It’s probably an alien escape pod that ejected from their civilization when their clickbait plague reached even their scientific journal articles.
jsbisviewtiful · 17h ago
The Cold War, conspiracy theories, tabloids and the dismantling of public education really did a number on a lot of people.
Statistically speaking, intelligent life is out there. Mathematically speaking, the odds of us or them ever making contact is near 0.
bob1029 · 17h ago
> The relevance of this is that had the object indeed been discovered earlier, then there would have been some possibility that humanity could have mounted an intercept mission, a recourse that was out-of-the-question by the time 3I/ATLAS was actually detected
The only kind of intercept mission that would make sense to me from a game theory perspective is a totally blind, large scale thermonuclear weapon strike. The first thing that it wakes up to shouldn't be a harmless probe that can only phone home the bad news.
tzs · 17h ago
Here's an interesting PBS Space Time video [1], "Dark Forest: Should We NOT Contact Aliens?", that goes over some of the game theory that a civilization might want to consider when deciding how visible to allow themselves to be to others.
I guess I'll try to keep my calendar free for interstellar contact
darqis · 17h ago
is that humor?
gus_massa · 9h ago
No, it's a well known astronomer with a solid trajectory that since a few years for some reasons is seen "evidence" of aliens everywhere.
fouronnes3 · 17h ago
> clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre
is now my favourite xkcd 2326 example.
zdw · 17h ago
In many asian languages idioms of 4 characters (Chinese: Chengyu, Japanese: Yojijukugo) are used for concepts, and when many of these are packed tightly together the intent is frequently to either flaunt language ability or sound very smart.
They can also be moderately impenetrable to early language learners.
Statistically speaking, intelligent life is out there. Mathematically speaking, the odds of us or them ever making contact is near 0.
The only kind of intercept mission that would make sense to me from a game theory perspective is a totally blind, large scale thermonuclear weapon strike. The first thing that it wakes up to shouldn't be a harmless probe that can only phone home the bad news.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXYf47euE3U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1440s
I guess I'll try to keep my calendar free for interstellar contact
is now my favourite xkcd 2326 example.
They can also be moderately impenetrable to early language learners.
Nah, I'm not really into Pokemon.
https://xkcd.com/178/