posted on May, 4 2013 @ 05:08 AM
reply to post by HomoSapiensSapiens
They probably wouldnt know that much before the rest of us to be honest. You have to remember that although we have some awesome telescopes, both
optical and radio based, the fact is that we can only survey a tiny fraction of the universe at any one time. Not only that, but unless an object,
which happens to be passing across the tiny scan range of one of our observation installations, is outputting light, or affecting surrounding bodies
via its gravitational pull, we cannot have a hope in hell of actually seeing it coming.
The reason we know about the thousands of comets and asteroids, plying the interstellar highways, is because we have observed some of these over
hundreds and hundreds of years, and because some of them are part of the solar system's construction, which means that they are regularly passing a
given location in the solar system, and are therefore trackable. Even those asteroids which pass through our solar system once every hundred years,
are not tracked visually when they leave our near space. The vast majority of what we know about the passage of these objects through space, is based
on mathematical calculations performed by minds and machines, rather than direct observation.
These things in mind, it is likely that unless the artificial object you are refering to was outputting some sort of signal toward Earth, or causing
MASSIVE changes in the space through which it passes, any object which has had no previous interaction with our solar system, or at least none during
the current age of scientific enlightenment in which we find ourselves, will not be expected, or recognised until it is, in cosmological terms, quite
close to us.