How do you know the government wants you distracted from more pressing issues? It starts releasing “reports” on aliens and UFOs, which are probably just weather balloons. In any case, some of what they release is entertaining and interesting if you’ve already read up on the important things happening.
Such is certainly the case with the report that the Pentagon’s UFO chief co-authored. That report, written by Sean Kirkpatrick, the director of the Pentagon’s All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) and Abraham Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department and released on March 7th, explores the possibility of an alien “parent craft,” or mothership, being in our solar system and releasing probes to explore it. In the report, they say:
In 2005, the US Congress tasked NASA to find 90% of all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that are larger than 140
meters (Loff 2014). The Congressional task resulted in the construction of the Pan-STARRS telescopes. On October 19, 2017, the Pan-STARRS sky survey flagged an unusual NEO, the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua (see, Loeb (2022a) and references therein). Unlike Solar system asteroids or comets, ‘Oumuamua appeared to have an extreme flat shape and was pushed away from the Sun without showing a cometary tail of gas and dust, raising the possibility that it was thin and artificial in origin. Three years later, Pan-STARRS discovered a definitely artificial object, namely NASA’s rocket booster 2020 SO, which exhibited similar behavior with an extreme shape, a push by the Solar radiation pressure and no cometary tail because its thin walls were made of stainless steel (Talbert 2020).
On March 9, 2017, six months before ‘Oumuamua’s closest approach to Earth, a meter-size interstellar meteor (IM2) collided with Earth (Siraj & Loeb 2022a). Surprisingly, IM2 had an identical speed relative to the Sun at large distances and an identical heliocentric semimajor axis as ‘Oumuamua had. But the inclination of IM2’s orbital plane around the Sun was completely different from ‘Oumuamua’s, implying that the two objects are unrelated.
Nevertheless, the coincidences between some orbital parameters of ‘Oumuamua and IM2 inspires us to consider the possibility that an artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that releases many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions.
These “dandelion seeds” could be separated from the parent craft by the tidal gravitational force of the Sun or by a maneuvering capability. A small ejection speed far away could lead to a large deviation from the trajectory of the parent craft near the Sun. The changes would manifest both in arrival time and distance of closest approach to Earth. With proper design, these tiny probes would reach the Earth or other Solar system planets for exploration, as the parent craft passes by within a fraction of the Earth-Sun separation – just like ‘Oumuamua did. Astronomers would not be able to notice the spray of mini-probes because they do not reflect enough sunlight for existing survey telescopes to notice them if they are on the 10 cm scale of CubeSats or smaller. At a distance d from the Sun and the telescope, objects that are a meter in diameter and reflect a fraction a ≈ 10% of sunlight impinging on their surface would yield a flux of optical light of ∼ 0.2(d/1 AU)−2 nJy, well below the detection threshold of even the James Webb Space Telescope. In contrast, the radar signatures of a meter class object would be detectable with our deep space radars and space fence, much like IM2 was, out to beyond geosynchronous orbit at an altitude above 36,000 km. Such objects could also become optically detectable as they get close to Earth, especially if they create a fireball as a result of their friction with air.
Equipped with a large surface-to-mass ratio of a parachute, technological “dandelion seeds” could slow down in the Earth’s atmosphere to avoid burnup and then pursue their objectives wherever they land. Current radar coverage of the majority of first-world countries gives detectability of this High-Area-To-Mass (HAMR) objects down to a few centimeters depending on material, making detectability possible (Frueh et al. 2017).
Within a close range to a star, extraterrestrial technological probes could use starlight to charge their batteries and liquid water as their fuel. This would explain why they would target the habitable region around stars, where liquid water may exist on the surface of rocky planets with an atmosphere, like the Earth. Habitable planets would be particularly appealing to trans-medium probes, capable of moving between space, air and water. From a large distance, Venus, Earth or Mars would be equally attractive for probes. But upon closer inspection, Earth would show spectral signatures of liquid water (through reflection of blue light) and vegetation (through its red edge) that might attract selective attention (Seager et al. 2005).
What would be the overarching purpose of the journey? In analogy with actual dandelion seeds, the probes could propagate the blueprint of their senders. As with biological seeds, the raw materials on the planet’s surface could also be used by them as nutrients for self-replication or simply scientific exploration. It is important to note, that given the time scales associated with the propulsion scheme discussed here, it is unreasonable to assert that the intention of any such probe launched in the far distant past, has anything to do with the human species. More likely, and similar to NASA’s missions – the goal would be scientific and exploratory in nature.
Continuing, they note that they are testing one meteor to determine if it is made out of an artificial alloy, which would indicate it could be an alien probe, and note that they are exploring the possibility of alien probes already being on Earth. In the report, they say:
This is why the first interstellar meteor (IM1), confirmed by velocity measurement of the US Space Command (Siraj & Loeb 2022c), is the target of a fully-funded ocean expedition by the Galileo Project (Siraj et al. 2022; Tillinghast-Raby et al. 2022). Hopefully, by retrieving IM1’s fragments within the coming year we will know whether its extraordinary material strength resulted from it being made out of an artificial alloy, like stainless steel or materials not yet developed by humans.
Are there any functioning extraterrestrial probes near Earth? We do not know. But the Galileo Project (2021) (Loeb 2021) intends to use the scientific method to explore this possibility, following the 2021 report about Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP) from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to the US Congress (ODN 2021). The stateof-the-art suite of instruments and computer algorithms of the Galileo Project will be able to study such data in the near future (Loeb & Laukien 2023).
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