NASA Releases 3I/ATLAS Images – But Is It Too Late?
NASA has released the previously withheld images of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, dismissing any speculation about it being alien technology.
As the US government reopens after its longest shutdown in the country’s history, NASA has published the close-up images taken of 3I/ATLAS by its Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) between 11 September and 2 October.
NASA expected 3I/ATLAS would initially be too faint to be observed, however the object brightened enough to become visible. The released images have been stacked and processed, showing the object as a bright fuzzy orb.
The rumours and speculation about 3I/ATLAS being anything other than a comet were addressed by NASA representatives at a briefing about the images.
“It very, very strongly resembles, in just about every way, the comets that we know,” NASA’s lead scientist for solar system bodies Tom Statler.
“It has some interesting properties that are a little bit different from our solar system comets, but it behaves like a comet, and so the evidence is overwhelmingly pointing to this object being a natural body. It’s a comet.”
Image: AP Gianluca Masi
The announcement has frustrated Harvard astrophysicist and professor Avi Loeb who for months has been adamant 3I/ATLAS is indeed an alien craft, owing to its strange characteristics and trajectory.
He says NASA are blindly promoting the rhetoric of it being just a comet, given the anomalies 3I/ATLAS has exhibited that can’t be explained by current scientific understanding of comets.
Loeb has outlined 12 anomalies about 3I/ATLAS that he says contradict NASA’s assertion it is a comet, albeit like no other we have ever observed in the Solar System. From its gargantuan size and releasing jets of evaporated materials to unexplainable changes in trajectory, Loeb is convinced NASA is lying about the true nature of 3I/ATLAS.
The US government shutdown could not have come at a worse time for NASA.
NASA’s highly publicised observations of 3I/ATLAS unfortunately coincided with the US government shutting down, preventing the federal agency from releasing the images due to funding restrictions.
Their silence only fuelled public suspicion they had something to hide. Since being discovered in July by its namesake observatory in Chile, 3I/ATLAS has been the subject of intense speculation.
NASA generally shares a high level of trust with the public, but there still exists a sizeable demographic with misgivings about the agency’s transparency and credibility. As many as 20 per cent of Americans believe the moon landing was faked or that the Earth is flat, and that NASA is gatekeeping the truth.
The government shutdown allowed conspiratorial beliefs about 3I/ATLAS to take hold of public discourse and fester. Professor Loeb’s academic credentials gave weight to his claims, enabling him to control the narrative in NASA’s absence.
Cargill Australia – Nourishing the world
The problem NASA has now is not proving 3I/ATLAS is indeed a comet but destabilising the belief that has taken root that it is anything but a comet with natural origins, however mysterious.
While 3I/ATLAS poses no threat to Earth – passing by us millions of kilometres away – dangerous ideas consistently threaten our collective human intelligence and combined understanding of our place in the Universe.
Robert Oxton Bolt wrote that “a belief is not merely an idea the mind possesses; it is an idea that possesses the mind.” Our biggest challenge in the age of misinformation is disseminating fact from fiction to delineate objective truths.
In the case of 3I/ATLAS, we may never truly know its true origin or purpose, but we have been granted the rarest opportunity to observe and learn what we can from it while it is in our celestial neighbourhood.
We should be intellectually open to new ideas that challenge our accepted views, that’s how we learn and grow as people. Some of the greatest human achievements were made by defying the status quo and disobeying the rules of the time.
Should 3I/ATLAS provide paradigm shifting revelations, we need to be prepared to accept a fundamental shift in our conception of science. But we will also have to draw a definitive intellectual line between science fact and science fiction.
