Page 15 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October / November 2018

Scientists: Space Object May Be Alien 15

Harvard Scientists Say sunlight, as radiation from the sun strikes the and feeds and alerts–it’s easy to feel like we
sail and pushes it forward like wind, according don’t have time to read anything but headlines.
Mysterious Space Object to the Planetary Society, which plans to launch We are social animals, and the desire for likes

a solar sail of its own into outer space in 2019. can supersede a latent feeling that a story seems
May Be From ‘Alien The Harvard scientists speculated that dicey. Political convictions lead us to lazy
Civilization’ solar radiation hitting a solar sail could explain thinking. But there’s an even more fundamental
why the mysterious object started moving impulse at play: our innate desire for an easy
faster. answer.
By Scott Berson “Considering an artificial origin, one Humans like to think of themselves as
possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, rational creatures, but much of the time we are
It’s cryptic, dark, and going really, really fast — floating in interstellar space as a debris from an guided by emotional and irrational thinking.
and a pair of Harvard scientists say the advanced technological equipment,” the Psychologists have shown this through the
mysterious space object ‘Oumuamua may scientists wrote. “... Alternatively, a more exotic study of cognitive shortcuts known as
actually have come from an alien civilization. scenario is that ‘Oumuamua may be a fully heuristics. It’s hard to imagine getting through
The theory, which the scientists call operational probe sent intentionally to Earth so much as a trip to the grocery store without
“exotic,” comes from a recent paper they wrote vicinity by an alien civilization.” these helpful time-savers. “You don’t and can’t
which was published online in November. Some are not so sure the cigar-shaped take the time and energy to examine and
“I follow the maxim of Sherlock ‘Oumuamua is a solar sail, however. compare every brand of yogurt,” says Wray
Holmes: When you have excluded the “Why send a spacecraft which is doing Herbert, author of On Second Thought:
impossible, whatever remains, however this?” said Coryn Bailer-Jones, an astronomer at Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits.
improbable, must be the truth,” one of the the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, So we might instead rely on what is known as
authors, Abraham Loeb, said, according to NBC according to NBC News. “If it were a the familiarity heuristic, our tendency to assume
News. spacecraft, this tumbling would make it that if something is familiar, it must be good and
Scientists first spotted ‘Oumuamua, a impossible to keep any instruments pointed at safe.
Hawaiian word for scout or messenger, in 2017, the Earth.” These habits of mind surely helped our
when they detected it blazing through the solar In their paper, the Harvard scientists say ancestors survive. The problem is that relying
system at 196,000 miles per hour, Reuters the only way to know for sure is to keep watch on them too much can also lead people astray,
reported. The initially thought it was a comet, and see what else shows up in our solar system. particularly in an online environment. In one of
but soon realized it didn’t have the telltale There are probably “thousands of interstellar his experiments, MIT’s Rand illustrated the
gaseous tail, according to the site.. ‘Oumuamua-like” objects “trapped” dark side of the fluency heuristic, our tendency
Scientists decided it was probably an somewhere in the solar system, they wrote. Not to believe things we’ve been exposed to in the
asteroid, but then it started mysteriously to mention all the others floating through the past. The study presented subjects with
accelerating again, which is more like what a stars. [] headlines–some false, some true–in a format
comet would do, NASA wrote. identical to what users see on Facebook. Rand
Astronomers were baffled, eventually How Your Brain Tricks found that simply being exposed to fake news
settling on the term “interstellar object,” the (like an article that claimed President Trump
Washington Post reported. You Into Believing Fake was going to bring back the draft) made people
“For decades we’ve theorized that such more likely to rate those stories as accurate later
interstellar objects are out there, and now―for News on in the experiment. If you’ve seen something
the first time―we have direct evidence they Continued from Page 13 before, “your brain subconsciously uses that as
exist,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate an indication that it’s true,” Rand says.
administrator for NASA’s Science Mission What is clear, however, is that there is another This is a tendency that propagandists
Directorate in a 2017 news release. responsible party. The problem is not just have been aware of forever. The difference is
NASA believes the object is a reddish malicious bots or chaos-loving trolls or that it has never been easier to get eyeballs on
color after being bombarded with solar radiation Macedonian teenagers pushing phony stories the message, nor to get enemies of the message
and is made out of rock and metal. It is expected for profit. The problem is also us, the to help spread it. The researchers who
to shoot past Saturn and leave the solar system susceptible readers. And experts like Wineburg conducted the Pew poll noted that one reason
in early 2019, according to the agency. believe that the better we understand the way people knowingly share made-up news is to
But if it’s not a comet, and there’s no gas we think in the digital world, the better chance “call out” the stories as fake. That might make a
pushing it forward, then what was causing it to we have to be part of the solution. post popular among like-minded peers on social
accelerate? In their paper, the Harvard scientists We don’t fall for false news just because media, but it can also help false claims sink into
say it may have been something called a “solar we’re dumb. Often it’s a matter of letting the the collective consciousness.
sail.” wrong impulses take over. In an era when the
A solar sail is a type of spacecraft that average American spends 24 hours each week (Continued on Page 17)
can be propelled forward entirely by the force of online–when we’re always juggling inboxes