That initial mark isn't a diacritic "backtick", though it's often presented as such, but a distinct Hawaiʻian letter ʻokina, Unicode U+02BB, decimal 699. To a linguist, it's a "phonemic glottal stop"., and the recommendation in new work is to use the UNICODE character in preference to the apostrophe or "backtick" diacritics. The correct (HTML) orthography is (all one word) "& #x2bb ; Oumuamua".
We have 1I/ʻOumuamua from 2017, and 2I/Borisov from 2019. So why not 3I/XXX? Yet. I maintain a watching brief on the Minor Planets Mailing List (MPML, and have done since ʻOumuamua. There hasn't even been a pulse of excitement with a first-report suggesting a significantly hyperbolic trajectory, even if it were later dis-confirmed. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Which isn't suspicious - yet - but it is getting just a touch nervous-making, because ... well, how did Fermi put it? "Where is everyone?"
This sounds like it's an advance in panspermia theory. It is - but not in a good way if you think that panspermia is a useful idea. The authors use the number (1) and size of ʻOumuamua (≈ 100m) to estimate numbers for the total number of impact events, and the total collision mass, then re-work that to estimate the number of (potentially) life-bearing particles to impact Earth between it's origin and the palaeontological origin of life, and from that to it's importance on a galcatic scale. Which is basically, a bog-standard panspermia argument. And their figure : assuming 109 Earth-like planets in the Galaxy, order of 105 of them might have been seeded by panspermia. One in ten thousand. I stil think that might be a bit optimistic, but it's a lot more realistic than some of the calculations done by other panspermia fans.
Panspermia remains a practically useless idea. Given that even with panspermia, somewhere has to be the origin of life, all that panspermia does is move the question of how life originated from here, under conditions compatible with the history of Earth's environment to an unknown location, with an unknown history of environmental conditions. Which, as useful ideas go, is damned-all a useful idea.
I propose Optimi-Panspermia : wherever your organism proposing panspermia lives today, the planet where it's panspermia origin is had conditions like the worst planet in the system (for Earth/ Solar system, would that be Neptune, Eris, or Mercury?), and then the dispersed panspermia seeds had to get to the Earth-analogue planet, then immediately adapt to the new conditions and take over. That sounds a credible panspermia to me. And it has no more evidence for it than any other panspermia proposal.
Sorry, did I sound like a fan of panspermia for a few femtoseconds there? Sooooo misleading.
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