Is the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS alien technology? [pdf]
67 comments
·August 4, 2025JumpCrisscross
“If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.”
There is a third: undecided.
“At the heart of this, is a question any self-respecting scientist will have had to address at some point in their career: ‘is an outlier of a sample a consequence of expected random fluctuation, or is there ultimately a sound reason for its observed discrepancy?’ A sensible answer to this hinges largely on the size of the sample in question, and it should be noted that for interstellar objects we have a sample size of only 3, therefore rendering an attempt to draw inferences from what is observed rather problematic.”
Not only the heart of the question, but of the paper.
Still fun, though!
aiaikzkdbx
> If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign
Even framing this objects actions using human concepts (benign, malign) is very short sighted. It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend (there’s some good sci fi short stories that explore this).
jerf
This isn't really that important. I don't care if the probe is here because of magh'Kveh or because its creators are really motivated to zzzzssszsezesszzesz. What I care about is whether it's going to be benign (which includes just cruising through doing nothing) or malevolent to me. I don't even care if the aliens think they are doing us a favor by coming to a screeching halt, going full-bore at Earth, and converting our ecosystem into a completely different one that they think is "better" for whatever reason. However gurgurvivick that makes them feel, I'm going to classify that as a malign act and take appropriate action... because what else can I even do?
And from that perspective, "benign" and "malign" aren't that hard to pick up on. They are relative to humanity, and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact it would be pathological to not care about how the intentions are relative to their effect on humanity.
Whatever happens, it's not like we can actually cause an interstellar incident at this phase of our development. Anything that they would interpret as an interstellar incident they were going to anyhow (e.g. "how dare you prevent our probe from eliminating your species?") and that responsibility is on them, not us. You can't blame a toddler that can barely tie their shoelaces for international incidents, likewise for us and interstellar incidents.
stevenwoo
Sort of the impetus (which at least gives us a reason unlike the movie adaptation Edge of Tomorrow but is not as important as the impact) in the novella All You Need is Kill.
JumpCrisscross
> It’s possible any alien life experiences complexities were fundamentally unable to comprehend
Possible. But I’d argue unlikely. We can’t make many assumptions about alien life, generally. We can about a technological civilisation that sends out interstellar probes.
tialaramex
A sufficiently advanced technology might make the construction of probes trivial, so that it has no great significance to its creators - the "Roadside picnic" situation. Our unfathomable advanced technology is their disposable object. "Why did you send us this probe?" would be like asking America to account for a discarded Coke can. "I dunno, probably somebody was thirsty? What the fuck are you asking us for?"
Aliens are completely unknowable, that's the thing most fiction trips up on. We don't understand what the hell is going on with other humans. They're like us but different, their motivations sometimes are mysterious or maybe they don't have motivations at all? It's confusing, and those aren't even a different species let alone aliens.
pavel_lishin
And a fourth: irrelevant.
If I accidentally step on a bug and squish it, it's surely not good for the bug, but I had no intentions towards it one way or another.
xoxxala
Scott Manley just posted a video:
"Interstellar Comet 3/I Atlas - Probably Isn't An Alien Spaceship" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MafmhXwPgmo
(It has more to do with why we can't send a probe to investigate 3/I Atlas...)
Mizza
Related to this is Loeb's proposal to nudge the Juno spacecraft, currently orbiting Jupiter and soon facing EOL, into the path of 3I/Atlas to try to scan it and snap some pictures. I doubt it has enough fuel left, but I hope they're looking into it.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/how-close-can-the-juno-spacecraf...
Zigurd
By now, Avi Loeb's recommendations should count against whatever he's recommending.
mattlondon
Even if they have no fuel/not enough fuel, can they at least point it in the right direction? Better than nowt?
ben_w
If the probe doesn't have enough fuel to leave Jupiter's orbit, we get a better view of it from here with our much bigger optics.
Sure, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Jupiter is 53.56±0.45 Gm, the closest approach of 3I/Atlas to Earth is 268.98±0.3 Gm — but we have more and better sensors down here.
For photographs in particular, Juno's JunoCam is spectacularly bad, because "it was put on board primarily for public science and outreach, to increase public engagement, with all images available on NASA's website" — while it can be used for actual science, at the orbital apsis (8.1 Gm) it has a worse resolution, when looking at Jupiter, than Hubble gets of Jupiter from LEO (a distance of ~600 Gm for https://esahubble.org/images/heic0910q/).
null
mattlondon
Loeb. That sounds familiar - is this the same Loeb who was hunting for molten alien rocket fragments on the sea floor? What happened to that?
taylorius
If I recall, he found a few small bits of metal and declared victory.
moi2388
The very same. And also the same guy who claimed ʻOumuamua is likely to be an alien spacecraft.
I don’t know what Harvard is doing lately, but perhaps they ought not to talk about astronomy anymore if this nonsense is all they can contribute to the discussion.
throwawaymaths
i do think loeb is nonsensical but is there any a priori reason to think that academia should not speculate about extraterrestrial intelligence in general?
Zigurd
Yes. Most people don't understand either physical and chronological distance enough to understand that contact with an alien civilization, if it exists or ever did exist, is vanishingly unlikely to happen because of time, physical changes to solar systems, distance, the endurance of civilizations, the speed of light, etc. Loeb is pandering to the UFO-susceptible.
jojobas
That's academic freedom for you.
criddell
> We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability of ≲ 0.005%.
What probability are they talking about?
Zigurd
Evidently not the probability of all the other coincidences that could be the basis of post hoc ergo propter hoc analysis.
pbmonster
If you take a random trajectory through our solar system, your chance to pass this close to three planets is < 0.005%.
datadrivenangel
Specifically a random angle.
"The likelihood for such a perfect alignment of the orbital angular momentum vector around the Sun for Earth and 3I/ATLAS is π(5◦/57◦)2/(4π) = 2×10−3."
Sloppy sloppy work.
pbmonster
I also misread that. The 0.005% is in relation to this:
> In the following analysis we assume that 3I/ATLAS is on its current orbit but vary the time-of-entry into the Solar System (or equivalently the time of perihelion), assuming 3I/ATLAS could have come at any time into the Solar System, and happened to do so such that it came within the observed closest approaches of Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The probability of this is 0.005
So exact same trajectory, but analyzed over a long period of time. If it came any earlier or later, it would almost never get this close to exactly those three planets.
baggy_trough
I noticed that about the orbit as well. It does seem a little surprising.
cyberlimerence
Does Loeb plan to apply this thesis to every interstellar object ?
moi2388
Not just interstellar ones, also any rock you might find on the ocean floor..
SideburnsOfDoom
The three known interstellar object to pass through the solar system were 1I/ʻOumuamua, 2I/Borisov and now 3I/ATLAS.
Did he give Borisov this treatment? It seems not, so then the answer is "no, only about two thirds of them".
rookderby
I'm in favor of spending more resources on research projects like building a probe to intercept one of these interstellar objects. It would be worth the investment to go and see, and it looks like the Vera Rubin will give us several targets.
Bender
I selfishly would rather invest in mining asteroids so that we may one day be qualified to manipulate their movements and prevent strikes of any planets in our solar system and to get rich of course. Even if it takes a few hundred years to become qualified for such mining that is a tiny blip in this spacetime and could mitigate at least some civilization ending events. The process of heading that direction is likely to result in many advancements in technology and slightly safer playgrounds to develop more intelligent androids assuming they don't get hacked resulting in dragging and dropping 20+ mile metal asteroids at us.
JumpCrisscross
> It would be worth the investment to go and see
Why? I’d rather we continue surveying from a distance while sending probes to places we know will be interesting, like Titan and Europa.
f6v
Well, we probably have resources for both (as The Humanity).
JumpCrisscross
> we probably have resources for both
In the long run, yes. Possibly even in the medium term. In the short term, no--we're limited by our technological capability.
jojobas
We don't quite have the technology. It was spotted a month ago, will cross inside Martian orbit in another 2 months, for another 3 months. The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
NitpickLawyer
> The fastest we can get to around Martian orbit is 7 months.
This is not accurate. Viking got there in <4 months, and we have the technology to do it even faster, if needed. The long duration transits are often the least energy (Hohmann transfer) and that's why we use them. Planetary alignment is also a big factor.
Anyway, there are currently proposals to have probes lingering in high orbits and intercept interstellar visitors (maybe not as fast as 3I), and Rubin should give us plenty of targets when it gets online.
As an interesting tidbit, 3I was found in the Rubin data ~2weeks before it was spotted. Should be a perfect exercise in refining the discovery algorithms.
pavel_lishin
We don't have the technology to catch up to this one, but what could we do with the next one that's detected earlier?
s1artibartfast
what's stopping you?
jpcompartir
Most reasoned take is directly from the paper itself:
"We strongly emphasize that this paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting discoveries and strange serendipities, worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and the authors await the astronomical data to support this likely origin."
thrance
More importantly, do we need to reach for aliens everytime something slightly out of the ordinary happens in the night sky? (No, we do not).
largbae
Based on their approach graphs, if it is an intercept probe it seems like the target is Mars.
Mistletoe
I hope this gets some discussion here. A fascinating paper to think about.
RajT88
Fun to think about, but think about this: as soon as we have the tech to start catching sight of these things, we start seeing them yearly.
While that does not automatically suggest that they are not technological, they are not likely to be hostile.* We've likely lived through tens of thousands of them passing through.
*Unless you subscribe to the "they are among us" viewpoint. That crazy well has no bottom.
Teever
It really isn't.
One of the authors (Abraham Loeb) is well known for writing salami-sliced papers that have tenuous and non-testable premises.
You should be skeptical of anything he writes after watching this:
SideburnsOfDoom
Yes, this. Here's Loeb 2 years ago on Oumuamua - was it Aliens?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomer-avi-lo...
https://earthsky.org/space/oumuamua-a-comet-avi-loeb-respond...
Here's Loeb on space dust - was it Aliens?
https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/alie...
He's doing what he usually does. It's fun to think about, but not to be taken too seriously or regarded as anything unique.
Mistletoe
What is a salami-sliced paper?
sgt101
It's weaponised language that pseudo academics hurl around at each other to try and denigrate the research outputs of other people. In the distant past it had a meaning which was that research was being published in small parts in order to get more academic kudos from it, but now literally all research is published this way based on the judgement of the submitter about what they can get accepted where.
In this case Loeb seems to have decided to delight in publishing out-there ideas, probably with a bit of a mission to open up debate and widen the range of acceptable topics in the field of astronomy for younger less established researchers. Basically, he's at a point in his career where he simply doesn't care what anyone things of him and his research and so he's spending credit so that if someone younger and more at risk than him comes up with a startling idea they will hopefully be more likely to share it.
I think it's a good thing, obviously a bunch of people really don't.
s1artibartfast
Pretty terrible and dishonest video. The author should feel bad.
They they throw up the following quote, omitting the first half. then bash him thinking this is the only explanation.
>Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment'
I think it speaks to a greater dispute about what topics are proper to think about, discuss, or even enjoy.
null
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/