Mysterious interstellar object 3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19, coming within just 167 million miles.
Scientists have been closely monitoring the object — which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system — as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory.
The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled “3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth.” Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by.
While hopes that we were just visited by an alien race diminish even further, Loeb made an interesting pivot in a follow-up piece, proposing that other objects like 3I/ATLAS could be useful for our future attempts to explore beyond our solar system.
“The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of sounds, images, music, and messages from Earth, were attached to NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are currently traveling out of the solar system,” he wrote. “These records serve as humanity’s message for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might find them, essentially a ‘message in a bottle’ sent out to interstellar space.”
Thanks to their tremendous speeds, exotic visitors like the latest interstellar object could carry a human spacecraft out of the solar system on our behalf, Loeb argued.
By “riding 3I/ATLAS,” which is traveling at a speed of 37 miles a second, he argued that we could reach “interstellar space by the year ~10,000 CE instead of the year ~30,000 CE.”
Even though they launched almost half a century ago, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 only recently reached the boundary of the heliosphere. To enter true interstellar space beyond the Oort Cloud, where objects are no longer bound to the gravitational effects of the Sun, it could take Voyager 1 another 28,000 years.
“The discovery of interstellar objects over the past decade offers new opportunities for humanity to send time capsules to interstellar space,” he concluded.
To attach the message to objects like 3I/ATLAS, Loeb proposed using a “high-power laser beam to engrave a message” or “design interceptor missions” to attach technological objects to their surface.
For its part, 3I/ATLAS is expected to get within just 33.3 million miles of Jupiter on March 16, 2026, offering us yet another opportunity to have a closer look using spacecraft positioned there.
Nobody knows when we’ll be able to observe the next interstellar object careening through our neck of the cosmic woods. But according to Loeb, we should seize the opportunity.
To “gain respect near the top of the food chain in the Milky Way galaxy,” Loeb argued that we must take matters into our own hands, and “endeavor to interstellar space.”
Loeb himself says he’d even jump to commit his own body to such a project.
He “would have loved to hitchhike 3I/ATLAS and let it carry my remains into interstellar space,” he wrote, “if offered the opportunity.”
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