Harvard Physicist Avi Loeb Explains to Joe Rogan How the 3I/Atlas Comet is Behaving in Completely Unnatural Ways as it Enters Our Inner Solar System

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You can't have any interest in what's going on around our little corner of the cosmos without at least having heard of Harvard physicist Avi Loeb. By way of background he has, among other things, suggested that the Oumuamua object that passed through our solar system a few years ago might be a probe from a distant alien world, sent here to check us out. (Note its name comes from the Hawaiian word for "scout.") And last week set his sights on the comet 3I/Atlas, and how it's demonstrating properties that would also seem to indicate it is anything but a naturally-occurring space rock:

I'll repeat what I said in that post, that one of the things that makes the good doctor stand out among his peers is that he's willing to not rule out anything. No matter how implausible it seems, if there's a non-zero chance of a thing being true, Loeb is happy to discuss the possibility. Which might not make him super popular among his peers in academia. But makes him a true friend of Barstool bloggers. And is the kind of personality trait that will get you on the hood of a race car and Joe Rogan's podcast:

I don't know how the NASCAR event turned out, but the Rogan interview did not disappoint. At least not if you're in the business of responding to preposterous claims made by a man with the academic credentials of a Harvard physics professor. Which I, a decidedly non-academic, just happens to be. So allow me to pull the most outrageous quotes, broken down by categories:

The size of this comet defies explanation:

LOEB:  3I Atlas is a million times more massive, at least a million times more massive than Oumuamua. … 

I realized, wait, that doesn’t make sense, because we should have seen millions of Oumuamuas before we saw this one. It’s so big.

And I also realized there is not enough rocky material per unit volume in interstellar space to deliver such a giant rock into the inner solar system within a period of a decade. You would expect it at the very optimistic scenario where you package all the material into objects that are 5 kilometers in diameter. You would imagine once per 10,000 years.

So is its motion, which would seem to indicate it's doing what it's doing because someone is controlling it:

LOEB: One way out of this dilemma of why is it so big is if it was targeting the inner solar system by design. And indeed, the trajectory is aligned with the plane of the planets around the sun to within 5 degrees. The chance for that at random is 1 in 500. Okay. And it’s moving in a retrograde trajectory opposite to the motion of the planets, which is ideal for it to release mini probes that will get into the planets. 

It gets close to Mars, it gets close to Jupiter. It goes on the opposite side of the sun relative to Earth when it’s closest to the sun. And that’s the time when a spacecraft could do a maneuver to take advantage of the sun’s gravitational assist. All of these are interesting indications that may imply that some intelligence designed the trajectory.

In fact, it has traits that are the opposite of what we know about comets. With a very troubling metaphor tossed in:

LOEB: Not a normal thing. So for one thing, there was a glow that looks like an extended feature. And everyone said, oh, that’s a tail, that’s the signature of a comet. And I said, wait a minute, it’s pointing towards the sun. It’s not pointing away from the sun. Usually cometary tails are made of dust and gas, which is pushed back away from the sun by the radiation and the solar wind. And so this one was pointed towards the sun, not away from the sun. And the question is why? …

[T]hat means it’s like a jet. So the object had a jet in front of it towards the sun. The question is why? And the comet experts ignored it and just said, well, comets are strange, who knows?

But my point is this is a blind date of interstellar proportions. … And maybe on one of the dates you will have a serial killer on the other side.

Its chemical composition makes no sense either:

LOEB: We found nickel, a lot of nickel, but very little iron. … The only place where we found before much more nickel than iron is in alloys that we produce industrially, for example, for aerospace applications. Nickel alloys have a lot of nickel, no iron. So maybe the skin of this object is industrially produced. That was my suggestion.

But what [other scientists] said is maybe nature is capable of going through the same chemical pathway of producing nickel without iron as we do in our industries. So they made the conjecture that this carbonyl pathway … happens in nature. We have never seen it before, but that is their explanation.

ROGAN: Hmm. Is it possible that nature could construct some sort of a nickel alloy?

LOEB: No, it’s not an alloy. It’s just that, well, something, somehow the nickel gets released, the iron gets suppressed. Nobody would argue that you could sort of separate nickel from iron because they’re produced together in exploding stars. And in fact, the composition of the sun has more iron than nickel, 10 times more by mass.

And in the humble opinion of this former Community College graduate, is the most fascinating assertion of all. The location and the radio signal of this object:

LOEB:  There are lots of anomalies. …[T]wo weeks ago, I realized the arrival direction of 3AI ATLAS was within 9 degrees of the Wow! Signal that was detected in 1977, which was an enigmatic, powerful radio signal that definitely came from outside of this Earth. We don’t know from where it was coming from.

A source that was approaching the sun and the chance of it aligning with the arrival direction of 3i atlas is 0.6%. And I just said, well, that’s interesting because 3i atlas was at the distance of three light days from the Earth at that time. And you just need about the output of a nuclear reactor on Earth, a gigawatt or so to produce such a radio signal.

By the way, Voyager as of now is one light day away from Earth. Just think about it. One light day. The farthest spacecraft we ever launched is one light day away. And the size of the Milky Way galaxy, we are talking about tens of thousands of light years. So one day out of tens of thousands of years. That’s the difference between the distance that we managed to breach so far compared to another civilization that may have sent something to our backyard right now.

By way of explanation, the "Wow! Signal" gets its name from a radio telescope operator at the Big Ear Observatory at Ohio State, as part of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) network. It was monitoring a frequency at the "Hydrogen Line," which is considered the logical place any alien species would choose for interstellar communicating. The one Big Ear picked up came from the constellation Sagittarius, was 30 times stronger than the normal background noise, in a perfect bell-curve pattern, and lasted 72 seconds. So and the operator wrote "WOW!" on the printout in red pen:

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And 3I/Atlas came from a direction 0.6% of the Wow! Signal. Has been detected at a distance three times further than the furthest man-made object ever launched. With a signature you'd need a fricking nuclear reactor to produce. 

Somewhere in this conversation, Dr. Loeb compared our area of the galaxy to the neighborhood we live in. And in his analogy, 3I/Altas is a tennis ball a neighbor tossed over the fence into our yard. I like this metaphor, because a tennis ball is a harmless object. A plaything, made for people to enjoy, have fun with, and have their dog fetch. Since there are a lot more dangerous things a cosmic neighbor could lob into our backyard, I'm going to just focus on the tennis ball and hope he's right. 

If it's anything scarier than that, we'll know soon enough. If so, it's been nice knowing you.