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!
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).
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.
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.
> In the following analysis we assume that 3I/ATLAS is on its current orbit but vary the time-of-entry into the Solar System (or equivalently the time of perihelion), assuming 3I/ATLAS could have come at any time into the Solar System, and happened to do so such that it came within the observed closest approaches of Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The probability of this is 0.005
So exact same trajectory, but analyzed over a long period of time. If it came any earlier or later, it would almost never get this close to exactly those three planets.
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.
This was much more interesting: https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas
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.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/394040040_Aligned_m...
Did he give Borisov this treatment? It seems not, so then the answer is "no, only about two thirds of them".
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/).
"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."
Mistletoe•2h ago
RajT88•2h ago
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.
Teever•2h ago
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aY985qzn7oI&t=1440s
SideburnsOfDoom•2h ago
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.
Mistletoe•1h ago
Teever•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Least_publishable_unit
sgt101•1h ago
In this case Loeb seems to have decided to delight in publishing out-there ideas, probably with a bit of a mission to open up debate and widen the range of acceptable topics in the field of astronomy for younger less established researchers. Basically, he's at a point in his career where he simply doesn't care what anyone things of him and his research and so he's spending credit so that if someone younger and more at risk than him comes up with a startling idea they will hopefully be more likely to share it.
I think it's a good thing, obviously a bunch of people really don't.