Goldtent TA Paradise

AND NOW WE TURN OUR ATTENTION TO….THE SOLAR SYSTEM

1. pedro_deleon says:

   July 28, 2025 - 10:14 pm at 10:14 pm

   A week ago, for those who didn’t read through it all, JC had this

   https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mars-attacks-monday-july-21-2025

   Something very weird —cosmically weird— is going on. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb just co-authored a scientific paper hypothetically suggesting that the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS might not be a rock at all. It might be… alien technology. He drafted a formal paper, pre-published on his Substack, and titled “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” Secure your grey alien Halloween mask, fasten your tinfoil hat, and prepare for turbulence.
   image 11.png

   Before you roll your eyes: Avi Loeb isn’t some wild-eyed crank on late-night AM radio. He’s the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and lead scientist of the Galileo Project. He’s a credentialed establishment figure—who just called for humanity to seriously consider that this object may evidence intent.

   To be fair, Avi also recently published a lay-targeting but science-heavy book speculating about alien origins of our very first interstellar visitor, Oumuamua. Here’s the link to Avi’s slightly more lay-friendly Substack summary of his new paper.

   The terrifying punchline is that Avi thinks evidence suggests there is a tiny but greater-than-zero possibility that 3i/Atlas is a weapon meant to destroy the Earth. Seriously. Using science. And he cited Pascal’s Wager to justify going public with his concerns. It’s better to be wrong and discredited than wrong and dead.

   ? Avi found at least seven bizarre features of the new intergalactic visitor that he finds improbable if it were just an accidental bit of space flotsam or jetsam. First, it came from the direction of the Galactic Core, which sounds unremarkable until you put on suspicious 3-D eyeglasses. Since it flew in from that particular star-dense section of space, we couldn’t see it until it was too late to mount an interception probe.

   That’s … odd, but it doesn’t prove anything. But it gets a lot odder.
   image 14.png

   Next, Atlas’s “random” trajectory defies probability. If it were just a random bit of space debris, it could have entered the Solar System from any angle and any direction. So … why is it making a close fly-by of three planets (Jupiter, Mars, and Venus) and the Sun? It seems to be surveying half the system. Avi calculated the odds of this happening by chance at under 0.005%.

   Avi wonders whether it could be probing those three planets. It’s passing each of them well within reach of one of our ICBMs.

   It is massive. The best guesses put it around 20 kilometers wide, which is the size of a small city. It’s 200 times bigger than 2017’s first interstellar visitor, Oumuamua. The significance of its size is that if these types of interstellar objects are common —regardless of size— we should have seen millions by now. Before 2017, we never even saw one. The astronomical history books are being rewritten in real time.

   This next point is wonkier. Atlas is traveling in a retrograde plane, meaning the opposite direction from everything else in the Solar System. If it is orbiting the Sun on some kind of vast orbit, it is hard to explain this retrograde motion without special pleading.

   It is fast. It is going three times faster than our fastest rocket. We now have no hope of catching up to it.

   Finally, and most troubling for Mr. Loeb, Atlas is aimed to pass very close to the Sun, just like Oumuamua. The chances defy description. And most suggestively, it will pass the Sun on the exact opposite side from Earth— the only place we can’t see it. And Avi has a theory.

   ? There’s a classic move in orbital mechanics called an Oberth maneuver, named after Hermann Oberth, a foundational figure in rocket science. Most people are familiar with the standard version: the slingshot. You dive toward a massive object —like the Sun or a planet— and fire your engines at the fastest point to get even more speed, using gravity like a turbo boost to escape the system or redirect your path.

   But there’s a lesser-known cousin: the reverse Oberth.

   In this move, the ship doesn’t try to go faster—it fires its engines to slow down. It uses the Sun’s gravitational pull as a brake. The closer and faster you get, the more efficient the slowdown becomes. A well-timed reverse Oberth can turn a hyper-speed flyby into a stable orbit, or even a course correction to a specific target.

   Like, say, a nearby habitable planet.
   image 12.png

   It’s not a sci-fi concept. It’s real physics— and is exactly the kind of maneuver you’d expect an interstellar probe to use if it wanted to stop, stay, or quietly redirect. Here’s where things get really spooky.

   ? Just for fun, since this is what our Harvard astrophysicist is doing, let’s stack the “ifs”:

   If 3I/ATLAS is a probe that was sent, not a wandering rock;

   if it deliberately flew in from the crowded backdrop of the galactic core, where early detection is almost impossible;

   if it timed its arrival to thread a corridor past Venus, Mars, and Jupiter;

   if it passed perihelion precisely behind the Sun, right where no telescope on Earth can track it; and

   if it used that moment to execute a reverse Oberth maneuver, bleeding velocity to shift into a new trajectory…

   … then we have a very different situation on our hands. We’re not dealing with a space rock.

   Here comes the kick-in-the-delicates: what if, as it braked passing the Sun, it swung around the star and headed right for Earth? It would be invisible. We wouldn’t see it until it was almost here. The Sun is so bright, so overwhelming, that any small, dark object coming straight at us from the solar direction would remain hidden until it was practically pulling up at the White House.

   If that’s the case, the most significant close encounter in human history could already be underway— and we wouldn’t know until the mother ship makes its big announcement.

   Loeb easily conceded the possibility of an attack on Earth is vanishingly small, and admitted there’s probably not much we could do to stop it anyway, but given the stakes, he wants governments to start preparing now. It’s Pascal again. It would be better to waste a few billion on nothing than be caught flat-footed if it’s something and wished we’d taken the signs more seriously.
   image 13.png

   Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe 3I/ATLAS is just a weird, oversized rock doing weird, oversized rock things. But if it’s not? If it’s something else —something watching, waiting, maybe braking— then we’re living at the end of Planet Earth Act I. And when the lights come up, it won’t be flying saucers over the Washington Monument or Martians with ray guns yelling “Ack ack!” It’ll be silent, surgical, and by surprise. The real War of the Worlds won’t begin with a broadcast. It’ll begin with a shadow sliding out from behind the Sun.

   Remember Revelation 8:8? I just mentioned it last week, dismissing the comet theory. But now? “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea…” Now it sounds plausible again. And technically speaking, 3i/Atlas isn’t a comet.

   Having indulged once again in that most human of pastimes —electrifying speculation about imminent doom— we should now reattach ourselves, however reluctantly (or gratefully), to reality: the least likely outcome is that 3I/ATLAS is any kind of actual threat. Odds are, it’s just a rock. A weird, spookily-aimed, Sun-skimming rock with the narrative timing of a Bond villain, sure. But still just a rock.

   And yet. Yet, here we are, calmly discussing, in scientific literature, the orbital maneuverability of a possible alien probe. That, in itself, is bonkers. The real story might not be what Atlas is. It’s that we’re now rationally asking the question.

   Ack ack!

2. Undercover Hippie says:

   July 28, 2025 - 11:15 pm at 11:15 pm

   Project Blue Beam?
   Might be related to events planned to introduce the Beast system described in Wildwoodwolf’s post earlier today. Just my random thoughts.