Alien visitors… next week

Meet Abraham “Avi”Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He chaired the Department of Astronomy from 2011 to 2020, and founded the Black Hole Initiative in 2016. And seems to have chucked a few chunks of cortex down a black hole in recent years.

Remember a while back in 2017 when a big oblong rock, Oumuamua,  sailed through the Solar System and a pundit decided that since it looked sorta regular shaped it must be an alien artifact? Or more recently, the comet  3I/Atlas, approaching our neighborhood from interstellar space – which is ALSO being theorized as an interstellar mothership? And by the same pundit. Avi.

Interstellar object 3I/ATLAS is expected to reach its perihelion, or the closest point to the Sun in its highly eccentric path through our solar system, on October 29.

By analyzing its trajectory, Loeb and his colleagues found that its “mass of 3I/ATLAS must be bigger than 33 billion tons.”

“Consequently, the diameter of its solid-density nucleus must be larger than [3.1 miles],” he concluded, roughly at the very top of the range of current estimates, based on Hubble Space Telescope observations.Futurism

Well, that is bigger than the meteor that hit Siberia in 1908 by a bunch – 3 miles versus 200 feet or so.  NASA.gov About half the size of the one that killed off all the dinosaurs Science.org. But in a universe where even our middlin’ size star, the Sun, is almost 900,000 miles across, this rock is – well, pretty much still a normal sized rock.

But Loeb is sure it’s an alien object because its closest approach to the Sun is on the far side of where we are and so it must be a dastardly cover-up or  conspiracy. Loeb was also sure that Oumuamua was alien because it seemed shinier than a natural rock. Do the words pyrite or obsidian come to mind? I knew that they would.

Well, our latest visitor has a couple of anomolies, which in a world of infinite possibilities look…well, tame. The biggest is that spectrum analysis shows that in true comet fashion there is material sublimating off the comet, and some of the gases spec out as pure nickel with no iron. NY Post We use that here on earth in some manufacturing, but it doesn’t occur naturally here  so MUST BE ALIENS! Maybe there are other “theres” where iron doesn’t always occur?

“Given the limited reservoir of heavy elements, we should have discovered on the order of a hundred thousand interstellar objects on the 0.1-kilometer scale of 1I/’Oumuamua before finding 3I/ATLAS, yet we only detected two interstellar objects previously,” he wrote in his blog post.

Loeb has also pointed out that the object’s highly unusual trajectory brings it suspiciously close to Jupiter, Mars, and Venus. In just over a week from now, 3I/ATLAS will come within just 1.67 million miles of Mars’ orbit around the Sun, a “remarkable fine-tuning” of its path, the astronomer previously argued.  Futurism ibid.

So who knows what may happen when 3I/Atlas gets to the far side of the Sun – will it release alien probes and scouts to check out all the cool planets here? Brake,  use the Suns gravitational field to come back at us? Contact a previously unknown Solar System intelligent race? (Hey, hopefully there is some intelligence on other planets – it sure doesn’t seem to exist here.) Release Marvin with a very big KABOOM? Regardless, its closest approach to Earth will be about 1.8 Astronomical units – call it 170,000,000 miles, or about 680 times as far away as the Moon.

But no matter what happens, we know that sooner or later another object will zoom through the Solar system – and Avi will probably claim that it’s an alien mothership, too. And remember, he chairs a department at Harvard… which just proves what many of us here have had to say about their educations nowadays.

I have a slightly jaundiced view: I think the electronic SETI search may be a total waste – if a civilization is advanced enough for faster-than-light drive, they may consider the electromagnetic spectrum and its communications as we currently regard smoke signals. And if they DO pass through the Solar System, I bet they roll up the windows, lock the doors, and stare straight ahead as they head on to somewhere more civilized.

Category: Science and Technology