The appearance and rapid transit of the first interstellar object Oumuamua has whipped up my story-telling juices. I have been meaning to write a story involving the likely elongated object as soon as we first came to know about it on October, 19, 2017. It was not clear precisely what the object was—first thought to be an asteroid—but now it seems it could well be a comet.
The determination that it may have been a comet comes from the sudden increase in its speed possibly caused by a part of it warmed up by the sun and puffing gas out, propelling it faster. Traveling at 196,000 miles per hour or about 320,000 kilometers per hour Oumuamua seemed like an asteroid at first because it had not gas emanating from it like comets have as they go close past the sun. It was thought to be an asteroid, made of rock and metal.
However, the sudden increase in speed as it moves away from our solar system suggests it was after all a comet.
In my fictional mind I have always seen Oumuamua as an alien spaceship designed to flyby through solar system generally but Earth particularly on a quick reconnaissance. Its mission was not to engage us but merely produce reasonably detailed imaging of the solar system and Earth before returning to its base on Proxima b, the exoplanet some 1.3 times the size of Earth orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to us. The discovery of Proxima b in 2016 was a sort of cosmic convergence meant to prepare us for the arrival and exit of Oumuamua.
I have made some quick calculations about when Oumuamua had to have left Proxima b to reach us now. Proxima b is part of the star system some 4.3 light years from us which makes it about 40 trillion kilometers from us. 40 trillion is—and I hope I am right about the zeros here—40,00,00,00,00,00,00. Oumuamua’s speed was a little over 196,000 kilometers per hour. I have rounded it off to 200,000 for my fiction. There are 8,760 hours in a year, which is not fictional but real. So in one Earth year the spaceship can cover 28,03,20,00,00 kilometers. At that speed it will need 14,270 years to travel through our solar system.
While that is terribly wrong from a single human’s standpoint, it is not that long to advance civilizational knowledge. Since this is science fiction, I have worked around the problem of the long travel time at ordinary speeds. Here on Earth there have been serious discussions about a breakthrough in laser-propelled interstellar probes that can travel at 20% the speed of light, covering the distance to Proxima b in 20 years.In fact, NASA is already said to be working on laser-propelled spacecraft that could cover massive cosmic distances such as the one to Proxima b at speeds with significant percentage of the speed of light.
Instead of burning chemicals to power spaceships—which is a rather inefficient method—the idea is to use electromagnetic acceleration. In the traditional rocket fuel, efficiencies are curtailed by the very chemical processes intrinsic to their burning. In electromagnetic acceleration the only bar is the speed of light beyond which nothing can travel. Of course, even traveling at speeds reasonably close to the speed of light is a complicated task but not an impossible one.
Photonic propulsion is a possible way out of our slow speeds challenge. Serious scientists believe that spacecraft can be propelled at 20 to 30 percent the speed of light and some day at higher percentages. Even if you settle for 20%, we can reach Proxima b in 20 years.
In my fictional story about Oumuamua, I have it travel at that speed for almost the entire duration of its flight which is designed to slow down to about 200,000 kph as it passes by Earth and then it picks up the speed to its maximum as it returns to its home planet with reconnaissance data. The sudden increase in its speed, which scientists explained as gases from the comet puffing out and propelling it in real life, is,in my story, a precursor to it acquiring a relativistic speed to return to its home planet.
Since it is fiction, I can have it travel at 50 percent the speed of light which means it would have taken just about eight years to reach us and return in the same amount of time. That makes it about 17 years if you factor in the slowing down during the transit through our solar system for data collection purposes.
Sixteen-seventeen years compared to 14,270 years feels almost contemporaneous. In a sense when Oumuamua left Proxima b in my story, Barack Obama was about to or had just become the U.S. president and by the time it reached our solar system it is Donald Trump.
Those tempted to steal my fictional idea consider yourselves warned. This has already been registered. I am now in the process of developing it into a full-fledged novel.
Scientists were intrigued by Oumuamua’s silence and a seeming lack of any activity as it flew past. That was by design. It had drawn its shields in order that any Earth-based civilization could not detect any activity. There were life forms—not necessarily human-like at all but more intelligent—onboard. The shields were such that they could block any attempt to read any activity inside. The civilization on Proxima b, which sent Oumuamua, knew about life on Earth and the spaceship was the first in a series of probes meant to eventually make contact.
Incidentally, Oumuamua is the name we gave. They gave it no name but just a graphic unique to the ship like the human fingerprint. I am working on that graphic now.
Note: In my artistic depiction of the spaceship (see below) you can see complex circuitry lighting up as it flies past our sun.