The Voyage Of Oumuamua

It's a Hawaiian name, don't worry about how to pronounce it. Oumuamua was an object that was detected while passing through our Solar System. It was the first object ever detected that is virtually certain to have come from beyond our Solar System, from interstellar space between the stars.

Oumuamua is now departed and appeared as an elongated rock-like object, although it's composition is uncertain. It was announced, with apparent certainty, that it was not any kind of extra-terrestrial spacecraft.

I do not believe in extra-terrestrial beings from outer space myself, although I do sometimes find them useful as a literary or perspective tool. What surprises me here is the lack of reaction by the science fiction community or those who do believe in extra-terrestrials, since a considerable amount of money and effort is being spent on trying to receive any signals that might be sent by them.

If soldiers wear camouflage uniforms, and military vehicles are painted with camouflage paint, then how can we be sure that an advanced extra-terrestrial civilization didn't send a spacecraft to clandestinely investigate us, disguised as a rocky asteroid?

Even if it was actually a rock, how do we know that there wasn't an advanced civilization that could extract photographs and images from a rock, having it act as a camera?

We saw in the posting on the progress blog, "Next-Generation Technology" how any material or object might someday act as a camera, from which we could extract images of it's past. 

A camera, whether digital or using chemical film, operates by the energy in the electromagnetic waves of light knocking electrons out of the outermost orbitals in atoms. The small electric current that results enables a record to be made of the pattern of light. We call this record a photograph.

But all atoms, in any material, have outermost electrons that must somehow be affected by light, even if not knocked out of their orbitals. Every physical object then must somehow keep a visual record of it's past, if we could trace how it's electrons have moved, even if it is completely beyond our present capabilities.

You may be thinking that extracting a photographic image from far in the past of an inanimate object is utterly impossible. But if you could take a camera back in time three thousand years, and told people that you could take a photograph of them, they would surely think it was utterly impossible. Imagine the reaction of ancient people if you told them that someday there would be satellites in the sky with cameras that could recognize anyone on earth by the way they walk. 

Here is a link to "Next-Generation Technology":

www.markmeekprogress.blogspot.com/2009/06/next-generation-technology.html?m=0 

Although I don't actually believe in extra-terrestrials they are sometimes useful as a literary or perspective vehicle. Here is the story that I wrote about visitors from space making deductions about human beings, based on patterns. It is called "Reverse Archeology":

www.markmeekpatterns.blogspot.com/2009/07/reverse-archeology.html?m=0