3I/ATLAS: Probably NOT an alien interstellar probe

[Jarhyn]

I would say you need significantly less material than most of y'all are thinking to survive the impact.

You need a computer capable of calculating the impact forces within margins, a computer you could conceivably later use as ablation or reaction mass, and then a number of small events.

This is because in space, things like the hydrophobic ejection of spore capsules happens at insane velocities and does not get the ejection "broken" by the thickness of the atmosphere.

Imagine a spore container several "spores" thick. The outer container uses hydrophobics to eject an inner container that contains some water and spore containers, and suddenly you have the means to get going well beyond the speed of sound with an utterly tiny package.

Remember that there's a cube/square problem going on, where the smaller you can make the interception device, the less energy it takes to intercept at speed.

Then, having an impactor made to take the structural collapse and damage for the internal payload would complete the journey.

I will maintain that having several hundred thousand tons of material to add to or modify and which is already going somewhere, anywhere, is a much better way of having several hundred thousand tons of material launched from a planet and accelerated yourself.

Then in a few hundred thousand years (what does it matter to the probe systems? They hibernate!) when something happens you wake up and check if you have found yourself somewhere interesting, maybe shed some probes, and continue on through the universe.

In fact this particular interstellar object has its own 'coma' or micro-atmosphere as well as frozen gassy deposits which would be VERY nice to have for future probe applications, since not only are they easily accessed reaction mass, they are also useful hydrocarbon sources for whatever other features might need to be farmed up.

1) Tyranny of the rocket equation. Booster to payload is exponentially linked to desired velocity vs reaction mass ejection velocity. Hydrolox running rich is the best chemical propulsion that can exist. (Using fluorine produces a higher binding energy, but it binds only one atom of hydrogen. More energy per molecule but less energy per gram. Likewise, you run hydrolox rich not only to protect your engines but because hydrogen is lighter--you actually end up with a higher exhaust velocity than if you provided enough oxygen.) Innovations come from reducing weight and reducing power consumption.

2) You still haven't addressed the problem of supersonic impact.

Position a launch vehicle maybe the size of a brick with a payload of less than a gram. Maybe a single milliliter of payload?

I keep saying the best information to density ratio we have for constructing some manner of 'truth machine' is something resembling biology.

I really do think that it is much easier to get something very small launched out of a system on an exit path than it is to get something large on that same exit path, and it's useful to have a lot of mass on an exit path.

The best exit path is therefore one that some other object is already on.

I'm not saying it's ever going to be easy to catch or direct such an object.

I acknowled that it's hard.

... But it's the best ticket we have to having something to build from and launch off of later, especially when we've used up a lot of the available resources trying to do even more wasteful shit like launching cans full of air into space to preserve hungry, cold, hairless, heavy apes.

At some point in the far future, when humans have gotten our asses into space and discovered that there's not really much to do or build from or survive with out there, even though it's the only place we have left that isn't completely fucked, and we're desperate enough to try to attach to anything on its way through or out, you can be sure that we're going to be trying even the crazy shit some asshole on an internet forum suggested before we give up trying to exist elsewhere.

Knowing how things tend to happen, I'll bet that the first couple tries will be half-assed and the payload will be a dud, or something bound to that object and unable to leave, trapped to live out eons in the cold of space, to never actually make an effective way to get off the rock, and to wander endlessly until it's too cold and doesn't pass anything warm enough to keep a semblance of activity going.

I think that if we can engineer life that can shit out hominid things that remember what it's like to be us, slap it on a thing we launch out of the system using slingshot maneuvers, and then litter into a new system.

In fact I'm not the only person who has this sort of idea for how life could be jury rigged; a much more simplified version is 40k Space Orks, apparently, where they are born of spored that germinate into a space-orkoid-creature producing womb.

So I'm not the only one thinking about doing that and it's apparently a popular idea. People will probably be suggesting it at some point of only because apparently, one in a popular grimdark space setting that will possibly outlive humanity with the profusion of junk that advertised it.