[CaptainCrunch]

The sky is vast and the telescopes can't see everything at once. so its often extremely lucky when we spot something like this and usually because we were studying something else and it popped into view.

I think the question of probes is a problem based around speed and early warning.

While it sounds cool to fire off probes, without a lot of advanced early warning most of our probes like voyagers take years to decades to cross the solar system. To intercept something like this we'd probably would have had to see it in the late 90's to intercept it.

Its different with predictable objects like comets, you can plan the arrival of those by a calender. But this thing was an unexpected object.

We'd need to come up with a much faster engine technology to be able to do interceptions, and probably have scanner systems at the edges of the solar system to be able to detect these objects.

I would almost expect that there are very few extra solar system objects because most objects are caught in the gravity shadow of their own solar system and don't have the ability to escape that.

I expect that the areas between systems are fairly clear of large debris.