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."
It makes me sad that so many people are seemingly so aggressive against Loeb and his takes on this stuff. Whether things might be aliens or not, people get so upset whenever it's even mentioned as a thought experiment. We should be able to have a bit of fun here and there.
I think its totally fair to be aggressive in pushing back against abstracts like "and hypothesize that this object could be technological, and possibly hostile as would be expected from the ’Dark Forest’ resolution to the ’Fermi Paradox’".
There is zero testing of either the hypothesis that it is technological or that it is hostile. At best, the methodology he employs in the paper could be argued to test the hypothesis that its path through our solar system is synthetic and intentional; but that's it, and that's also not remotely close to what he said.
I think if it was framed more as fiction it would get a better read. The title and the abstract suggest they take this possibility seriously, which is ridiculous.
I agree, I mean something like this only has to happen once in our lifetime for everything we know to change overnight. I’m not saying believe anything and everything at face value, but at least question whether immediate knee jerk dismissal of any idea you think you’ve seen before is actually considering the nuance of the specific thing in question or just a learned response.
“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.
If it's malign there's really nothing we can do about it. A technology that can traverse the distance between solar systems is so far outside of our technology that it might as well be magic, and our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth. If you have power to travel interstellar distances the power to obliterate all life on a planet with no warning is trivial.
Ironically we might be in less trouble if they have FTL technology, since that might not require quite the outrageous level of technology you would need to do the journey with the physics that we know. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
I don't believe FTL travel is possible, but if it were, the Fermi Paradox would seem to suggest it isn't obvious or trivial. It might require burning the mass energy of an entire star just to open a wormhole or hacking the matrix and forking the physics engine or sacrificing us to their chaos god patrons or something.
I think I'd rather deal with the aliens who just have really good rockets. At least we could potentially comprehend the rulebook they play by. Who even knows what the hell the Walkers of Sigma 957 are about?
Also, FTL technology existing would naturally abate the prospects of interstellar war under the Dark Forest theory, because it means FTL communication is possible; and factions that can communicate with each other quickly are far less likely to fight each other. This was, at least in the first book, a (iirc stated) reason why the Dark Forest theory exists.
Of note: It might not require the outrageous levels of technology you might expect to accelerate technology to the delta-v 3I/ATLAS is traveling at, simply because there are absolutely star systems near ours already traveling at a pretty large sun-relative delta-v. We get a ton of galaxy-relative velocity for free from our solar system; we just have to shoot the probe at slower solar systems. Putting (and surviving) biological life in there, however, is a different matter.
There's a scifi story about a civilization stumbling upon how to achieve FTL travel. In the story, the tech is at the same time very simple and very unexpected. Anyways, they go explore the galaxy and invade and conquer with their primitive ships, which are little more than tin buckets. Their weapons technology is on the flintlock gun level.
(A tragic kind of) hilarity ensues when they stumble upon Earth with its completely unexpected, incredibly advanced weaponry. IIRC in the story most civilizations find FTL travel pretty early. Just Earth didn't happen upon it and instead had time to develop advanced weaponry, computers, etc.
Arguably if you launched the project Orion interstellar ark from the ground you could have pulled the world ending at the same time as well, perfect tripple combo. ;-)
This doesn't sound true given what we know about asymmetric warfare in general. What if we discovered the object really was an artillery shell sent to destroy us, but the civilization at the other end only has the resources to fire one every ten years with an accuracy of 1% to hit the Earth?
We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
> our current level of technology is already adequate to obliterate all life on the surface of the Earth
FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
> If this is the case, then two possibilities follow: first that its intentions are entirely benign and second they are malign.
And why do we assume that, if humans can have a whole spectrum of motivations from "entirely benign" to "entirely malign," that a presumably-much-more advanced civilization can't?
Because humans are nearly incapable of projecting in a non-linear way. As in, it takes active educated effort. Most predictions you will see are linear extrapolations of what we already know. That's why flying cars were a popular "futuristic" scenario. They can drive now, why shouldn't they be able to fly in 50 years from now? That thought was prevalent in the 60s.
How should they even know that cars will become globally connected smartphones on wheels first? Smartphones didn't exist. The microchip didn't exist yet. The Internet didnt exist yet. It is impossible to make this combination from the 1960s perspective.
Complex non-linear systems don't work in intuitive ways and minor changes in fundamental variables can chaotically change the system in entirely unexpected ways. Non-linear developments will always be surprising, it doesn't matter how many Youtube videos certain pop scientists are creating.
This was a (minor?) plot point in Crichton's "Sphere".
Paraphrasing: if a smart bacterium steps on the battery of one of our space probes and gets destroyed by the heat, the smart bacteria community may think the aliens (we, humans) sent it to them for unfathomable reasons, perhaps to teach them a lesson, but we didn't think of them at all.
> 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).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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/).
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.
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?
3l/Atlas itself is unlikely to be alien technology, but it is from way outside our solar system and deserves to be examined as closely as possible with every resourse availible, and at this point planning for ways to investigate interstellar objects more closely needs to be figured out......say, blast it with ultra high lasers and see what boils off!
If any alien civilizations believe the "Dark Forest" hypothesis, then they will definitely disguise their probes as asteriods and comets. At least, I would.
Readit News
"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."
There is zero testing of either the hypothesis that it is technological or that it is hostile. At best, the methodology he employs in the paper could be argued to test the hypothesis that its path through our solar system is synthetic and intentional; but that's it, and that's also not remotely close to what he said.
It’s as ridiculous as proposing that it could naturally be made of up of M&Ms or that monkeys built the ancient Egyptian pyramids.
Also he raised a bunch of funds to dig one up under the ocean and got nothing.
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Dead Comment
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!
Ironically we might be in less trouble if they have FTL technology, since that might not require quite the outrageous level of technology you would need to do the journey with the physics that we know. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress.
I think I'd rather deal with the aliens who just have really good rockets. At least we could potentially comprehend the rulebook they play by. Who even knows what the hell the Walkers of Sigma 957 are about?
Of note: It might not require the outrageous levels of technology you might expect to accelerate technology to the delta-v 3I/ATLAS is traveling at, simply because there are absolutely star systems near ours already traveling at a pretty large sun-relative delta-v. We get a ton of galaxy-relative velocity for free from our solar system; we just have to shoot the probe at slower solar systems. Putting (and surviving) biological life in there, however, is a different matter.
Edit: the book is "The Road not Taken"
There's a scifi story about a civilization stumbling upon how to achieve FTL travel. In the story, the tech is at the same time very simple and very unexpected. Anyways, they go explore the galaxy and invade and conquer with their primitive ships, which are little more than tin buckets. Their weapons technology is on the flintlock gun level.
(A tragic kind of) hilarity ensues when they stumble upon Earth with its completely unexpected, incredibly advanced weaponry. IIRC in the story most civilizations find FTL travel pretty early. Just Earth didn't happen upon it and instead had time to develop advanced weaponry, computers, etc.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_ark
Arguably if you launched the project Orion interstellar ark from the ground you could have pulled the world ending at the same time as well, perfect tripple combo. ;-)
We might be like a primitive tribe facing an attacker with battleships - a technology that might as well be magic, but still one we can adapt to by abandoning the seafront village and retreating into the jungle.
FWIW, and reinforcing your point, this is not even remotely true. Humans lack the technology now or in the foreseeable future to destroy the Earth’s biosphere, which would likely require boiling the oceans. There’s a reason we use that as an example of an impossibly large task.
Nice Heinlein reference
And why do we assume that, if humans can have a whole spectrum of motivations from "entirely benign" to "entirely malign," that a presumably-much-more advanced civilization can't?
How should they even know that cars will become globally connected smartphones on wheels first? Smartphones didn't exist. The microchip didn't exist yet. The Internet didnt exist yet. It is impossible to make this combination from the 1960s perspective.
Complex non-linear systems don't work in intuitive ways and minor changes in fundamental variables can chaotically change the system in entirely unexpected ways. Non-linear developments will always be surprising, it doesn't matter how many Youtube videos certain pop scientists are creating.
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.
Paraphrasing: if a smart bacterium steps on the battery of one of our space probes and gets destroyed by the heat, the smart bacteria community may think the aliens (we, humans) sent it to them for unfathomable reasons, perhaps to teach them a lesson, but we didn't think of them at all.
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).
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.
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.
https://avi-loeb.medium.com/how-close-can-the-juno-spacecraf...
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/).
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People with fear will deny the existence of something that they do not comprehend so that they do not have to mentally deal with it in any way
The tiny metal spheres stuff was interesting even though it's not aliens.
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.
"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...)