Show HN: Are interstellar visitors alien probes?
Would a planned path through the solar system give itself away? The three interstellar visitors, scored in bits against calibrated chance.
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There was a lot of debate about whether the 3 interstellar objects found might not be natural. Most of it cherry-picked a few oddities and claimed decisively, for or against. I don't have a strong opinion, and don't trust my eye for coincidence or to spot astrology-like "planetary alignment", so I simulated millions of random paths through the solar system and counted how many came closer than the 3 known objects, either to the planets or to or from nearby stars.
1I and 2I look like chance. Loeb et al. put 3I's planetary passes at 1 in 20,000. Scored against all eight planets and random arrivals of its speed, it's about 1 in 300. I don't know how much more easily surveys spot objects along the ecliptic, which would explain some of 3I's coincidence.
I welcome forking the project and adjusting the assumptions I made, like a Bracewell or von Neumann probe would take a traveling salesman path, or that it would need to fly near multiple planets.
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