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Comment by gleenn | Hacker News Reader

Could you imagine trying to aim something at a moving planet from light years away and while also shooting it at that speed and not having potential a huge number of things affect it's trajectory via gravity? I love the conspiracy theory, but unless it could course-correct during flight, the odds seem insanely low for it to be a alien test probe

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If I was an alien engineer trying to aim something at a moving planet light years away while also shooting it at that speed and having a huge number of things affect it's trajectory via gravity, I'd make it course-correct during flight.

"The navigation stage was released about Jupiter, as planned. They will ask for centuries who threw that rock, bhahaharaH!"

You can go a step further. Use a computer vision algorithm to find planets, and then do some spectroscopy to identify planets with water in their atmosphere. Course correct to aim at one of those planets

Well, they’re cleverer than us. They probably just plugged the numbers into the n-body equation they teach in their junior high schools.

Also:

- The ion thrusters were small enough to completely disintegrate on impact/reentry.

- Oumuamua was the mother ship, clearly.

Or used their quantum computers with trillions of qBits to be confident of the trajectory to the limit of their sensing ability.

It was no disintegration at all, merely a thermochemical nanomultiplication catalyst that relied on aerobreaking to generate 10^14 quantum entangled shards of spy drones. These are now permeating all multi-celled organisms, which they have adapted as co-processors. They rely on quantum-entanglement synchronized gravitational wave induction for home-world communication, but can fall back to planet-wide baseline interferometry due to the entangled nature of their origin.

This object was a probe.

Oumuamua was the mass ejected to decelerate.

Mother ship due in 10-20 years.

Ooh, strong point!

This is the plot of the Expanse books. Ancient alien civilization loads a rock with nano-computers that take over self-replicating molecules on planets with life to build stuff, aim it at Earth two billion years ago, but it never makes it because Saturn captures it and it becomes the moon Phoebe instead.

Dunno, there's helpful photons traveling from distant points through out stellar neighborhood and to any possible observer. We are already making 3D gravitation maps of our neighborhood. Also who says there's not some minor navigational control, much like today's smart bombs. Even minor corrections made well ahead of time could greatly help the aim.

Not to mention if you are slinging probes into other solar systems you likely could send 1000x into each one, so if a few miss, not big deal.

Why are we assuming it couldnt course correct?

They said it looked like a comet, not a rocket, it was very small in size.

Maybe they launched millions of those things

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