It’s probe-ably nothing.
The newly discovered Manhattan-sized interstellar object zooming through our solar system has been identified as a comet — but two Harvard scientists argue there is reason to believe it’s really an alien probe.
NASA discovered 31/ATLAS on July 1, speeding through the inner solar system at 140,000 miles per hour according to observations from the ATLAS telescope in Chile — with experts clueless as to where it originated.
Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb suggested in a new paper that the object — only the third interstellar object ever detected — could be an intelligently directed alien craft observing Earth with possibly hostile intentions.
and will end up passing Jupiter, NSF NOIRLab
“The hypothesis in question is that [31/ATLAS] is a technological artifact, and furthermore has active intelligence. If this is the case, then two possibilities follow,” Dr. Loeb, Adam Drowl, and Adam Hibberd, wrote in a paper published on July 17.
“First, that its intentions are entirely benign and second, they are malign,” the experts opined, suggesting ETs.
The paper presented several anomalous characteristics of the object, which could indicate that it is not a comet at all but instead a directed craft.
One of the “most puzzling” observations is that the object has “significant ‘non-gravitational’ acceleration whilst having now “cometary outgassing.”
Loeb writes that 31/ATLAS “approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter with a probability of <0.005%,” the paper claimed.
31/ATLAS’s “low retrograde tilt” would seemingly allow it to “access our planet with relative impunity.”
The retrograde tilt “means attempts by humanity to intercept it, or even more difficult, rendezvous with it, are extremely challenging,” while the route simultaneously gives 31/ATLAS easy access to “certain key target planets,” the paper hypothesized.
Loeb further suggests that the tilt and pathway would allow the intelligent life on the object to gather “astrometric measurements, to determine the orbits and masses of the Solar System planets, allowing it to prepare an optimal approach strategy to the Solar System.”
Another possible smoking gun is that 31/ATLAS will come closest to the Sun on October 29 — on which day the object will be completely blocked from Earth’s view by the fiery ball.
The paper, presented in part as a “pedagogical experiment,” embraces the “Dark Forest” hypothesis regarding alien life — which assumes that other intelligent life would likely view Earthlings as a threat to be snuffed out.
The Dark Forest hypothesis, coined in the 2008 novel “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu, is a direct rebuttal to the Fermi Paradox, which suggests that contact with extraterrestrial intelligences is impossible.
