiculed by the media.” But, he predicted, “the situation will change.”
Believers in such things say there are no coincidences, so make of THIS what you will: the Interlaken referred to in this piece is the one in Switzerland, but there is also a small burg of that name just outside of Ithaca (final home of Carl Sagan, also quoted in the review), and it is the Tompkins County Interlaken that is the final resting place of one Rodman E. Serling:
Just another oddity that we come across in.... The Twilight Blog:)
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Furry people, inside and out....
We finished the Fran Lebowitz miniseries last night and moved on to something else on Netflix called The Dig: a very unVoldemortian Ralph Fiennes goes in search of not-quite-as-ancient but still-pretty old things in a Suffolk, England field. While we watched, we came upon an odd pairing in the dining room:
I've seen Bronzini cuddling with Zoey fairly often, and at least once all three of them were bunched together, but this is my first sighting of him with just Evil Cat- her tolerating him and him not driving her crazy playing with her appendages. It didn't last long, but it was quite the sight.
Then this morning on walkies, I came upon another unusual sight. I’ve seen duck crossings and geese crossings and even the occasional sign for a turtle crossing, but just now, Pepper saw a squirrel crossing. Five of them in formation. Of course she went apoplectic and I let her chase one of them, which led to some interesting stares from somebody’s backyard-facing breakfast nook.
Checking out the evidence before and after the chase. Maybe I can get a book deal outta this;)
You're hilarious!
Date: 2021-02-03 11:41 am (UTC)hahahahaha
Did you make that Kirk pic? Can I lift it?
Re: You're hilarious!
Date: 2021-02-03 01:19 pm (UTC)Now the Serling grave picture IS mine- made that pilgrimage on the way to Ithaca a few years ago. Note the little tableau that grew up around the stone- one of the little rocks is inscribed "Time Enough at Last."