"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.
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/).
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...)
Did he give Borisov this treatment? It seems not, so then the answer is "no, only about two thirds of them".
What probability are they talking about?
"The likelihood for such a perfect alignment of the orbital angular momentum vector around the Sun for Earth and 3I/ATLAS is π(5◦/57◦)2/(4π) = 2×10−3."
Sloppy sloppy work.
Are their trajectories uniformly distributed?
Why? I’d rather we continue surveying from a distance while sending probes to places we know will be interesting, like Titan and Europa.
This is not accurate. Viking got there in <4 months, and we have the technology to do it even faster, if needed. The long duration transits are often the least energy (Hohmann transfer) and that's why we use them. Planetary alignment is also a big factor.
Anyway, there are currently proposals to have probes lingering in high orbits and intercept interstellar visitors (maybe not as fast as 3I), and Rubin should give us plenty of targets when it gets online.
As an interesting tidbit, 3I was found in the Rubin data ~2weeks before it was spotted. Should be a perfect exercise in refining the discovery algorithms.
What's the minimum time to intercept something like this? Do we need 6 or 7 years, or is 3 years enough?
Intercepting 3I/Atlas at Its Closest Approach to Jupiter with Juno Spacecraft https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44717239
"A Harvard Astronomer on the Interstellar Object ‘Oumuamua"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18923591
and
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21948804
the above on the same 2019 article, but others can be found
etc
(but why would optimum mission be a head on collision? and not getting something flying its near trajectory at near speed?)
If i didn't know so much about how broken the world is already, this is like life path defining stuff
Clearly the best mission would be to shoot something to something it into mars so we can check it out someday.
Then after that success, be inspired to fill the whole outer solar system with somethings, capable of redirecting everything into mars for later catching or eventually murdering all musk's future offspring
given the effort involved and the alternatives, the only possible reason to contact us is benevolent. also, if there is a single other civilization within range of contacting us, statistically and necessarily, there are also millions, if not billions of others to choose from.
No, there is no malign intent. Even considering it reveals some very mid reasoning. We are very likely emerging up the evolutionary scale to become the stupidest intelligent thing in the universe, but only just over the line of what passes for intelligence among space faring civilizations. The only concievable risk is from ourselves.
That seems extremely unlikely, we're far from advanced enough to send a probe to another solar system, by the time we are, I'd like to think we'll be even less likely to want to exterminate or enslave anyone...
All points of that 2D graph are available.
Edit: also I think you're misreading the Dark Forest concept. They're not saying those aliens are "as bad as [us]". It's rather akin to a prisoner's dilemma. The logic is:
#1. if only one actor is paranoid enough and strong enough, they will proactively get rid of whoever speaks up.
From this axiom comes the logical conclusion that, since we cannot be sure to avoid detection forever, the only viable survival mechanism is to be paranoid ourselves and get rid of others before they become strong enough and can enforce axiom #1.
These are not the same things and "advancing" on one axis does not require "advancing" on the other axis, even taking into account the fact that beyond a certain point, one person's moral viewpoints are not necessarily universalizable in the Kantian sense.
And even amongst humans there are many other such factors (ego of the current leader, etc.)
You're also making economic assumptions that might be wrong at an advanced enough level of technology.
A man from the 14th century Americas might understandably believe that
"the idea of malign intent ignores the physical economic factors that are true everywhere on this planet. The amount of energy it takes to get here from across the Atlantic, and the necessary probability that there is at least one other country with every element we have, in much higher quantities, and closer to them, precludes any motive to wipe us out. Given the effort involved and the alternatives, the only possible reason to contact us is benevolent."
the analogy to 14th century Americas would be that aliens arrive, have technology for resource extraction, this disrupts the economics of the existing civilization, which then orients itself to this new technological power and factions compete to dominate brokerage of it among themselves, or to destroy it. the aliens need to secure their resource supply lines from the native factions, and when there is no peace to be had, they fight the way they know how, which wipes most of them out, or they leave and come back in a more evolved millenium.
the cultures that were strong enough to adapt, survived. the ones that weren't able to adapt, died. in a sense it was a case of the meek inheriting the earth, where natives who fought against alien technology lost, and the people in ones that adapted, lived to survive to today.
but the comparison breaks down when you substitute boats for craft capable of relativistic speeds. the sophistication required to do faster than light travel is too high to make unforced errors like that, imo.
I think it's much more likely that space aliens have FTL. Unless it's the klingons.
The first thing you discover when you invent FTL is that you’re the last civilisation to invent FTL.
While that does not automatically suggest that they are not technological, they are not likely to be hostile.* We've likely lived through tens of thousands of them passing through.
*Unless you subscribe to the "they are among us" viewpoint. That crazy well has no bottom.
One of the authors (Abraham Loeb) is well known for writing salami-sliced papers that have tenuous and non-testable premises.
You should be skeptical of anything he writes after watching this:
They they throw up the following quote, omitting the first half. then bash him thinking this is the only explanation.
>Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that ‘Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment'
I think it speaks to a greater dispute about what topics are proper to think about, discuss, or even enjoy.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/astronomer-avi-lo...
https://earthsky.org/space/oumuamua-a-comet-avi-loeb-respond...
Here's Loeb on space dust - was it Aliens?
https://www.livescience.com/space/extraterrestrial-life/alie...
He's doing what he usually does. It's fun to think about, but not to be taken too seriously or regarded as anything unique.
When it comes to alien civilizations, the probability is that they are millions of years more advanced than us.[1]
Millions of years is enough for natural genetic change to have an impact, and we already know what that impact will be: individuals that have more offsprings will spread through the population and displace individuals with fewer offsprings.[2]
But if you're a technological species, the only limit to having more offsprings is competition with other members of your species.[3]
In effect, over a million-year time-scale, you get into an arms-race to harness as much power/energy as possible to prevent others from killing you and to kill others who are using resources you need.[4]
So if any alien civilization deliberately decides to visit Earth, you can be pretty sure that their intentions are hostile. Maybe, if they are hydrogen-breathers who evolved on gas giants, they will leave Earth for last. But if they are carbon-based, oxygen breathers, they will squash us like bugs.
------------
[1]: Imagine that, over the 10 billion-year history of the galaxy, 100 civilizations appear. What's the chance that a randomly chosen civilization (say, the closest one to us) is less than 1 million years old? Using a Poisson distribution, the chance is 0.01%: a 1 in 10,000 chance.
[2]: This is just a restatement of Darwin's theory. Note that Darwin's theory holds even for intelligent/technological people. E.g., imagine some civilization decides that 2.1 kids is the limit because that yields a stable society. That civilization will be destroyed by one that has no such limit, because the latter civilization will have a need for more resources and will have the power to take it. After millions of years, only expanding civilizations will be left because they will have destroyed all the others.
[3]: Non-technological species are limited by their environment. Ants cannot colonize the ocean or the moon. But technological humans can. Our only limit is physics and other humans.
[4]: As long as there is more than 1 civilization, there will be competition because, over millions of years, the galaxy is a zero-sum arena. If one civilization expands to a star system, then the other one cannot. [And, as I said earlier, if one expands but one doesn't, the expanding one will take over.]
The only possible benign scenario is if there are very few civilizations who don't compete with each other. But in that scenario, they wouldn't be sending probes to our solar system.
What you have proposed as the only path, we have, in our limited time on this planet, already proven false. The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Old men like me can afford to be cynical, but I'm glad the next generation has enough idealists that they reject the dark future I'm predicting.
Still, I'm forced to reply.
> The vast majority of people are already not harnessing more and more resources in order to reproduce more.
Considering that every other species larger than a rat is being driven into extinction, largely because we are converting their habitats into farms or strip malls, I don't see evidence that we've learned not to consume more and more.
Sure, over the next hundred years our population will stabilize, but as the great scientist Jeff Goldblum said, "Life...ah...finds a way!"
If you want to know how humans will evolve you have to ask, which genes will spread? Obviously, genes for raw strength aren't useful--that's what machines are for. What about genes for intelligence? Do the smartest people have the most kids? No, which means those genes won't necessarily dominate.
In nature, every species is constrained either by food availability or predators or both. If two rabbits have four baby rabbits, and those four have eight baby rabbits, then why aren't there trillions of rabbits now? Obviously, it's because eventually they run out of food or get eaten by coyotes.
But a technological species like us has no predators, and we can continue to make more food by cutting down forests (where other species live) and turn them into farms.
The only limit we have right now is that we don't want to have too many kids. Unlike every other species, we can (mostly) control our reproduction, and we sometimes choose to have fewer children so that we can have a more luxurious life.
Of course, the desire to have children varies across individuals. We all know some people who want to have more kids and some who don't want any. It is likely, of course, that this innate desire is partly or mostly heritable.
Over long enough time-scales--maybe a thousand generations or 25,000 years--the genes of people who want to have kids will dominate. By then, of course, we will have run out of forests to cut down, so we'll have to start colonizing the oceans and other planets.
But like I said, I'm just a cynical old man.
If there is only one galactic civilization it will either be the Borg or a Federation so violent that it destroyed the Borg—basically a Mirror Universe Federation.
Either way I don’t like our chances.
This was much more interesting: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas