Bali, Paul

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 'Oumuamua, interstellar object: what we know so far   it came from above, and we didn't see it coming: down onto the orbital plane, the big implicit disc of our Solar System. down into the whirling inner Orrery.  in a NASA/JPL-CalTech gif, it almost hits us, twice.1 trails us in our circumsolar motion for some days. gains on us then blows us by.  it has no readable heat. emits no beep, yet itself is a winking pixel: a brightness phasing ten-to-one, transiting our interface.  it has no message but its own improbability. a luminous anomaly says look at me / solve me.  gives no sign but comes from the direction of Vega. draws an epic V on the Ecliptic.  all agree: an interstellar alien. a proper UFO, unidentified. it's Interstellar Object 1 : first of a mysterious Kind.  'Oumuamua is the first foreigner you've had at your dinner table and we never got to ask them about Panama & damnit there they go, down the driveway.2  a deep-UFO, a Vallee UFO, a Hermetic entity. its wake is eidetic, a binary trail of our own affirmations & denials.3 comet/asteroid; natural/artificial; warning us / laughing on its fly-by; a whale saying Hi / a ballistic flung by trebuchet; et cet.  the name, on our mumming lips, is childish, subjectivized. the second mua is the speaker's own exuberance, a redundancy.  the signal, for me, is motherly. like Sagittarius A*, the dense dark heart of the Milky Way: where Scorpius & the Archer meet: like November 22nd, my own mother's birthday.  zoom out from our local star, take into your wider view a circumsolar sphere of a few hundred systems: relative to this Local Standard, 'Oumuamua seems to be stationary.4 we pass it, then loop a hard left, seem crazy.                                       1 https://www.wired.com/story/is-oumuamua-an-alien-spaceship-sure-except-no/ 2 Robert Reid, the After On podcast. Nov 28 2018 3 see Erik Davis, "The Alien Call" in Techgnosis, 2004. 4 Avi Loeb, the After On podcast. 

'Oumuamua, interstellar object: what we know so far

https://philpapers.org/archive/BALOIO.pdf

'Oumuamua, interstellar object: what we know so far

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