Is there an Outer SpaceX?

With 3I/ATLAS set to fly by Earth in just over a week, experts continue to speculate over its origins. Harvard Scientist Avi Loeb believes that if aliens, the comet wouldn’t be the first extraterrestrial being to grace our solar system — and that an “Elon Musk”-style “space entrepreneur” possibly dispatched spaceships already, possibly with hostile intentions.

“Just imagine that there is an empire that, just like Spain or the United Kingdom, sends out ships to find new territories,” Loeb told the Post. “And at first they send small boats, but then they send much more capable ships.”

In a recent Medium post, which recapped several interviews Loeb did about ATLAS, the astrophysicist reiterated that it’s “arrogant” to dismiss any theories that 3I/ATLAS could be artificial.

He cited its myriad alleged anomalies, including its bizarre trajectory around our planets, the nickel composition of its plume and non-gravitational acceleration that could provide evidence of a propulsion system.

NASA’s current position remains that the cosmic snowball is a comet.

Regardless of ATLAS’s origin, Loeb believes it’s likely that aliens visited our cosmic neighborhood before. “My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same,” he wrote.

He cited the astronomical gaffe in January, when The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., announced the discovery of an asteroid zooming close to Earth — only to learn it was actually a Tesla sports car launched by Elon Musk as a publicity stunt seven years ago. 

“Musk, statistically, is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky Way over the past 13.8 billion years,” Loeb wrote. “There are about a hundred billion stars with similar properties to the Sun in the Milky Way; roughly a tenth of them host a habitable Earth-size planet.”

He explained that it’s statistically very likely that some of these star systems harbored “space entrepreneurs,” one of whom potentially launched 3I/ATLAS.

Loeb explained that even something as primitive as the Voyager spacecraft, with its 1970s technology, could traverse the galaxy in a billion years.

This means that there was plenty of time for a far more advanced civilization from beyond to dispatch an interstellar object to our neck of the celestial woods.

Loeb told the Post that there’s possibly a “Darwinian selection” of intergalactic species just like on Earth and that the so-called fittest will be the one we see first — and they might have malicious intentions.

“If they developed the self-replicating probes, those can fill up the Milky Way galaxy eventually, and it’ll dominate,” he warned.

With this in mind, the scientist stressed the need to ramp up our interstellar surveillance. “If 3I/ATLAS is technological, it could pose a threat to humanity,” wrote Loeb, who critiqued humanity’s myopia when it comes to threats from beyond.

“Most of the real estate is actually out there in the Milky Way galaxy and not on the rock that we all occupy,” Loeb told the Post. “Once we realize that there is a neighbor out there that has alien technology, then we might decide at the very least to allocate some portion of the military budgets that we use for the defense of individual nations to use it for the defense of the entire planet.”

He suggested installing a “planetary defense network” comprised of an array of spaceships that can monitor and even intercept technological objects bound for Earth.

Although if our interstellar visitor does have malicious intent, it could be too late.

“3I/ATLAS is expected to arrive closest to Earth in a week, on December 19, 2025,” Loeb wrote. “Let us hope that we will not get unwanted gifts for the holidays.”