[mel919]

The whole situation of us encountering Oumuamua and being unable to gather much information about it reminds me of one of the Lem's short stories about Pilot Pirx in which he encounters an unique alien object and is also struggling with recording data about it.

Here's a quote that works on imagination:

There are times when the human eye can behave like a camera lens, when a momentarily but brilliantly cast image can be not merely recalled but meticulously reconstructed as vividly as if viewed in the present. Minutes later, I could still visualize the surface of that colossus in the flare’s afterglow, its kilometers-long sides not smooth but pocked, almost lunar in texture; the way the light had spilled over its corrugated rills, bumps, and craterlike cavities—scars of its interminable wandering, dark and dead as it had entered the nebulae, from which it had emerged centuries later, dust-eaten and ravaged by the myriad bombardments of cosmic erosion. I can’t explain my certainty, but I was sure that it sheltered no living soul, that it was a billion-year-old carcass, no more alive than the civilization that gave birth to it.

This story (Pirx's Tale) is available on Google Books: https://books.google.com/books?id=n16z06cm1P0C&lpg=PT11&dq=%...