Could 'Oumuamua be an icy fractal aggregate ejected from a protoplanetary disk?
> It seems far more likely that objects like 'Oumuamua are relatively rare, and that means it likely came from someplace close by (if it came from farther away, the odds are even lower we'd ever see one).<p>Ok, it's on my list of things to do this year to actually learn how statistics work, but my naive reaction to this supposition, which I read is "the fact that we have encountered Oumuamua means that it's likely it didn't come from far away, because if it did, it's less likely we would have encountered it," is: We <i>did</i> encounter it. Just this one, ever. How can we draw any statistical information from that? Either we encountered it, or didn't, how does that have any bearing on the statistical probability of seeing it?