, insists it could have been built by extraterrestrials.
In a controversial 2019 paper, Loeb speculated that Oumuamua’s unusual trajectory and shape suggested it was neither a comet nor an asteroid, but possibly an alien probe.An object crashed into the ocean off the coast of Manus Island, Papua New Guinea.
“They also released the light curve of the explosion of this object, which revealed that it had material strength tougher than iron, and it was tougher than all the other space rocks that the US government identified over the past decade, about 272 of them,” he said. “It takes 100,000 years to reach the nearest star and many hundreds of millions of years to reach the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, so it makes much more sense to send systems with artificial intelligence that are not so sensitive to the hazardous conditions of space,” he said.
In his essay earlier this year, Loeb said a retrieval expedition could be achieved using “scooping” magnets to explore the 6 square mile region of the Pacific Ocean where the object is thought to have landed.