A strange interstellar object is hurtling its way toward our pale blue dot — and according to a Harvard astronomer, there’s a chance it’s not a benign asteroid or comet, but instead some harmful form of alien tech.
In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb — the same scientist who suggested that ‘Oumuamua, the first interstellar object ever detected back in 2017, was alien in nature — teamed up with researchers from the Britain-based Initiative for Interstellar Studies to hypothesize not only that the newly-discovered interloper 3I/ATLAS is alien in origin, but that it may be from a hostile civilization, too.
Loeb is an interesting character: he’s an enormously accomplished academic and the former chair of Harvard’s prestigious astronomy department, but in recent years has often made headlines for suggesting that various detections in the cosmos might be alien spacecraft. In other words, he was almost bound to weigh in on this latest interstellar visitor, which is only the third ever detected.
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And weigh in he did. Citing the so-called “dark forest” hypothesis — which comes from sci-fi writer Cixin Liu’s novel of the same name and posits that the universe is full of silent and aggressive aliens, all staying as quiet as possible to avoid mutually-assured destruction — Loeb and his colleagues Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl suggest that 3I/ATLAS could theoretically provide evidence that we are not alone, and that our neighbors would do us harm.
“The consequences, should the [dark forest] hypothesis turn out to be correct, could potentially be dire for humanity,” Loeb wrote in a blog post accompanying the paper, “and would possibly require defensive measures to be undertaken (though these might prove futile.)”
In another recent post, Loeb argued that 3I/ATLAS’ strange characteristics — including that it’s likely over a dozen miles in diameter, which is far larger than the obelisk-sized ‘Oumuamua — render it statistically improbable.
“If 3I/ATLAS is not an asteroid — based on the interstellar reservoir argument in my paper, nor a comet — based on the lack of the spectral fingerprints of carbon-based molecules around it, then what is it?” Loeb mused in that previous post.
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It’s worth noting that these sorts of hypotheses have made Loeb controversial among skeptical colleagues who consider his quest for alien artifacts to be sensationalist in nature. In his latest paper, to be fair, Loeb acknowledged that there’s a good chance 3I/ATLAS is not from an extraterrestrial civilization.
“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,” the scientific trio wrote.
Still, Loeb argues that undertaking a “pedagogical exercise” like the one presented in the new paper is important not just to stretch open minds, but also to create protocols for determining the natures of future interstellar objects.
“When viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective,” the researchers concluded, “our paper includes many compelling insights that could be applied to tens of interstellar objects that are expected to be detected over the next decade.”
More on space objects: Remember That Asteroid NASA Deflected in a Test of Saving Earth? We Have Bad News
