David Kipping

We see a circular disk of objects around us, which kind of looks like the asteroid belt, but just further away called the Kuiper belt.

And then further beyond that, you get the Oort cloud.

And the Oort cloud is not a disk, it's just a sphere.

It kind of surrounds us in all directions.

So these are objects that were scattered out three-dimensionally in all different directions.

And so those objects are potentially resources for us, especially if you were planning to

to do an interstellar mission one day, you might want to mine the water that's embedded within those and use that as either oxygen or fuel for your rocket.

And so it's quite possible.

There's also some rare earth metals and things like that as well, but it's quite possible that a civilization might use all cloud objects as a jumping off point.

or in the Kuiper Belt you have things like Planet 9 even.

There might even be objects beyond in the Oort Cloud which are actually planet-like that we just cannot detect.

These objects are very, very faint, so that's why they're so hard to see.

Even Planet 9

it's hypothesized to exist, but we've not been able to confirm its existence because it's at something like 1,000 AU away from us, 1,000 times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.

And so even though it's probably larger than the Earth, the amount of light it reflects from the Sun, the Sun just looks like a star at that point, so far away from it that it barely reflects anything back.

It's extremely difficult to detect.

So there's all sorts of wonders that may be lurking out in the outer solar system.

And so this leads you to wonder,

in the Oort Cloud, that Oort Cloud must have intermixed with other Oort Clouds in the past.

And so what fraction of the Oort Cloud truly belongs to us, belongs to what was scattered from Jupiter and Saturn, what fraction of it could in fact be interstellar visitors?