As we told you yesterday, SETI, the organization for Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence is set to start investigating the cigar-shaped object that swung by earth two month ago, as scientists believe the object’s form is exactly what they believe a spacecraft from an alien civilization would look like.
<a href="http://thegoldwater.com/news/13861-Video-SETI-Thin-Body-Flying-Past-Earth-Possible-Spacecraft"> The object in question, christened "Oumuamua" (Hawaiian for ‘First Messenger’), is about a quarter of a mile long, some 260ft wide and is currently travelling through our solar system at the astonishing speed of 196,000mph</a>.
Today the SETI researchers have received a major endorsement as it was announced that Mr Stephen Hawking, considered by many to be the smartest man on earth, will join the SETI team looking to study the object with a powerful telescope.
The team of scientists are using high-tech scanners to discover if the huge, cigar-shaped space object currently hurtling through our solar system was sent by an alien civilisation.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">'<a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Oumuamua?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#Oumuamua</a>'s hyperbolic trajectory viewed with retrograde loops as seen from the earth. If you were real an alien probe or derelict star-ship tumbling for millions of years, I hope your batteries are recharged from the solar flyby. If so, send us a signal!<a href="https://t.co/bzMJEKhJxm">https://t.co/bzMJEKhJxm</a> <a href="https://t.co/ioiUQHM83w">pic.twitter.com/ioiUQHM83w</a></p>— Tom Ruen (@Tom_Ruen) <a href="https://twitter.com/Tom_Ruen/status/940646875060949002?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 12, 2017</a></blockquote>
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Professor of astrophysics at Harvard University Avi Loeb chimed in as well, saying: "Perhaps the aliens have a mothership that travels fast and releases baby spacecrafts that freely fall into planetary system on a reconnaissance mission.
“If this object is natural in origin, there should be many more like it in the solar system… and even if most of them are natural, perhaps one of them will be found to be of artificial origin, some space device or junk from an alien civilisation.
“The more I study this object, the more unusual it appears, making me wonder whether it might be an artificially made probe which was sent by an alien civilisation.”
Source:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=11959103
I think Stephen Hawking is acknowledging the possibility that it may be a craft built by an extraterrestrial civilization due to lack of evidence to the contrary but he's not saying he thinks it's very likely to be an alien spaceship.
Having either the exact same set of facts available to Stephen Hawking or maybe less since I don't have the same access to astrophysicists that he has, I can't disprove the alien spaceship hypothesis either but I suspect, if it had been, it might have lingered around Earth longer than it actually did (although the counter argument there is that maybe they only planned a quick flyby to minimize possibility of detection).
Wasn't Hawking afraid of ever getting found by aliens?