Transcription
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 tug-of-war 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.