I'm guilty of editing late too, I hope you all refresh the page and reread what I posted, I added some material.
Oops, now it's on the previous page lol.
Although I don't necessarily disagree with you here, it does seem to be a bit of a logical fallacy on your part to scoff at the alien probe hypothesis while accepting it's no less extreme natural origin. In light of our ignorance in some other details, this presumed knowledge is as dangerous as erroneous knowledge.
Accepting a hypothesis requires that we test and isolate that hypothesis as the only working one, which we now cannot do, because it is too far away and we cannot catch up to it to get new observations. We have to wait and hope for new objects to come by to get more data on their properties and numbers.
Yes, the probe hypothesis does strike one as a rather quaint observation. But further to the point, to what degree did the distance required for us to detect it by the pan-STARS 1 telescope play into the statistical likelihood of detection and thereof extrapolated population?
Occam's Razor.
'Oumuamua was moving at roughly 315,000 kilometres per hour (196,000 miles per hour) when it approached Earth, and is now traveling at 138,000 kilometres per hour (85,700 miles per hour) away from us. The New Horizons space probe launched by NASA in 2006 had a peak speed in it's Earth/Sun escape trajectory of 57,936 kilometers per hour (36,000 miles per hour) and is the fastest spacecraft on record to be sent into the outer solar-system. So yes, 'Oumuamua is a bit out of our reach currently - but some future designs might be able to catch up with it - there is a proposed mission called Project Lyra that wants to examine 'Oumuamua via powered flybys between the sun and Jupiter.
It's status as a interstellar object was never in question, really. We do know that it had come from the gravitational well of Vega some 600,000 years ago, but beyond that it could have come from almost anywhere in the galaxy.
This does bring to mind the notion of von Neumann probes, though 'Oumuamua does not match the expected criteria for such a craft. Certainly an alien civilization with sufficient automation could pump out a great number of probes and potentially fill the galaxy with them within many hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
It's the most concise of its kind I've read, and honestly reflects the advances in the field of SETI (or present lack thereof).
That's the ultimate transhumanist goal - and a worthy one at that . I'm not entirely sure if we can travel to other universes with the knowledge of technology and science that we currently have - but who knows what scientific breakthroughs an ASI could make. Probably of a magnitude that we cannot even grasp or would even think of. They would solve the "Unknown unknowns" in science - whereas we can only solve "Known unknowns".I can think of several benefits to this, to combine the best properties of each into one common being that has a lifespan long enough to explore the entire universe and perhaps one day even outlast it (either by causing the universe to rebang in the far future, journeying to other universes or creating our own universes to explore ourselves.)