Earth went through five documented mass extinction events throughout its 4.54-billion-year history. They occurred approximately 445, 365, 252, 201 and 66 million years ago. The latest among them resulted in the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs, probably as a result of the Chicxulub asteroid impact. It has been suggested that some extinction events resulted from astrophysical causes, such as exploding stars or passage through the spiral arms of the Milky-Way galaxy. But one possibility was omitted: if life was seeded on Earth by an interstellar gardener, then it is also possible that this gardener resets terrestrial life whenever it goes in an unwanted direction.
This brings up a question that Dr. Robert Cykiert asked me yesterday: “Was the Chicxulub impactor a predecessor of 3I/ATLAS?” The two objects have similar masses, but 3I/ATLAS is not heading towards Earth as of now. In case 3I/ATLAS will maneuver towards Earth, this question will gain relevance.
The mysteries of 3I/ATLAS triggered a tweet from the successful businesswoman Kim Kardashian to NASA’s acting administrator, Sean Duffy:
“Wait … what’s the tea on 3I/ATLAS?!?!!!!!!!?????”
to which he promptly replied:
“Great question! NASA’s observations show that this is the third interstellar comet to pass through our solar system. No aliens. No threat to life here on Earth.”
On the same day, the brilliant congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna submitted an official letter to Duffy (available here), requesting disclosure of the highest resolution images of 3I/ATLAS, taken by NASA’s HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter a month ago on October 2–3, 2025. In parallel, I requested access to the data from the Principal Investigator of the HiRISE camera team, Professor Alfred McEwen at the University of Arizona, but received no response to my email. The dissemination of scientific information should not be held hostage to the politics of the government shutdown. This precious data with a spatial resolution of 30 kilometers per pixel is time sensitive as it would help to guide upcoming observations of 3I/ATLAS before the object leaves our solar system. We should be humble about the little we know and curious about 3I/ATLAS rather than insist that we know its nature before data is shared and analyzed. Congress members and scientists also deserve a prompt response to their inquiries.
In a TV interview with Natasha Zouves on NewsNation (available here), I stated that I would love to bring Kim Kardashian up to date regarding all the anomalies we know so far about 3I/ATLAS. They include:
1. Its retrograde trajectory is aligned to within 5 degrees with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun, with a likelihood of 0.2% (see here).
2. During July and August 2025, it displayed a sunward jet (anti-tail) that is not an optical illusion from geometric perspective, unlike familiar comets (see here).
3. Its nucleus is about a million times more massive than 1I/`Oumuamua and a thousand times more massive than 2I/Borisov, while moving faster than both, altogether with a likelihood of less than 0.1% (see here and here).
4. Its arrival time was fine-tuned to bring it within tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter and be unobservable from Earth at perihelion, with a likelihood of 0.005% (see here).
5. Its gas plume contains much more nickel than iron (as found in industrially-produced nickel alloys) and a nickel to cyanide ratio that is orders of magnitude larger than that of all known comets, including 2I/Borisov, with a likelihood below 1% (see here).
6. Its gas plume contains only 4% water by mass, a primary constituent of familiar comets (see here).
7. It shows extreme negative polarization, unprecedented for all known comets, including 2I/Borisov, with a likelihood below 1% (see here).
8. It arrived from a direction coincident with the radio “Wow! Signal” to within 9 degrees, with a likelihood of 0.6% (see here).
9. Near perihelion, it brightened faster than any known comet and was bluer than the Sun (see here).
10. It exhibits non-gravitational acceleration which requires massive evaporation of a sixth of its mass (as calculated here), but post-perihelion images do not show evidence for it so far.
Regarding anomaly 5, Elon Musk suggested in a new podcast with Joe Rogan a few days ago (in a clip accessible here) that natural asteroids can be rich in nickel. However, the same asteroids are also rich in iron. The anomaly of 3I/ATLAS is associated with a high nick-to-iron ratio. In contrast to asteroids, most of the gas around 3I/ATLAS was found to be carbon dioxide, CO2, with nickel making a part in 30,000 by mass of the total mass loss (5 grams per second out of 150 kilograms per second).
The existence of a massive debris cloud would unravel its nature and composition through upcoming observations during November and December, as 3I/ATLAS comes closest to Earth on December 19, 2025. The absence of such a cloud would suggest that the non-gravitational 3I/ATLAS was propelled by something other than cometary evaporation, potentially an engine.
Science is guided by data and data should flow seamlessly among scientists, unaffected by the politics of the day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
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