Depends on where you want to go, like choosing which bus.

You do realize that we’re sitting on a perfectly good planet that is already on an interstellar journey through the galaxy? Just sit tight. The sun is orbiting the galaxy at half a million miles per hour. It will take 200 million years to make one orbit.

But where is it going and how long will it take to get there?

You would likely need to send multiple spacecraft at the same time to the object. Couldn’t nuclear energy get us a long way once we’re actually on the object? This would be a notch in favour of making a colony that could become self sustaining if properly prepared

If its moving fast enough to be useful, how would you set up a colony in the time you could access it?

I mean it could allow you to send multiple smaller payloads to the asteroid and allow it to act as a central ship. You can carry a smaller payload either way if you could figure out how to mine and manufacture on such a body. You wouldn’t need the object to be as heavy with shielding materials etc. If the project was sophisticated to carry humans you could develop essentially a colony and sensory instruments once actually on the asteroid. You could mine for elements and there are many.

The only advantage I can think of would be maybe for some level of gravity afforded by the mass of the asteroid, but it would have to be a big asteroid to give anything useful, and that would mean steering it would be that much harder.

With this object being so far away, and a possible 10,000 year orbit, it would take a long long long time to make out perturbations due to it.

Also a reminder that we don't know everything about the universe or physics yet! While Planet 9 would be a cool find, it always makes me think of Vulcan: the "planet" they used to explain Mercury's orbit with Newtonian physics.

They should play KSP. They would find out the "hard" way!

Hey, reaching great speeds and then slowing down is just as much a problem as actually getting off the craft.

I mean, you would choose an asteroid with a desirable trajectory.

Yes, the object could be boarded by multiple smaller spacecraft with specific payloads.

In terms of mining before you leave the sun, perhaps only a certain level of mining is essential, like for certain gasses. Even still maybe you send enough payloads that mining isn’t much of a necessity.

I think you’re missing the point is that the comet isn’t an energy point. Be it a feather or a bus at the speed is the same speed. You don’t need to catch the bus to transport it, it’s fine to travel on no it’s own. Rocket gets it to speed and there is no air resistance

I swear we had this same proposal before except it was with comets. What’s with people suggesting we hitch a ride on passing rocks?

I swear we had this same proposal before except it was with comets. What’s with people suggesting we hitch a ride on passing rocks?

Now I kind of disagree with the premise that we don’t need it, it could become a ship of it’s own, though with even more added benefits like : protection from radiation and very small asteroids, they contain much of the materials needed for human survival and manufacturing, meaning you could potentially take less equipment with you on the initial departure and instead manufacture sensory devices later on.

Now I kind of disagree with the premise that we don’t need it, it could become a ship of it’s own, though with even more added benefits like : protection from radiation and very small asteroids, they contain much of the materials needed for human survival and manufacturing, meaning you could potentially take less equipment with you on the initial departure and instead manufacture sensory devices later on.

The other issue is that once you've caught up with it, you're now stuck travelling where it's going, which is unlikely to be toward any nearby star, so now you're just hanging on getting yeet'd out of the solar system into the great void between stars.

So even if you did spend all the effort (enormous, many stage rocket, very very tiny delivered payload to match the object's velocity) you're not necessarily going anywhere interesting. The only thing working for you in this scenario is you are sitting on a big pile of potential resources for building something else. But even then you need to build quickly as your access to abundant sunlight to power any construction is going away quickly as you leave the vicinity of the sun.

You could in theory, but you wouldn’t want to. First you are entirely at the mercy of its random trajectory, sure you could nudge it around, but it’s generally going to be headed into deep space, away from any solar energy source. If you had fusion power you could be okay for energy. But if you wanted to turn it drastically, it would require more energy than it would take to just accelerate a space ship in that direction at the same speed.

The main problem is that even if it happens to be pointed exactly where you want to go, it’s not necessarily going to get you you there faster or more efficiently than just building your own starship.

If the asteroid is going really fast, you’d have to build a ship that catch catch up to it and match its speed. If you have that, you don’t really need the asteroid apart from resourcing mining.

If it’s going as fast as modern rockets currently allows, then riding on it wont get you there faster than just staying in the ship.

It wouldn’t solve any problem except providing a far greater reservoir of resources, and not a very good one. What you really want from fusion energy is hydrogen. It’s not efficient to extract hydrogen from rock.

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I believe there being no other benefits is untrue. Such a body carries water, metals etc. Regolith, couldn’t that be used as a soil like substrate for some kind of farming? Even if not, the terrain itself could still be used to provide the space for farming, processing of materials and manufacturing tasks. Maybe the initial craft never launches with a telescope but manufactures one on-board the asteroid. Perhaps a small scale human colony? Inside the asteroid, protected from at least some radiation?

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True however living inside the asteroid provides a source of many (all) needed materials, protection from the elements of space etc... land for farming, industry.

THIS. It's a BIG search area because things are further away from each other that far out and thus the gravity perturbations on the other planets and small bodies is small. Small effect means we only know the general area it's in. Couple that with the dim lighting that far away from the sun and it means you have to stare for a long time to see the dim objects, and thus it takes longer to search that part of the sky with enough sensitivity to see things this dim.

Exactly we are on the path to being able to fully operate on such objects. I can’t see why landing an unmanned vehicle on an object (OSIRIS-style) like oumuamua and hitching a ride on this 87,000km/h travelling bus. Or at least why we aren’t trying to do that ASAP.

Like couldn’t you land so much sensory technology, even telescopes on such a thing?

To reach the asteroid you would have to match it's vector and speed at which point your space craft is already on an escape trajectory and doesn't need the asteroid to leave the solar system.