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Here's some more of his thoughts in Scientific American.
I just got it as well. I’m interested to read it based on what I’ve heard her say in interviews. She was fairly active on Twitter until recently, when she basically disappeared. I’m concerned by how much she seemed to be on board with some of the TTSA/disclosure cheerleader types.
Yeah, agreed, he's a contrarian and the article reads as though he is enjoying the attention.
I to am a skeptic first. For me, the book has well-assigned lanes for the concepts and topics, which, if not successful can make it hard to find the thesis so to speak. She also adds more information and content to the narrative than borrowed from. Which is providing me with more to scrutinize and ponder, which I guess is the case I am making for the book. I've been stopping frequently to go look up what she just stated.....for me, that's a good book! I am up for discussing the book in a new thread if others are interested.
Thanks for the reference to American Cosmic. I've sent a message inviting the author on as a guest. She sounds very interesting!
I’ve read it. It’s... decent. She makes some good points, has a couple of interesting stories, but at the same time if you’ve read Vallee (as I know you have), then you already know what she’s going to say. Her most interesting point is that she neither believes, nor not believes, she merely accepts the story and seeks to provide meaning from within a religious historian context. The liminal aspect is interesting, but it can be encapsulated in Strieber’s “keep the question open” or O’Brien’s trickster liminality. Or even Bishop’s co-creation hypothesis.
www.nature.com
The acceleration is likely due to radiation pressure from the sun and potentially outgassing, if I remember correctly. Plus, it’s tumbling, so an artifical Newtonian thrust would be astoundingly hard to vector and control. And it wasn’t that large of a delta-V at any rate.
Last time I was looking into the mystery of Omuamua's acceleration out of the solar system, according to one scientist who chimed in, the radiation pressure theory is plausible, but only if the object isn't much more massive than a solar sail, which isn't very likely. Maybe some other cosmic force. Was it far out enough to have hit the electromagnetic highway?
gotscience.org
Right. Assuming the mass-to-acceleration ratio requires the object to be as light as a solar sail, then the obvious extrapolation is that it's made of such material, and considering it's shape and tumbling further implies that it has crumpled in on itself. For an engineered object, we can fairly easily imagine a deep-space solar sail probe having some sort of mishap that results in it getting caught-up in its own rigging, which would naturally lead to it tumbling through space. I'm not really sure what other explanation could reasonably account for all the factors. What sort of naturally made object that size, but as strong and light as a solar sail might there be?Given its delta-v is 0.01%, if it is artificial, it’s pretty weak. Like ion propulsion weak. And it’s tumbling, so using ion thrust would be very problematic.
If it were artificial, I’d expect thrust along its long axis for stability, or along its small axis if it were rotating for artificial gravity. It’s doing neither, it’s just tumbling.
This Interstellar Asteroid Is Accelerating - Science Connected Magazine
Oumuamua is an asteroid travling so fast, it could go from the moon to the earth in 73 minutes! See the speedy asteroid with the U. of Hawaii telescope.
The problem as I understand it with the solar sail idea, is that the solar sail would have to be unfurled and not tumbling to provide the acceleration described. It's a cylinder, not a flat plane, and it's acceleration is not perpendicular to it's long axis at any rate.
A solar sail is most efficient when it's unfolded in it's proper configuration and orientation, but hypothetically, there's no reason it wouldn't work, albeit less efficiently, if by some accident or malfunction, it were caught-up in it's own wires and rigging, and formed into an elongated shape like Omumamua. In that case, tumbling would actually be advantageous, because there would still always be some effect no matter what the orientation was. In other words, the worst case would be if it weren't tumbling and its horizontal axis were always aligned with the direction of the Sun.
Sorry maybe I misunderstood the articles I read, but I thought the mass: acceleration profile only worked for a solar sail if it was unfurled?
That's my guess as well - it could be a low density material that is more easily pushed by small things like radiation pressure or outgassing that's too small to be detected.