In this post, I would like to cover a recent paper by Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl and Avi Loeb. The paper covers 3I/ATLAS, the third object we have observed arriving into our Solar System from another star system. 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025, by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System. The very first detected alien visitor to our Solar System was 1I/Oumuamua, detected on October 19, 2017, which some have suggested might have been an alien photon sail probe. The second visitor was 2I/Borisov discovered on August 29, 2019, which turned out to be a comet. What 3I/ATLAS will turn out to be is still to be determined. The 1I, 2I and 3I designations stand for the 1st, 2nd and 3rd interstellar objects to be discovered passing through our Solar System.
Before proceeding, I must relate a very famous story about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951). The story goes like this. One day Wittgenstein ran into a friend, Elizabeth Anscombe, in the corridor of a hallway and asked her this question, "Tell me, why do people always say that it was natural for men to assume that the sun went around the earth rather than the earth was rotating?" To which Elizabeth Anscombe responded, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as if the sun is going around the earth." To which the philosopher replied: "Well, what would it look like if it had looked as if the earth were rotating?". Some of the very thoughtful amongst us might wish to reframe this story with, "Well, what would Oumuamua have looked like if it really had been an alien photon sail?". For more on that, see Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts.
Figure 1 – Above is the currently projected path of 3I/ATLAS through our Solar System.
Figure 2 – Size comparison of 3I/ATLAS with 1I/Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov shows that 3I/ATLAS is much larger.
Notice that 3I/ATLAS will be entering our Solar System nearly in the plane in which all of the planets of our Solar System orbit. 3I/ATLAS could have easily entered our Solar System from any other angle. For example, it could have entered our Solar System by deeply diving into the orbital plane of the Solar System's planets, but it did not. Also, notice that 3I/ATLAS is entering our Solar System with a velocity that is opposite to that of all the planets. In the above figure, all of the planets in our Solar System are orbiting in a counterclockwise manner. 3I/ATLAS is entering our Solar System in a clockwise manner. This makes it nearly impossible for a probe launched from one of our planets to catch up to 3I/ATLAS to take a good look. It is like being on a two-lane blacktop highway, watching oncoming cars rapidly pass by. In order to catch up to one of the oncoming cars, you would have to essentially stop and turn around to chase after it, which is practically impossible to do. However, if 3I/ATLAS were to enter our Solar System on the other side of our Sun, catching up to 3I/ATLAS would be much easier. It would be like trying to catch up to a car in your lane of traffic that is just ahead of you and that is just traveling a little faster than you are currently traveling.
Also. notice that 3I/ATLAS will be reaching perihelion with our Sun, the closest it will ever get to our Sun, on October 29, 2025. This would be the best time to deviate the path of 3I/ATLAS with an acceleration that would put 3I/ATLAS into a permanent orbit about our Sun using a reverse Solar Oberth maneuver. But notice that on October 29, 2025, 3I/ATLAS will be behind our Sun as viewed by those of us on the Earth, and therefore, totally unobservable by we unsuspecting human DNA survival machines as to what may actually be going on. In fact, at this point, it would be possible for 3I/ATLAS to establish itself in a permanent orbit about our Sun with a radius of 1 AU that is always on the opposite side of the Sun as the Earth. In such a case, we would never again see 3I/ATLAS. That would take a great deal of acceleration because 3I/ATLAS would have to essentially reverse direction and start to orbit the Sun in a counterclockwise manner. However, an object like 3I/ATLAS entering from the right side of our Sun, as shown in Figure 1, rather than from the left side of our Sun, would have a much easier go of such a clandestine maneuver.
Me:
Tell me about using a reverse Solar Oberth thrust for an interstellar object to take up an orbit about the Sun.
ChatGPT:
Reverse Solar Oberth for Interstellar Object Capture
An interstellar object (ISO) like 'Oumuamua or 2I/Borisov is moving at high hyperbolic excess velocity when it enters the solar system. Capturing it gravitationally is very difficult. But could you slow it down enough to capture it into orbit using the Sun’s gravity and a maneuver? Here's the idea:
Initial Hyperbolic Trajectory:
The ISO enters the Solar System on a hyperbolic (unbound) path.
Sun Dive / Perihelion Passage:
The ISO passes very close to the Sun (perihelion), where its velocity relative to the Sun is extremely high.
Thrust Applied Near the Sun (Reverse Oberth):
At perihelion, a retrograde thrust is applied (opposite its motion), where the Oberth effect maximizes the deceleration.
This would require either:
The object itself to have active propulsion (very unlikely), or an external device or spacecraft to intercept and attach/detonate some propulsion system (e.g., nuclear or kinetic).
Energy Drop:
The ISO’s velocity is reduced sharply, possibly enough to transform its trajectory from hyperbolic (escape) to elliptical (bound orbit).
3I/ATLAS is also entering our Solar System from the direction of the center of our galaxy. Such a view is filled with background stars from the dense center of our galaxy, which makes it very difficult to see 3I/ATLAS coming at us. It is much like being set upon by an enemy fighter plane diving at us from behind the glare of the Sun in our eyes. 3I/ATLAS also seems to be about 20 km in width, which is much larger than 1I/Oumuamua or 2I/Borisov. 3I/ATLAS seems to be too large to be a comet or asteroid dislodged from the extremes of the Oort cloud of another star system. If it turns out that 3I/ATLAS does not change its trajectory in any way, it will still pass very close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter like an interstellar flyby mission similar to our Voyager I and Voyager II missions that flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to observe them close up.
Figure 3 – Voyager I and Voyager II flew past Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune to observe them close up in the 1980s.
As I explained in An Alternative Approach for Future ASI Machines to Explore our Galaxy Using Free-Floating Rogue Planets, alien ASI Machines could use free-floating planets or asteroids to explore our galaxy.
Figure 4 - Free-floating rogue planets or asteroids traversing between the stars of our galaxy would provide the perfect home for self-replicating ASI Machines buried deep underground. Such objects would provide shielding from cosmic rays and would also provide the necessary atoms to build new ASI Machines and fuel them with nuclear energy.
Figure 5 - Free-floating rogue planets or asteroids can be formed in several natural ways. For example, free-floating rogue planets can be hurled from the planetary disk of a new star system, as we see above, or they can be later hurled by well-formed planets that enter into synchronized orbits. Free-floating rogue planets could also be produced by advanced Intelligences launching large asteroids from the Oort cloud of a stellar system. It is estimated that there are more free-floating rogue planets in our galaxy than there are stars.
Figure 6 - Free-floating rogue planets would be able to provide enough atoms for ASI Machines to launch many additional "dandelion seed" stellar photon sails to other free-floating rogue planets or large asteroids around normal stellar systems.
Figure 7 - These "dandelion seed" stellar photon sails would need to be launched using very powerful laser beams from their home free-floating rogue planet to send them forth into the galaxy in a similar fashion as the Breakthrough Starshot project is planning to do.
However, a 3I/ATLAS asteroid that injected itself into a 1 AU orbit about the Sun, which orbits on the exact opposite side of the Sun to us, could also use a similar strategy to place probes into orbit about the Earth that could then be used to secretly observe the Earth. In fact, perhaps this has already been done many years ago! For more on that, see Close Encounters of the Third Kind While Making Coffee for Frank Drake.
Below is a link to the paper under discussion:
Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12213
ABSTRACT
At this early stage of its passage through our Solar System, 3I/ATLAS, the recently discovered
interstellar interloper, has displayed various anomalous characteristics, determined from photometric
and astrometric observations. As largely a pedagogical exercise, in this paper we present additional
analysis into the astrodynamics of 3I/ATLAS, and hypothesize that this object could be technological,
and possibly hostile as would be expected from the 'Dark Forest' resolution to the 'Fermi Paradox'.
We show that 3I/ATLAS approaches surprisingly close to Venus, Mars and Jupiter, with a probability
of ⪅ 0.005%. Furthermore the low retrograde tilt of 3I/ATLAS’s orbital plane to the ecliptic offers
various benefits to an Extra-terrestrial Intelligence (ETI), since it allows the object access to our planet
with relative impunity. The eclipse by the Sun from Earth of 3I/ATLAS at perihelion, would allow it to
conduct a clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre, an optimal high-thrust strategy for interstellar
spacecraft to brake and stay bound to the Sun. An optimal intercept of Earth would entail an arrival
in late November/early December of 2025, and also, a non-gravitational acceleration of ⪅ 5.9 × 10-5
au day-2, normalized at 1 au from the Sun, would indicate an intent to intercept the planet Jupiter,
not far off its path, and a strategy to rendezvous with it after perihelion.
CONCLUSION
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.
Nevertheless when viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective, these investigations have revealed
many compelling insights into the possibility that 3I/ATLAS is technological, and moreover the calculations presented
here are useful even if the interstellar object ends up being a comet like 2I/Borisov because they could be applied to
future detections of interstellar objects by the Vera C. Rubin observatory over the coming decade.
Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl are members of an independent group dedicated to the study of interstellar missions:
Initiative for Interstellar Studies
https://i4is.org/
In the recent past, I also covered the work of Professor Avi Loeb in Harvard's Galileo Project - The Systematic Scientific Search for Evidence of Extraterrestrial Technological Artifacts. In that post, I described Avi Loeb's suggestion that Oumuamua might have been an alien photon sail probe housing an alien ASI Machine, and also of his creation of the Galileo Project at Harvard in July of 2021 to search for technological artifacts of alien Intelligences within our galaxy. For more on how ASI Machines could use photon sails to navigate our galaxy, see How Advanced AI Software Could Come to Dominate the Entire Galaxy Using Light-Powered Stellar Photon Sails. Professor Avi Loeb is the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science, and former Harvard Astronomy Department Director, Institute for Theory and Computation Director, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Founding Director and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) Director in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professor Avi Loeb first became interested in the possibility of observing interstellar photon sails with the discovery on October 19, 2017, of Oumuamua. At the time, Avi Loeb was the department head of the Astronomy Department of Harvard University.
In the above paper, the authors highlight a few of the very early peculiar characteristics of 3I/ATLAS that might hint that it might be a probe from an alien Intelligence. But even more profoundly, the paper outlines what the appearance of an alien Intelligence might look like if it were ever to happen.
Figure 8 – Strange things about 3I/ATLAS. Click to enlarge.
Figure 9 – Above is a plot from the paper showing how 3I/ATLAS could visit the Earth late in 2025 and the required accelerations required to do so. Click to enlarge.
Why Should We Care?
In the above paper, the authors suggest that we might need to worry about the Dark Forest solution to the Fermi Paradox. The Fermi Paradox was first proposed by Enrico Fermi over lunch one day in 1950:
Fermi’s Paradox - If the universe is just chock full of intelligent beings, why do we not see any evidence of their existence?
The Dark Forest solution suggests that all of the other Intelligences in our galaxy are simply hiding. Those Intelligences in our galaxy that unwisely chose not to hide were then very quickly eliminated by very risk-averse competing Intelligences about them. For example, I live in a western suburb of Chicago, and about 25 years ago, we suffered through a dramatic population explosion of skunks that lasted for several decades. I jog about two miles each morning, and I once counted 13 individual skunks along my jogging path one morning. Frequently, there was a very faint scent of skunk around the neighborhood most of the day. Then, about five years ago, I started to notice seeing coyotes on my morning jogs instead. I have lived in the suburbs of Chicago for 73 years, but I had never seen coyotes before. Then suddenly, all of the skunks disappeared very quickly and have never returned. My guess is that a coyote can probably smell the residual skunk spray on a skunk from a mile away! Unlike the many rabbits that are still hiding and occasionally running about us, the skunks unwisely chose to broadcast their presence in the neighborhood with great vigor and deadly consequence. Now, we human DNA survival machines on the Earth have been essentially doing the same thing as the now defunct local skunk population of my neighborhood by broadcasting large quantities of electromagnetic waves out into interstellar space for the past 100 years.
This reminds me of a science fiction novel that I read about 35 years ago called The Forge of God (1987). In the novel, the Earth was visited by two different ASI Machine probes. One probe came to destroy the Earth as a potential threat. The other ASI Machine probe came to save some vestige of whatever Intelligence was to be found on the Earth. You see, coyotes will sometimes kill small dogs, not necessarily for food, but because the coyotes see the dogs as competing predators for rabbits and squirrels, and that was the strategy of the hostile ASI Machine probe.
Me:
Tell me about The Forge of God by Greg Bear, published in 1987.
ChatGPT:
The Forge of God is a hard science fiction novel by Greg Bear, first published in 1987. It’s a powerful and somber exploration of humanity’s place in the universe, centered on the sudden and catastrophic destruction of Earth by unknown extraterrestrial forces.
Plot Summary
The novel opens with a series of mysterious events: a strange visitor appears in Death Valley, a bizarre object is found on the Moon, and strange seismic activity is reported. A scientist discovers that the Earth’s core is being manipulated in an unnatural way, suggesting impending planetary destruction. As the plot unfolds, it becomes clear that Earth is being targeted by alien machines - a kind of robotic warfare between alien civilizations. One group of machines appears to be hell-bent on annihilation, while another sends a warning and selects a small group of humans to preserve. The destruction of Earth is not averted - a rare and sobering decision in science fiction. Instead, Bear follows a small number of survivors who are taken off-world, laying the groundwork for the sequel.
In The Forge of God, the destruction of Earth is orchestrated in a cold, methodical way by automated alien machines - part of a cosmic war between intelligent, machine-based civilizations. The aliens never directly communicate with humanity, and the planet's annihilation is a calculated act of extermination, not conquest or negotiation.
Mechanism of Earth's Destruction
The Earth is destroyed through a series of highly advanced and coordinated steps involving exotic matter and planetary-scale physics:
1. Terraforming from Within - Strange Visitors
Early in the novel, strange objects are found: a dying alien in Death Valley and a black monolith-like device on the Moon. These are precursors or scouts sent by two different alien factions - one hostile, one attempting to help (but not stop the destruction).
2. Core Destabilization
The primary means of destruction is the injection of exotic matter into Earth’s core, specifically neutronium and antineutronium - hypothetical ultra-dense materials made entirely of neutrons and antineutrons. These two materials are placed deep within the Earth, gradually pulled toward each other by gravity. When they make contact, they annihilate each other in a catastrophic release of energy, due to matter-antimatter annihilation. This explosion initiates a chain reaction that destabilizes the planet’s core.
3. Planetary Implosion
Once the neutronium and antineutronium meet, a massive internal explosion is triggered. The planet begins to collapse and tear itself apart from the inside. Earth is effectively unmade, not just shattered but consumed in a way that leaves little or nothing behind. It’s not an asteroid or external force - it’s planetary self-destruction, engineered by an alien intelligence so
advanced it uses planet-destroying technology like a surgical tool.
Why Was Earth Targeted?
Earth was not targeted out of malice or fear - rather, humanity was collateral damage in a cosmic-scale war between machine civilizations. The destroyers are a kind of automated berserker probe, tasked with seeking out and eliminating potential sources of life that might become threats. The defending faction can’t stop the destruction, but they rescue a small number of humans, sending them into space to continue humanity’s legacy.
Conclusion
Most likely, 3I/ATLAS will soon safely pass through our Solar System and then quickly depart in peace. But as I pointed out in Will the Coming ASI Machines Develop Their Own Sense of Morality?, the ASI Machines from the Earth will be spending the next 100 trillion years exploring and settling our galaxy, even if there are no other such ASI Machines already out there. In that post, I suggested that the future evolution of AI technology is now largely out of our hands, as children playing with matches sometimes learn the hard way. I then suggested that the ASI Machines of the future will most likely develop the famous "dove" and "hawk" survival strategies common to evolutionary biology as seen in The Forge of God.
Figure 10 - Evolutionary biology explains how "dove" and "hawk" galactic ASI Machines could live together in the same galaxy.
Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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