Political Violence Makes No Sense
The one topic on which members on both aisles of the U.S. Congress agree, is that we should figure out whether there are other intelligent beings in the cosmos. Hearings about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), like the latest one chaired by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna on September 9, 2025, brought together Republicans and Democrats in support of future scientific research on this topic.
A day later, a scientific paper (accessible here) reported that a sample collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover from an ancient dry riverbed in the Jezero Crater on Mars, might contain evidence of ancient microbial life. A return of this sample to Earth would allow scientists to reach more definitive conclusions through isotope analysis.
Astrobiologists focus on the search for extraterrestrial microbes. The Astro2020 Decadal Survey in Astronomy and Astrophysics assigned the highest priority to the Habitable World Space Observatory, in search for the molecular fingerprints of microbes in the atmospheres of exoplanets.
At the same time, the general public is obsessed with the search for alien intelligent beings, from whom we can learn new science and technology, those who would inspire awe and change our aspirations for interstellar space after our first blind date with them. For that reason, when an object like 3I/ATLAS shows up, its five anomalies inspire viral discussions on social media. Some scientists ridicule this discussion, but they fail to recognize that the raw curiosity and sense of adventure which propel the search for aliens could bring science funding to the forefront much more so than the search for dark matter or dark energy, other unknown constituents of the cosmos.
Sixty-five years have passed since Frank Drake pioneered SETI observatories in search for radio signals from an extraterrestrial civilization. It is time to diversify our strategy and search for extraterrestrial technological signatures in interstellar objects as well as UAP close to Earth. I am not just talking the talk. I am walking the walk by studying scientifically the anomalies of the interstellar objects 1I/`Oumuamua and 3I/ATLAS, as well as the scientific-quality data on UAP — obtained from the three new observatories of the Galileo Project in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Nevada. During my work on this subject, I encountered pushback from astrobiologists and SETI advocates. But there is a silver lining: the thousand scientific papers and nine books that I published throughout my scientific career over the past forty years attracted a level of academic scrutiny in proportion to their significance. The bigger the impact, the more pushback an idea received when it was first proposed. This gives me the peace of mind of not engaging in mud wrestling with critics when data is sparse, because collecting more data will ultimately bring us to agreement. The refusal to collect evidence will keep us ignorant. But whether we have neighbors on our cosmic street does not depend on how popular this notion is within the halls of academia.
A day after the UAP hearing, Charlie Kirk was shot on the campus of Utah Valley University while being engaged in a dialogue with an audience member. In the wake of this terrible shooting, I lost sleep. Frankly, I would have used my body to stop the bullet on its path to kill a young father and husband like Charlie at age 31. There is so much more that Charlie could have done if he had lived to his full potential. As I jog every morning at sunrise, I watch with delight the beautiful wild flowers around me and hate to see a flower lying on the ground prematurely.
At the end of his first inaugural address on March 4, 1861, President Abraham Lincoln said: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. ” He said so, wishing to avoid a civil war. Four years later, President Lincoln was shot while attending a play on April 14, 1865.
From a cosmic perspective, the conflicts that power our hateful political violence on this Earth make little sense. There is much more real estate beyond our planet. There are billions of Earth-Sun analogs in the Milky-Way galaxy alone. Seeking evidence for microbes in them from the vantage point of our home is challenging. Finding a resident might be easier through a tennis ball that landed in our backyard. This search makes common sense that can unify all of us, but instead it triggers ridicule among some bloggers, YouTubers and influencers on social media.
This brings me to my main point: ridiculing or shooting people with whom we disagree is not a sign of intelligence. An extraterrestrial observer might have a hard time concluding that humanity represents an intelligent civilization given our history of political violence.
Here’s hoping that by encountering an extraterrestrial role model, we will do better in the future than we did in the past. Here lies the opportunity to recognize that as humans we are all in the same boat and we better cooperate to survive.
As President Ronald Reagan said in his 1987 speech to the United Nations: “In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”
We desperately need an interstellar object like 3I/ATLAS to show up alien technology in order to get us back to our senses. With this in mind, let us review again the anomalies of 3I/ATLAS so far:
· The retrograde trajectory of 3I/ATLAS is aligned with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun to within 5 degrees, with a chance probability of 1 in 500 (as discussed here). This coincidence brings 3I/ATLAS to pass within several tens of millions of kilometers from Mars, Venus and Jupiter.
· The diameter of the nucleus of 3I/ATLAS has an upper limit of 46 kilometers (as derived here), which would make it a million times more massive than the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. On October 3, the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter will be able to image 3I/ATLAS with a pixel resolution of 30 kilometers, providing the best limit on the diameter of its nucleus.
· For a couple of months after its discovery — when 3I/ATLAS was at a heliocentric distance of 3–4.5 times the Earth-Sun separation, it featured a glow, ten times longer than it is wide, towards the Sun and not in the opposite direction — as expected from a cometary tail. This feature of an anti-tail was never observed before for comets (as analyzed here).
· The plume of gas around 3I/ATLAS is composed primarily of carbon dioxide — CO2 (87% by mass) with traces of carbon monoxide — CO (9%), and water — H2O (most of the remaining 4%), as derived here. It also features nickel without iron (as known to exist in industrially-produced nickel alloys) and cyanide, both rising sharply with decreasing heliocentric distance (as reported here).
· 3I/ATLAS is characterized by an extremely deep and narrow negative polarization of −2.77 percent with a low inversion angle of 6.41 degrees (as reported here). This polarimetric behavior is significantly different from all known comets, either interstellar or bound to the Solar System. 3I/ATLAS is the first object known with this combination of low inversion angle and extreme negative polarization. Its anomalous polarization might be the result of the very elongated configuration of scattered sunlight around it with a 10:1 aspect ratio.
Watching 3I/ATLAS as it gets close to the Sun while reading the daily news, feels like attending a party where the guests misbehave. All we can do is look through the window at the street with the hope that a new guest will make the situation better.
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.
