3-I/Atlas Comes Close

 The article below is written by this really smart guy.  Please notice that once you believe the lie that all life on earth came to existence from non-life over billions of years, you will naturally take that lie and apply it to the immensity of the universe.  And once you do that you will logically accept that billions of other places in the universe have intelligent life.  And once you understand that you conclude that those life forms evolved billions of years before us and would be capable of traveling through the sky on interstellar missions.

It sounds like the 3-I/Atlas wasn’t a mother ship filled with aliens…or maybe it was and they just weren’t interested in some boring humans on earth who only recently left the Stone Age and have only been flying in space for a few decades?

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Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Humans are interesting cosmic creatures. More than four centuries ago, we were convinced that the Universe centers on us. 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. However, our popular view is that visitors from these houses might show up in our cosmic neighborhood because of their interest in our home. Well, guess what: if you are late to a party and you are not at the center of the room, the party is not about you. Not only are we not at the center of the Universe, we are also not at the center of attention for interstellar visitors.

This blunt message-in-a-bottle was delivered to earthlings on December 19, 2025, by the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, as it reached its closest distance from Earth, 268.91 million kilometers. 3I/ATLAS did not maneuver or display any unusual activity on that occasion. Its trajectory is aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane but it avoided Earth by passing on the other side of the Sun relative to us on October 29, 2025.

Some find this message insulting. But the truth of the matter is that with an interstellar speed of 60 kilometers 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 center of attention given that its mass is 318 times larger than Earth’s.

Humans arrived late to the local cosmic party, only to witness the last 0.0001 of the Milky-Way history. Given that, we should not be surprised that interstellar visitors — who attended the party for much longer, did not plan to dance with us.

So far, December 19 images of 3I/ATLAS were only released by amateur astronomers. They feature a prominent anti-tail jet pointed at the Sun, ten times longer than it is wide, with a length of a million kilometers. We have never witnessed such a long, tightly collimated anti-tail. To fully understand the nature of 3I/ATLAS, we must explain this anomaly as well as the others listed here.

In the coming months, imaging and spectroscopic data will help us figure out the mysterious properties of 3I/ATLAS by the time it gets closest to Jupiter on March 16, 2026. The forecasted perijove distance of 53.6 million kilometers is close to Jupiter’s Hill radius, 53.5 million kilometers (as discussed here), where Jupiter’s gravity dominates over the Sun’s tide. Given that Jupiter is the largest planet in the solar system, it would be interesting to monitor 3I/ATLAS with the Juno spacecraft for any unusual activity, such as the release of satellites, as it passes by Jupiter’s Lagrange points.

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/3i-atlas-ignores-earth-2e2c00682bf0