Does anyone know more about the initiatives by Yuri Milner with respect to this? I heard something like he is helping fund satellites that could specifically be better at looking at 'Oumuamua than our current means?
This should have been a big wake-up call to have pre-made probe craft ready to launch to investigate anything odd that entered the solar system. But expecting humanity to be that fore-sighted is pure folly.
Even if we had a probe ready today it's already too far and moving too fast to overtake. Even if we had a probe ready when we first detected the object it would have been difficult to intercept with today's technology. It would have to be something like a Falcon Heavy already in orbit and ready to burn at a moment's notice with a tiny probe at the top for gathering the data.
That's the other side of the problem: we didn't detect it until far too late. We should be able to detect objects of this size much, much sooner than we currently do. We're not looking very hard for them, so usually we end up seeing them after they've already whizzed by. There have been way too many times in the last decade or so when we're informed, "hey, we just barely got missed by some big asteroid, and we didn't even see it until it already went by the Earth!" That's just pathetic.
Edit: although, that would involve pointing a 100 gigawatt laser directly at Oumaouma, which might disturb it.
Maybe that would cause it to turn around and come back.