Well it's laws can get awfully strange. This slowing down of acceleration in high speed reference frames seems like a kind of asymmetry. It seems like if you could somehow measure this reduction in acceleration from within the spaceship it would be a way to tell your new 0.75c inertial reference...
So it sounds like I should be thinking in terms of three reference frames. One based on the launch location and another on the motion of the ship after it has accelerated to whatever relativistic speed I cut thrust at so as to have another inertial frame. And another at the destination of this...
How enjoyably strange. But the ship really will be harder to accelerate after getting to a high relativistic speed, right? For a more concrete example let's assume a 10 million kg ship with an improbability drive that can accelerate it at exactly 1 G at the start of the trip when the motion of...
Well the sealed box is a ship that has accelerated to 0.75c and is now coasting with the engines off. If the velocity is zero then my constant force engine can accelerate the ship at the same rate it did when the trip started, right? Wouldn't it mean the ship would have zero momentum and zero...
I get that the concept of relativistic mass has sort of been deprecated in physics these days and that relativistic momentum is supposed to be seen as more well useful. So let momentum equal ##\mathtt ~~ \frac {mv} {\sqrt {1 - \frac {v^2} {c^2}}} ~~## or ##~~{mv\gamma}~~##. So mass is supposed...
Because this is the first time we have encountered something with any chance at all of being an alien artifact. Even if the chance is 1% it is shortsighted and irresponsible to just ignore it because the most boring hypothesis is usually the correct one. It really could be something artificial...
Well that's a good point. It wouldn't really. It would probably impress them though and get them wondering how they could make such things. But we have science and engineering already. So even if we were hundreds of thousands of years behind the Oumuamuans and even if their tech were so advanced...
There are additional benefits to spending those billions. Would developing a small Fission Fragment Drive or Pulsed Nuclear Thermal Drive or even a 1960s era pulsed Orion bomb-drive really be entirely without value for us? The nuclear test ban treaty should have had an emergency clause. Although...
The idea that this object may have been manufactured is fundamentally different from any supernatural explanations. Supernaturalism is itself entirely absurd and without evidence and what's more lacks even explanatory value.
This object is the first in human history to not be plausibally...
Some people are arguing that interstellar objects like this, whether natural or artificial, are quite common and that only now do we have the tech to see them and now that we can we should be seeing as many as 10 per year. My recollection is that most astronomers were not really expecting to see...
Yes well I predict tall heatsinks with loudly buzzing fans in his future. The whole point of the things is to give off heat. How about buying a bunch of water blocks and using water cooling?
I am almost 50 now and for most of my life I think the consensus has been that interstellar objects were highly speculative and extremely rare and that we should not really ever expect to see any. I guess sort of like intergalactic objects might be regarded now. Sure now it is easy to point to...
It would probably be more efficient to use a mothership that dropped smaller probes that themselves would slow down and do the complex orbital manuevers to start sending back data and images either using the mothership as a relay station or send the digital data back many light years themselves...
What if in 100 years we build our own probe driven by a fission fragment propulsion system that can quickly catch up to this slow and supposedly passive object but when we arrive at where it should be it just isn't there?
Yes well in the Why It May Be an Artifact column that, along with its oddly changing albedo is the most compelling evidence which even if explained by the irregularly wobbling cigar shape theory is I think unlike the albedo of any known local object.
Also the fact that it is the first and...