This mystery object may be our first visitor from another solar system

[mfcorey1]

http://wsvn.com/news/us-world/this-mystery-object-may-be-our-first-visitor-from-another-solar-system/

CNN
(CNN) — Astronomers around the world are trying to track down a small, fast-moving object that is zipping through our solar system.

Is a comet? An asteroid? NASA’s not sure. The space agency doesn’t even know where it came from, but it’s not behaving like the local space rocks and that means it may not be from our solar system.

If that’s confirmed, NASA says “it would be the first interstellar object to be observed and confirmed by astronomers.”

“We have been waiting for this day for decades,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies, said in a NASA news release. “It’s long been theorized that such objects exist — asteroids or comets moving around between the stars and occasionally passing through our solar system — but this is the first such detection. So far, everything indicates this is likely an interstellar object, but more data would help to confirm it.”

NASA says astronomers are pointing telescopes on the ground and in space at the object to get that data.

For now, the object is being called A/2017 U1. Experts think it’s less than a quarter-mile (400 meters) in diameter and it’s racing through space at 15.8 miles (25.5 kilometers) per second.

It was discovered October 19 by the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS 1 telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii.

Rob Weryk, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy, was the first to identify the object and immediately realized there was something different about it.

“Its motion could not be explained using either a normal solar system asteroid or comet orbit,” he said. “This object came from outside our solar system.”

Whatever “it” is, the object isn’t a threat to Earth.

[Buns_of_Fire]

1. It's a cookbook! nt

[DiverDave]

19. Lol

Thanks for the laugh

[Chasstev365]

29. Those Kemets seem trustworthy to me!

[C_U_L8R]

2. Is it slowing down?

[malaise]

3. They're coming to save us from Groper Don the Con

Hurry!

[ProudLib72]

4. I'm going to name it Bob

and hope it lands on the WH while Dotard is in it.

[ret5hd]

9. So you think Bob is coming to rapture trump?

It would be fitting. Bob is the figurehead of the Church of the SubGenius.

[ProudLib72]

15. Robert (Bob) Mueller

And he's going to rupture Dotard, not rapture.

[tblue37]

20. Name it George, and hug it and pet it. nt

[kydo]

38. I ain't no bunny rabbit!

[tblue37]

39. It been a few decades, but I think Lenny's pet that he named George was a mouse

(in Of Mice and Men).

[kydo]

41. Yeah, well while that is true, I saw the Lonney Tunes way before I could read

And reading Steinbeck's "Of Men and Mice" didn't happen until college. So my first encounter with this phrase occurred first for me in cartoons. When hearing the phrase I think Bugs Bunny first and "Of Mice and Men" much later.

Source - http://languagehat.com/and-call-him-george/

AND CALL HIM GEORGE.
February 23, 2010 by languagehat 83 Comments

There is a meme running around the internet that takes the form “I’m gonna love him and pet him and squeeze him and call him George” (many variations in wording, but all ending with “…and call him George”). This is ultimately based on Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, where Lenny, George’s addled sidekick, has an unfortunate habit of squeezing his pet mice to death, but there is no “name him George” involved; the proximate source of the line is a pair of cartoons, both of which play off of Steinbeck but in neither of which does the line occur as commonly cited. As a public service, I am providing the actual quotes from the cartoons, since it’s probably not going to turn up in the Yale Book of Quotations any time soon. The first is Tex Avery’s 1946 “Screwy Squirrel” cartoon “Lonesome Lenny,” in which the eponymous lonesome dog greets his new pet Screwy Squirrel with: “Hello, George! Glad to know ya, George! You’re my new little friend, George, my new little friend! What I’m gonna do is to petcha and play witcha, George.” After much wackiness: “Now I gotcha, my little friend. I’m gonna petcha and hold ya and petcha and petcha and petcha.” (Warning for the soft of heart: the cartoon does not end happily!) The second is from “The Abominable Snow Rabbit” (1961), in which Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck find themselves in the Himalayas; Daffy runs into an abominable snowman, who picks him up and says: “I will name him George and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him … and pat him and pat him … and love him and caress him…” Daffy escapes his dangerous clutches by offering him Bugs as a substitute; the snowman picks Bugs up and says “I will name him George and I will hug him and… and…” (Here‘s the video clip if anyone wants to check my transcription.) Both these are significantly different from the current version; there may be an intermediate source that I have not found.

*edited to add link.

[Turbineguy]

5. I always believed that there is intelligent life out there.

The proof lay in the fact they haven't contacted us. On the other hand there's a lot of very entertaining things going on just now. Bevis and Butthead have been replaced Trump and Kim Jong Un.

[Blue_true]

6. Star Trek and reality.

On Star Trek spaceships move at the speed of light or multiples of the speed of light. In his theory of relativity, Einstein concluded that mass goes to zero at the speed of light, so in theory it is impossible for a spaceship to reach that speed and still exist.

A more relative issue to people is that a person would be dead wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy before a spaceship reaches the speed of light due to the effects of the acceleration needed to reach that speed earlier than 1,000 years. The nearest planets than may have life are around 4.5 lightyears from us, even if a spaceship could travel at the speed of light, that ship would need 4.5 years to reach the approximately 28 trillion miles to the closest planet that may have life. Maybe God did not intend for Earthings to meet any other being from other planets.

The fastest known spaceship travelled at around 36,300 kilometer per second after a gravity sling off either the Sun or Jupiter, don't remember which.

[Thor_MN]

8. Close, but no cigar. Mass goes to infinity as one approaches the speed of light.

If mass went to zero at light speed, you wouldn't need ever increasing amounts of energy to accelerate the mass. The reason one can't get to light speed is that mass increases, therefore more energy is required to accelerate the mass.

Not sure, but it sounds like you may have time dilation backwards as well. Time slows down as one approaches light speed. Time here on earth would pass normally, but be slower for anyone on a ship traveling at a significant fraction of light speed. Put one of a set of twins on a very fast space ship, accelerate them to a high fraction of light speed, and do a spin around the solar system. The twin left on Earth would age more than the twin on the ship.

[Blue_true]

22. You are right, I got it wrong.

[Nevernose]

21. At one g acceleration it would take 1 year

About one year to get close to the speed of light.

[Blue_true]

43. Slightly less than one year. But.

No engine has been created that can smoothly accelerate from a low velocity such as g speed and get to the speed of light after many multiples of 9.8 m/s. So realistically a rocket ship traveling to the closest worlds that may have life is likely to travel at a constant speed, let's say the solar system escape velocity of around 43,000-54,000 m/s - at that speed it would many years just to travel one light year. Now, if rocket ships can be built that smoothly accelerate like a car does say from 20mph to 120 mph and can keep accelerating to an enormous speed then yes, Proxima A and Proxima B planets may be reachable in a few years, like 2-5 years.

The speed of light is 299,792,458 m/s, if a spaceship can be invented that accelerated smoothly in multiples of 30,000 m/s up to the speed of light then humanoids in the ship won't be killed by the acceleration. Other things like cosmic rays may kill them if there is no protection against those hazards.

Thanks for your thoughts, I think about stuff like this but often get sloppy in my analysis.

[Nevernose]

44. The tilda symbol stopped working on DU

And then all punctuation in titles stopped working today. Other people have had similar issues, but none of us had the same. Point being, it was supposed to read as “take about a year.”

You weren’t wrong about the mass and energy being zero, either. I think the terminology there becomes more philosophical than mathematical or technical. IIRC, the reason we can’t actually travel the speed of light is that the faster we go, the more mass we gain; at the speed of light, we’d have infinite mass; it would require infinite energy to move infinite mass. Since a synonym for “infinite mass and energy” is “all of reality,” traveling that fast is impossible both logistically (getting enough energy) and logically (you can’t move anywhere if you’re everything all at once).

Zero and infinity might be conceptual opposites, but might as well be the same thing when discussing traveling at the speed of light: it’s literally everything and nothing all at once.

Of course, that’s just my limited understanding of the Newtonian/Einsteinian understanding. With gravitational waves and dark energy and who-knows-what-else, it’s gonna take an Arthur C. Clarke to invent faster than light travel.

Honestly, what I think is far more likely and practical? Replicants. We’re not going use cryosleep like in Alien or warp drive like in Star Trek. We don’t have the technology to transfer a human consciousness into a computer currently, nor can build a body (robotic or flesh) from scratch. But that’s today.

Technology really is improving exponentially with time. My grandmother was born in the last year of the nineteenth century and lived almost until this one started. When she was little, her family were mostly-self-sufficient farmers with nothing more technologically advanced than a blacksmith could have made, maybe a winding clock, but certainly no electricity or phone or anything remotely like that (she rode the stagecoach into Dallas twice a year until she was ten). By the time she died, “harnessing the atom” and “putting a man on another planet” were blase, quaint even; everyone on the planet was buying cell phones and microwaves and laser-beam devices as fast as they could; we were well on our way to recording every single shred of human knowledge ever recorded — transcriptions of every cuneiform tablet or hieroglyph-inscribed pyramid, menus from unpopular Bangkok restaurants from the 1920s, bad Supernatural fanfic, good Supetnatural fanfic. All of it. In our pockets right now.

So in another hundred years? It’s easily conceivable that — while I’ll definitely be dead — my hypothetical grandchildren will be able to put a copy of their mind on a hard drive. Put it in sleep mode, put it on a spaceship, send it into the void. A thousand years later, when it gets to Vulva Prime or wherever it was going, it wakes up and transfers a copy of the consciousness into a robot body. Ten robot bodies, because why not? With wings and karate skills, too. Because we can.

Immortality plus the advantages of a computer. Continuously upgradeable, improving. Able to travel virtually anywhere, because time is no longer a factor. We won’t even stop to ask if we’re dreaming of electric sheep.

Yeah. So. Got a little long-winded there, sorry. Dealing with some anxiety and I started ranting about other shit.

Tl;dr. Science is cool, and we can use conscious robots for interstellar travel.

[Blue_true]

46. You covered interesting stuff.

Before I start, I need to make you sick. Imagine sending Donald Trump to the speed of light and getting his plasm over everything. Yech!!!!

I think the most likely form of space travel will be transposition, where a human is turned into plasma then converted back to humans when they get to where they are going. The plasma could be protected from things like high energy particles. Star Trek alluded to this where people were put into a chamber that converted them back and forth from human to plasma.

The information on your mom's life is interesting, imagine being able to go back in time to when she was a girl and seeing the things that she saw.

On space travel, the most likely spaceships will travel at a fraction of the speed of light, say 1/4 to 1/3. Space missions to the nearest planets will be 15-20 year affairs. You make a point about technology, we sitting here today can't imagine what will exist even 25 years from now.

I am rewriting a space fantasy novel, having discussions with poster like you and the other poster really has sharpened my logic and should cause me to do a better job on the novel.

[WhiskeyGrinder]

7. I'm excited about this.

[exboyfil]

10. Shout out to Arthur C. Clarke

It is Rama.

[JHB]

13. +1

[Liberal In Texas]

23. Beat me to it.

First thing I thought of.

[Canoe52]

36. One of my favorites! nt

[H2O Man]

11. I anticipated

a picture of Roger Stone.

[Laffy Kat]

12. One of my "must knows" before I slip down the mortal coil...

Is whether there is other life out there. I would die a happy soul knowing for sure. Even if they're hostile. I don't care.

[matt819]

14. Sounds like

It might be the TARDIS.

[kentuck]

16. Nothing important.

Just a visitor from another universe doing a fly-by.

They are sending a message.

[Binkie The Clown]

17. The Borg, no doubt.

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

[Stuart G]

26. OH NO...Another reference to .. "Star Trek the Next Generation" yes indeed..!! no text.

[Irish_Dem]

18. It's my space Uber coming to take me home. I am definitely not from this planet.

My home planet is kind, loving, rational, and sensible.

[lindysalsagal]

24. Drumpft's Mother Ship: Very small steering controls.

They're taking pity on us and dragging his ass outta here.

[Stuart G]

25. And how do they know that they, (the aliens) haven't been here before?

Of course, if they, the aliens, were here before, they would have landed and flew in with some invisible shield to protect them from those low life people that they were visiting. As they were walking around, they would take the appearance of humans so as not to be suspicious. But, what is more important is this: after a few days of taking a look at this place, (assuming that they came here at warp speed, that is faster than the speed of light) they would have easily figured out..these beings are totally nuts and weird. Let's get out of here as fast as we can. We need to get out of this solar system where we might be "safe" ...............far away from this planet..

As they were taking off,, they are likely to yell out..."High Ho.. Silver..and Away"

[PoliticAverse]

27. ...

[Stuart G]

28. Of course it is "Aliens" ...are they good or bad?

Are they...."The Day the Earth Stood Still" ?

Or is it .....Independence Day?

Which one?...or a combo?...When will we find out?...stay tune for next weeks show, where we will find out the future of the planet earth. or with another title...."Are the Romulans and the Klingongs Coming to Take Us Away?"

or is it the "Borg" coming To Just Take Us?

[delisen]

30. Looks like they are trying to zoom through fast.

Maybe take a few pictures on the run.

[Takket]

31. Winnebego!!!!!!!!!

[Stuart G]

32. Isn't that from ...Spaceballs??? not sure??

or did you make that one up yourself???

[Takket]

33. Spaceballs is correct!

and the bumper sticker reads "I <heart> Uranus"

lol

[Stuart G]

34. AbOUT .........Intelligent Life on Other Planets....

Back in the day, there was a discussion in one of my college classes..The Professor, (can't remember his name) said..........that the chances that there was NO INTELLIGENT LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE..MORE ADVANCED THAN US.....that the chances of no intelligent life.. were one to the 32nd power. or something like 1..with 100 zeros after it..

He said there had to be intelligent life out there..given the number of solar systems in the galaxy and the millions of planets out there. That at least some, had advanced farther than us....Who knows??? If they could talk to us, what would they say?..

By some incredible piece of luck, and you could go back in time, and talk to the cave people..in their language, say 10,000 years ago..ok, what would you say?..........get the picture???

[RKP5637]

35. "Whatever it is, the object isn't a threat to Earth" until the retro's fire

and it takes aim!

[librechik]

37. closer examination reveals more details of the small object

?w=150&h=114

[lpbk2713]

40. Klaatu barata nikto.

[hunter]

42. It wouldn't be preposterous to claim our solar system was seeded from life elsewhere.

Heck, life on earth may have been seeded from earlier life on Mars.

Or maybe life is just inevitable in this universe.

A lot of stuff can happen when you are counting years by the billions.

[greyl]

45. Yep.

https://cosmicseed.com/dust-from-the-great-beyond/