[jula432vdf]

I don't think many realize the seriousness of the situation. If the asteroid is just a rock, nothing happens, everything is just fine, we can continue to be the apex predator of Sol system.

But if anybody is wrong and oumuamua was in fact an alien device looking for us (intelligent life), almost certainly it has found us. What happens next is entirely out of human hands, unless we can realize that event.

Maybe is nothing more than some kind of probe or long range satellite, but it could be a scout ship, or an early warning sensor, and we're just in course to meet the rest of the hardware from where oumuamua came from.

Is really rational just plainly deny the chance of that rock being pure luck of not having found a big fleet of some interestellar things and having to figure out if they are friendly or not as they approach the planet?

Probably the space force and the whole stuff many countries are sending to all the solar system since 2018 are just a coincidence, or may be other people is also worried about what happens next if oumuamua was not just a weird rock.

[wcoenen]

> What happens next is entirely out of human hands, unless we can realize that event.

We would not have been able to detect this object two decades ago. So the "event" is that our observation capabilities have grown past some threshold, not that anything has changed in our solar system. Whether rocks or alien probes, these types of objects must always have been passing through our solar system with some regularity. We'll get a a chance to study others soon enough.

Edit: this video by Scott Manley helps to get a sense of how our ability to detect asteroids has grown over time: https://youtu.be/BKKg4lZ_o-Y