Aliens in the Solar System

 

Sure, this isn’t science fiction but it certainly is close. After all, in science fiction we deal with intelligent life on other planets and alien visitation to Earth, or rather our Solar System. Now, it seems that that visitation has happened.

Harvard scientist, Dr. Abraham (Avi) Loeb, who is the chair of the Department of Astronomy, has suggested that we were visited in 2017. Well, visited isn’t quite the right word but that an alien artifact had entered the Solar System.

Dr. Avi Loeb

In my communications with Dr. Loeb, I asked a number of questions, such as where it might have originated. According to the data, it came from the direction of Vega, which is about 25 light years from Earth.

On September 6, 2017, the artifact crossed into the orbital plane of the Solar System, and on September 9, it made its closest approach to the sun. On October 7, it passed Earth, moving in the direction of Pegasus. Or, in other words, flew by and is on its way somewhere else.

Earth-based scientists were able to study the object, which was about three hundred feet in length, and had a somewhat cigar shape and was rotating slowly.

It was named, “Oumuamua” which means scout in Hawaiian.

It was, at first believed to be a comet, but it exhibited none of the characteristics of a comet. That suggested to Dr. Loeb that it was something completely different.

Dr. Loeb told Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, “There is a Scientific American article I wrote where I summarized six strange facts about ‘Oumuamua. The first one is that we didn’t expect this object to exist in the first place. We see the solar system and we can calculate at what rate it ejected rocks during its history. And if we assume all planetary systems around other stars are doing the same thing, we can figure out what the population of interstellar objects should be. That calculation results in a lot of possibilities, but the range is much less than needed to explain the discovery of ‘Oumuamua’.”

He also suggested that the civilization that sent out the object might no longer exist. I had wondered about the speed reported as it passed through the Solar System, suggesting a very long flight time to get here. Some the commentators to my A Different Perspective blog suggested that it had slowed as it passed by or that it had arrived via a wormhole. I sort of ignore that without evidence to the contrary but do acknowledge the possibilities.

Nearly all the scientists agree that the object did not originate in the Solar System, which makes it the first alien object to be observed in the solar system. While Dr. Loeb believes that it is an artificial object, many scientists disagree.

In an article published in July 2019, it was concluded, “We find no compelling evidence to favor an alien explanation for ‘Oumuamua’.” 

I, on the other hand, am rooting for Dr. Loeb’s explanation but must note that while the object is certainly alien, it is not necessarily artificial which takes some of the fun out of this.

What is Science Fiction?

 

Back in the olden days, when I attended many science fiction conventions (which I fear might be something that is fading into past), a number of us discussed what was science fiction and what was not. Those that I remember participating in these ad hoc discussions were Wilson Tucker, known around the convention circuit as Bob, Robert Cornett who has written a number of science fiction novels and me.

Wilson "Bob" Tucker (in plaid shirt) involved in the "smooth" process.

For those interested in those sorts of things, Robert Cornett, aka Bob and sometimes as RC Squared, wrote Seeds of Doubt, Remember the Alamo, The Aldebaran Campaign, The Aquarium Attack, Remember Gettysburg, and Remember the Little Bighorn with me.

Bob Tucker has a long list of very good science fiction books including The Year of the Quiet Sun, The Lincoln Hunters, Ice and Iron and The Time Masters to name just a few. He was quite popular at science fiction conventions, often surrounded by a bevy of his “granddaughters.” He was so popular that, at one point, Fandom created the Tucker Transfer, which was a collection to pay for his trip to the World Science Fiction Convention in Europe (or in other words, an attempt to transfer him to the convention). Today it would be a Go Fund Me page. But I digress.

We decided, with no authority to do so, that science fiction was based in real science. In the 1950s, you might consider Rocketship X-M or Destination Moon as science fiction. These movies reflected the science of the time and nearly everyone believed that humans would walk on the moon. In Forbidden Planet, made in 1956, that would not happen for more than a century. Of course, it happened in just 13 years.

As an interesting aside, in Apollo 13, director Ron Howard included a scene of the rocket heading off into space that was reminiscent of those old movies. I am convinced that he included that scene as a tribute to those science fiction movies.

The point is that the science fiction reflected real science. Rockets and missiles were being fired into space and they were going farther and farther from Earth. It wasn’t long before unmanned rockets hit the Moon and, of course, finally taking men to the Moon.

Fantasy, then, were stories set in exotic places but contained elements that weren’t possible. Magic worked in fantasy stories. Although I’m not sure that either Bob agreed with me, I thought of time travel stories as fantasy because I don’t believe we can travel through time, as outlined in most those stories. Yes, I recognize that we are all traveling in time as we live our lives, but we are unable to manipulate it. And yes, I understand that time dilation theory might allow us to manipulate time but in a very controlled sense. We won’t be speeding around time as is seen in The Time Machine or the End of Eternity, to name just a few time travel stories.

Finally, we came up with Sci Fi, which is not to say that we invented the term, only that we defined it. Sci Fi were stories and movies such as The Beginning of the End, The Blob or First Spaceship to Venus (which, for some reason I enjoy but it is a really bad movie with an internal logic that simply doesn’t work). A lot of things fit this category and I’m not at all sure what we would have done with SyFy, which, if you study the programming on that channel, often has nothing to do with science fiction or Sci Fi. Strikes me that is why they changed the name.

For the purists among you, I will note that Star Wars is strictly not science fiction but more like sci fi or fantasy, simply because it is set in another galaxy and includes faster than light speeds not to mention the Force. It works because we care about the people in the film. We want them to win (well, not Darth Vader, though I suspect there are a few who root for him as well). Sci Fi doesn’t have to be bad. It just has to incorporate elements that slip into fantasy or that are impossible given our current scientific knowledge.

No, we didn’t bother with horror because that is something completely different. Horror was once things like Dracula and Frankenstein, but it evolved into what, in the 1980s, we called dead teenager movies and other such slasher films.

These were our somewhat arbitrary definitions for this genre. The rules are not hard and fast and you can put a story or movie into more than one category as we see with Star Wars. It was conceived as a way of explaining what science fiction is and what is not.

Alistair 1918 - A quick Review

 

I was cruising through the science fiction listings on Amazon Prime the other day and came across Alistair 1918. What intrigued me was the time travel elements in the story and I’m always willing to take a look at time travel. With Bob Cornett, I wrote several time travel novels, and alone I wrote, On the Second Tuesday of Next Week, in which a war is fought using time travel. All are available on Amazon.

Alistair (Guy Birtwhistle)

Alistair is a British soldier who, through some fluke of time and space, is literally blasted into modern Los Angeles. It is something of a fish out of water tale, as the hero, Alistair (Guy Birtwhistle), tried to survive in the modern world. This is somewhat reminiscent of Time After Time, in which Jack the Ripper and H.G. Wells find themselves in the modern world, learning about everything from television, aviation to McDonalds. Alistair must learn to navigate in the modern world as he searches for a way to return home.

This film, which is one of those low budget gems we sometimes find, is actually quite well done. The actors seemed to be natural, and while I was a little annoyed at some of the coincidences that provided the means for him to attempt to return to his home time, it was all nicely done. It also outlines some of the troubles that people have navigating in our modern world. Alistair, however, rises above the challenges, finding friends to help understand what is happening around him.

This is a very nice little time travel film and if you have the chance, you should take a look at it. While it won’t appeal to everyone, it should find a very nice audience, and if you happen to be programming the film part of a SF convention, you won’t go wrong by adding this title to the list.