1919: Interstellar Asteroid

[gmalivuk]

Alt-Text: Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

Waited for the dick joke. Was disappointed.

[sfmans]

Did anyone check the asteroid to see if it had a disc of music nailed to its side?

Every time humanity fires something out into the deep we send a compilation along with it, but the first chance we get to see if we’ve been sent a mixtape back and nobody even bothers checking. We’ll never set up a regular tape exchange with that kind of attitude.

[chenille]

My guess is a couple of Rama cylinders glued end-to-end.

[Pfhorrest]

Waited for the dick joke. Was disappointed.

The eggplant emoji is a dick joke.

[rhomboidal]

It might be a giant space poop -- an "assteroid." But from what cosmic creature? We can only guess...

[Soupspoon]

Did anyone check the asteroid to see if it had a disc of music nailed to its side?

Every time humanity fires something out into the deep we send a compilation along with it, but the first chance we get to see if we’ve been sent a mixtape back and nobody even bothers checking. We’ll never set up a regular tape exchange with that kind of attitude.

They upped the game with the whole asteroid?

Spoiler:

(My title-text to that is: Scrawled on the label is "Vic Reeves Big Night Out" in black eye-liner pencil. - Almost true story!)

[Thibaw]

Also there is no dust cloud (or only a very, very light one) around it which is kind of unusual. I would say it is definately a spaceship. Maybe from a civ with a very strict prime directive regarding first contact. So they all suicided one they realised we are here.

[Eternal Density]

I don't really follow Apple news but I'm still surprised we're up to that many iPhones.

[pkcommando]

The most important thing, if we're to fling asteroids back, is to make sure ours is bigger.

[cellocgw]

With apologies to Groucho,

sometimes an asteroid is just an asteroid.

[NemeSys]

With apologies to Groucho,

sometimes an asteroid is just an asteroid.

Wasn't that Sigmund Freud?

As for the asteroid itself, I'm waiting to see if the flat earth loonies claim this as some sort of proof...

[rmsgrey]

My guess is a couple of Rama cylinders glued end-to-end.

Only two? That seems unlikely...

[cellocgw]

My guess is a couple of Rama cylinders glued end-to-end.

That would suggest that ISRO is way ahead of us

[cheezehog]

Saw this yesterday and thought it was quite a funny idea

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/com ... ow_itself/

[markfiend]

Saw this yesterday and thought it was quite a funny idea

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/com ... ow_itself/

At estimated size of 180m x 30m x 30m it's more likely to be a GCU, or some kind of VFP/OU. GSVs are big.

[svenman]

It's as if real life is providing us with a mixture of Rendezvous with Rama and Contact (up to now at least).

I'll be very interested in how this continues to play out.

[netsplit]

I know it's probably not aliens, but why can't it be aliens just this once?

[svenman]

I know it's probably not aliens, but why can't it be aliens just this once?

Bet that's what you say every time an interstellar asteroid enters our solar system...

[somitomi]

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

I say send a comet just for the sake of one-upping them.

As for the asteroid itself, I'm waiting to see if the flat earth loonies claim this as some sort of proof...

I don't think so, but the Rod Earth Society might get a little too excited...

[Soupspoon]

I know it's probably not aliens, but why can't it be aliens just this once?

I'm not saying there's a meme for this occasion. But there's a meme for this occasion.

[cheezehog]

Saw this yesterday and thought it was quite a funny idea

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/com ... ow_itself/

At estimated size of 180m x 30m x 30m it's more likely to be a GCU, or some kind of VFP/OU. GSVs are big.

Yes indeed, some guys on reddit said similar stuff. I just thought y'all might get a kick out of that reddit thread is all

[Keyman]

What a fun day for me. My two favorite fora are talking the same subject.
So if you do want to join in some other "irresponsible specializations" the APOD folk are having some fun with it too.
For the "real" picture:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171122.html

Discussion threads here:
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=37779

and here is an earlier thread from shortly after the annoucment of the discovery:
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=37698

[somitomi]

My guess is a couple of Rama cylinders glued end-to-end.

Or maybe something like Vanguard. Has anyone looked for a lifeboat going to somewhere like Titan?

[jewish_scientist]

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

This seems unnecessary to me. Solar systems are so far apart that they are basically never interact, meaning that they are closed systems. The Law of Conservation of Mass says that any closed system must maintain a constant mass. Therefore, whenever an asteroid enters our solar system, an asteroid from our solar system must leave. When you take into account the Law of Conservation of Momentum, then you realize that the exiting asteroid must be headed to wherever the entering asteroid came from. That's just science.

[markfiend]

Saw this yesterday and thought it was quite a funny idea

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheCulture/com ... ow_itself/

At estimated size of 180m x 30m x 30m it's more likely to be a GCU, or some kind of VFP/OU. GSVs are big.

Yes indeed, some guys on reddit said similar stuff. I just thought y'all might get a kick out of that reddit thread is all

Yup thanks

[jeanrenaud]

She forgot the cigar-shaped alien probe from "Star Trek 4 - The voyage home". The one that was calling for whales, and Kirk and his team had to go back in time to bring a whale with them to the future.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1RBGvyhkOU

These old films are so more slow-paced than today films.

[Soupspoon]

(Incidentally, I've long been meaning to compare the ST4 joyous finale music directly against the similar Bakshi LOTR theme. I must dig them both up at the same time, at some point. Just to see how much I've deluded myself as to their similarity.)

[rmsgrey]

Every time we detect an asteroid from outside the Solar System, we should immediately launch a mission to fling one of our asteroids back in the direction it came from.

This seems unnecessary to me. Solar systems are so far apart that they are basically never interact, meaning that they are closed systems. The Law of Conservation of Mass says that any closed system must maintain a constant mass. Therefore, whenever an asteroid enters our solar system, an asteroid from our solar system must leave. When you take into account the Law of Conservation of Momentum, then you realize that the exiting asteroid must be headed to wherever the entering asteroid came from. That's just science.

I think you flipped a sign in your momentum calculations, and ignored a rounding error earlier in your reasoning

[da Doctah]

At estimated size of 180m x 30m x 30m it's more likely to be a GCU,

No way. Grand Canyon University is way bigger than that.

[Toom1275]

"I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.
Why not? Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.
Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course.
Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.
Therefore, the surface must be wet.
Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.
If there's a swamp, there's ferns.
If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs."
- Carl Sagan, on the fallacy of speculation

[gd1]

Waited for the dick joke. Was disappointed.

The eggplant emoji is a dick joke.

Sometimes it's just a cigar. Other times it's an asteroid.

[colonel_hack]

"I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.
(Snip)
- Carl Sagan, on the fallacy of speculation

LOOK! There are no real mathematicians working on that!
- Carl Sagan on metalogic

[New User]

In Star Trek 4, I never understood why the alien probe came to Earth looking for whales. I mean, it was stated to be from really far away, and from an utterly unknown civilization, right? How did it know humpback whales lived on Earth? How did it know what they sound like, and why did it think it could communicate with them? They actually did communicate, at the end, but how? The probe didn't appear to have any kind of boom microphone. Did the whales have some sort of underwater transmitter that they used to transmit a signal through space before they went extinct, and the aliens were attempting to respond to that? Did the aliens get information about the whale's existence from some man-made source, only to ignore the possibility of communicating with the humans that created that source? From a production point of view, I think the probe was intentionally mysterious, like they never really even said if it was robotic or some kind of alien spaceship with living things inside, but still, their behavior is way out of line with typical Star Trek aliens.

[chridd]

"I can't see a thing on the surface of Venus.
Why not? Because it's covered with a dense layer of clouds.
Well, what are clouds made of? Water, of course.
Therefore, Venus must have an awful lot of water on it.
Therefore, the surface must be wet.
Well, if the surface is wet, it's probably a swamp.
If there's a swamp, there's ferns.
If there's ferns, maybe there's even dinosaurs."
- Carl Sagan, on the fallacy of speculation

...so if Venus weighs the same as a duck, we should burn it?

[Soupspoon]

In Star Trek 4, I never understood why the alien probe came to Earth looking for whales.

A prior probe had clearly found Earth in the past and established that there was intelligent life in the form of the cetations (so sometime well within the last 50 million years). Probably made contact¹. It had not detected, realised or cared about intelligent life on land (see footnote 1 for the possible species bias) and may even have left a Monolith-like device behind that we never discovered or identified as such, but somehow imbued the cetations with a racially-usable walkie-talkie (that no whale had ever told us about, because we never realised we could/should ask about it?) and/or passive monitoring to see when Uplift might be ripe for the making.

Whales die out, communications/'heartbeat-monitor-thing' go silent, presumed catastrophe! Probe sent with aqua-tech ability to project communications into water (pretty intense, dangerous to unhardened Atmosphere-Dweller tech) to try to work out why their pet project had gone into decline. Or were coming back anyway to see if their equivalent of 2001's Moonwatcher had developed, their probing aquatech features receiver-capability (resonant-backscatter of the projected signal, like "laser bugging" of windows?) and, again, things worry them. Or this is just their inestigatory probe's programmed response ("Try harder until contact is made; No effective limits to power usage, so long as the oceans don't actually boil away."),

Whether George and Gracey actually heard "Whale friends, whale friends! Please respond!" and replied "Hello probe, of whom i learnt under my grandmother's fin. We are here. Sorry, things were tricky and desperate, but we're alright now (or so this little land-moving guy we trust told us straight to our mind!), please could you not shout so much? We'll talk later, maybe…", I don't know.

It could as easily have been the equivalent of a safari-park ranger approaching a worryingly motionless monkey and prodding it with a stick to see ifit was dead, and happy enough to get it to wake up from its slumber and yowl a general complaint about being dusturbed.


Though all that is just a set of guesses. I know there's other ways to eff this deliberately ineffible monstrous MacGuffin.



¹ I'm clearly supposed to presume that this space-faring species are themselves aquatic, probably on an ocean-dominated planet, despite the popularised idea that technology and even cooking of food cannot exist in an environment where fire (natural, at first, then self-made) cannot happen. Though it's conceivable that food just never was a problem to which cooking was a brilliant solution, and industry based around volcanic escapes might have sufficed too. Then there's the problem that dealing with outer-space level one (surfacing to the atmosphere around their ocean, and/or into the ice-crust a la Europa) is one thing, but then they need to discover the limits of OS1 to get into OS2 (actual space), which requires development of further technology. More so than we, who have long seen flight in natural use, progressed to (fire based) rocketry to escape the atmosphere we pretty much knew all about, though conceivably a development of impulse-like technology (perhaps bio-mimicing?) within the ocean-fluid might have led 'easily' to an air-pushing version, and a Sufficiently Advanced Technology which just imparted inertia upon the craft itself (already a Trek-universe technology, give or take) may well have avoided all the messy Big Dumb Rocket stuff of pushing mass out the back (whether drawn in the front or not), and so found application even out into Outer Outer Space. Right?

[speising]

cetations

[cetation needed]

[Soupspoon]

cetations

[cetation needed]

I hope that wasn't an Ad Homonym attack on my clumsy keyboarding.