More like: 'Oumua-wah-wah...

In disappointing alien contact news, 'Oumuamua, the rigid and mighty interstellar shaft of mystery that recently plunged betwixt our solar system's quivering orbital paths and into the warmth of our primary star's embrace might not be an alien starship after all.

"Bow-chicka-wow-wow."

-NASA's official

statement on 'Oumuamua

Four if you count 'as portent of ill omen.'
Which, thanks, but we don't really need a
comet to tell us how screwed we all are.

Even more disappointingly, it might not even be an oddly shaped asteroid. A paper published this week by a researchers in Belfast, Northern Ireland, suggests that 'Oumuamua might just be a comet. They contend that the object is just a chunk of carbon-rich ice that's been cooked by interstellar radiation giving it a crust of 'organic gunk.' Their words, not mine. Anyway, according to planetary astronomer Michele Bannister, this crusty gunk layer is what's preventing 'Oumuamua from giving off the spectacular glowing tail of gases we normally associate with comets. So really this thing is disappointing us on at least three different levels.

Ok, so it's not alien, it's not some new, as yet undiscovered type of asteroid and as comets go, this one's more like an gunk covered log slowly circling the drain of the sun's gravity well.

Above: gross.

Or, if Nick Pope, the former head of the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense UFO Project has anything to say about it, it really is an alien starship and thanks to the radio signals we scanned it with earlier this month, we're all doomed. Wai-wah?

No one in a UFO documentary
could be full of shit, right?

Yeah, according to Pope:

'While nothing has been found yet, there's another intriguing possibility: If this ship is an alien probe, it's possible that our scans will awake the intelligence inside.'

-Nick Pope, presumably in a dark, smoke-

filled room with a shadowy figure looking on

All I'm saying is that maybe we
should all stop washing our hands,
...you know just in case.

Well, yeah, but it's also possible that Michele Banister is right with her crusty space log theory, right? Pope went on to explain that if this is aliens, our civilization is probably boned.

"Humanity probably wouldn't survive and alien invasion...any aliens that find us...probably have technology way in advance of anything we have."

-Pope, apparently never

having seen War of the Worlds

An interstellar civilization almost
certainly has Roombas that can manage
stairs. So what do they want with us?

Look, I would be thrilled to see alien contact in my lifetime. Just tickled pink. But why does everyone from Nick Pope up to Steven Hawking always assume they'll be hostile? I mean, what could our puny planet possibly have of value that aliens would travel lightyears to murder us for? Any natural resource of value found here on Earth can also be found floating freely everywhere else in the galaxy. Water, metals, crusty space logs. Anything. Sure, I suppose they could take us as slaves, but if they're so advanced, wouldn't they have robots or something? Why come all the way here?

It's the exact same reason the plot of
Starship Troopers makes no godadmn sense.

Pope's theory that aliens might have hollowed out 'Oumuamua to use as a spaceship is clever and all, but for this to work wouldn't they have had to sealed themselves up inside this thing thousands or maybe even millions of years ago to make it this far across the interstellar void? Like, long before civilization developed on Earth and possibly before humans even evolved? Is he saying that they hopped aboard this thing and shot themselves into space on the off chance that they might somehow, in the brain-melting vastness of the universe, stumble across a planet worth conquering?

Don't get me wrong, I mean no disrespect towards Nick Pope or his batshit paranoid claims that the least plausible explanation of 'Oumuamua is not only correct, but also signals our imminent destruction at the hands of incredibly lucky visitors from the stars, but maybe-and I say this as someone who is super pro-alien-maybe it really is just a chunk of ice?

Again, I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but according
to my calculations, the chance of Nick Pope's theory
being the correct one is exactly centaur.