‘Alien spaceship’ 3I/ATLAS ‘ignored Earth’ as we’re not ‘centre of consideration for extraterrestrials’
31/ATLAS made its long-awaited nearest approach to Earth on Friday but just hurtled past, showing that the aliens who “sent” it just aren’t interested in us, claims a Harvard space boffin
After an epic journey over billions of years through deep space, 31/ATLAS flew its closest to Earth on Friday (December 19) – and rather than making contact or launching an invasion, the interstellar anomaly just passed right on by.
But Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist who has repeatedly pointed out the object’s weird features, remains convinced it’s a spaceship. Just not one sent by aliens who care at all about us.
“Our popular view is that visitors might show up in our cosmic neighbourhood because of their interest in our home,” he writes on his blog. “Well, guess what: if you are late to a party and you are not at the centre of the room, the party is not about you.“
Avi has spotted a host of features that suggest 31/ATLAS isn’t, as NASA claims, just a comet. He reckons the spacecraft has shown signs of using thrusters and has a highly suspicious “anti-tail” pointed at the sun.
“We have never witnessed such a long, tightly collimated anti-tail,” he said. “To fully understand the nature of 3I/ATLAS, we must explain this anomaly as well as the others.”
But when the aliens launched their probe, billions of years ago, they had no motive to plot a path closer to Earth, he claims. “Recently, we realized that there are about ten billion houses like ours on the cosmic street of the Milky-Way and most of them formed billions of years before the Earth-Sun system,” he wrote.
“Not only are we not at the centre of the Universe, we are also not at the centre of attention for interstellar visitors.” The spacecraft instead delivered a “blunt message-in-a-bottle” to earthlings on Friday, when it reached its closest distance from Earth, 268.91 million kilometres.
“3I/ATLAS did not manoeuvre or display any unusual activity on that occasion,” he writes. The mystery object’s trajectory also avoided Earth by passing on the other side of the Sun from us on October 29.
“Some find this message insulting. But the truth of the matter is that with an interstellar speed of 60 kilometres per second, the journey of 3I/ATLAS through the Milky-Way disk of stars must have taken billions of years.
“When 3I/ATLAS started its journey, there were no humans on Earth. And besides, among the solar system planets, Jupiter is the centre of attention, given that its mass is 318 times larger than Earth’s.”
He now hopes that imaging and spectroscopic data will help us figure out 3I/ATLAS’s mysterious properties by the time it gets closest to the giant planet on March 16, 2026.
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