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We’ve likely had at least one close encounter of the 3I kind before.
Harvard scientist Avi Loeb claims that not only does 3I/ATLAS potentially have alien origins, but that this wouldn’t be the first time extraterrestrials have visited our planet.
In a recent blog post on Medium, the astrophysicist claims that it’s nearly statistically impossible that the Earth wasn’t exposed to potentially advanced “civilizations” from beyond — some of which may have left some intergalactic stragglers on our rock.
“There were plenty of opportunities for residents of previous stars to visit our place,” Loeb told the Post. “It really depends on their agenda. But if there is an interstellar gardener, then obviously it could have intervened….it could have seeded the various forms of life on Earth intentionally.”
The researcher wrote in the blog that it’s highly improbable that, in the 4.6 million years that Earth has been in existence, we haven’t received at least one cosmic interloper.
“I explained that meter-scale rocks from interstellar space may impact the Earth roughly once per decade, adding up to half a billion such collisions over the Earth’s history,” he wrote. “If any of these interstellar rocks carried resilient forms of life that survived the interstellar journey, Earth could have been exposed to extraterrestrial forms of life.”
And, since most stars formed a billion years before the sun, an “ambitious gardener from an earlier star” would’ve had plenty of time to affect the history of life on our planet, the researcher claimed.
“We often consider the history of Earth as isolated from its galactic environment, but this may not be the case,” said Loeb.
Unfortunately, we likely wouldn’t have documented evidence of this cosmic incursion, given that recorded human history is only around 6,000 years old, per Loeb. He added that we’ve been effectively monitoring the sky for only a small fraction of that time.
“In terms of interstellar objects, it’s only over the past decade that we started finding them,” Loeb told the Post, noting that we’re somewhat limited by technology that’s unable to see super far-flung interstellar objects.
So far, there have only been three recorded interstellar objects in our solar system to date: 1I/ʻOumuamua in 2017, 2I/Borisov in 2019, and 3I/ATLAS in 2025.
Contrary to NASA’s position that ATLAS is a comet, Loeb speculated on numerous occasions that it could be of artificial origins due to a variety of alleged non-cometary characteristics.
Recently, the space expert claimed that 3I/ATLAS boasts a “heartbeat”-like pulse that could provide evidence of its artificial origins — potentially even pointing to the inner workings of a spaceship.
But who were ATLAS’ interplanetary predecessors? Loeb believes they were “accomplished siblings of our family of intelligent civilizations” that have potentially been documenting our solar system for billions of years.
“We may have a family of technological civilizations like ours or intelligence civilizations that we are not aware of,” he told the Post. “These are siblings that we have, and the most accomplished among them are the ones that managed to leave their home planet with the birth planet that hosted them early and spread them.”
Loeb declared that it’s in humanity’s best interest to follow suit and go interplanetary to discover what interstellar beings share the cosmos. He warned that not doing so might doom us to self-destruction, like with other celestial civilizations.
“Salvador Dali is quoted as saying: ‘Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings,’” Loeb wrote. “This certainly applies to intelligent civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy.”
He added, “Many of them might have engaged in geopolitical conflicts on their rocky planet and perished by now.”
As such, the researcher claimed that it would behoove our government to re-allocate some of our military budget — which he noted vastly overshadows the money spent on space exploration — toward expeditions into the beyond.
“If we continue along this path, we will not be remembered,” Loeb told the Post. “And one way to change the priorities that we have is to realize that someone else did it (go interplanetary). If we get a visitor, it’ll inspire us to perhaps imitate it.”
