Let's return to our origins, like a planet orbiting its star, a star around the center

of a galaxy, like a circle or an O. And come back to Amumuamua, our interstellar object,

which we first spotted in October 2017, or as Harvard astronomer Abbey Loeb described

it, our rather strange guest.

If you have a guest for dinner and that guest looks very unusual, you start wondering,

is it really the same as my family members? It looks so strange.

It was our first interstellar object, at least the first we recognized, in and out of range

before we really knew what we'd found, and we'll never get a better look at it.

That's quite unfortunate because science is based on evidence, and the more evidence

we have, the better conclusions we can draw about the nature of this object.

Given what little information we were able to gather about how it moved, its trajectory

and speed, its shape, we knew it was different. But a lot of questions remained. What was

it? Comment? Alien Light Sale? Something completely unknown or unexpected? We won't

ever know. But in August 2019, in the middle of reporting this project, an amateur astronomer

and Crimea discovered a second interstellar object, passing through our solar system, getting

about as close as Amumuamua did. Which suggests that these kinds of objects are more common

than we thought, and now that we're developing the tools to see them, we might just find them

everywhere. Perhaps life will be the same.

As we finally develop tools powerful enough to peer into the great distances of our solar

system, our galaxy, and ultimately the universe beyond, maybe we'll discover that life abounds,

that extraterrestrials are everywhere. But we also have to consider the possibility that

we are on our own.

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