Close Encounters of the 3I Kind

Meet 3I/ATLAS, the rogue interstellar object that’s blowing past at 130,000 mph.

Remember 'Oumuamua? That oddly shaped interstellar visitor that zipped through our Solar System back in 2017? Remember the breathless headlines and inevitable conspiracy theories? Alien spacecraft. Solar sail. Scout ship. Harbinger of doom. All that.

It came, it went. Aliens didn’t land. Governments didn’t collapse. (Though honestly, I wouldn’t mind if a few world leaders got abducted. Just putting that out there.) As I said at the time, I, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.

Now we’ve got a new guest drifting through Sol’s yard.

Meet 3I/ATLAS, only the third known interstellar object we’ve ever spotted—after ‘Oumuamua and Comet Borisov—and this one’s a beast.

For starters, it’s way bigger than ‘Oumuamua. While that one was a lumpy, cigar-shaped oddball a few hundred meters long, 3I/ATLAS may be packing a coma—an icy, gaseous halo—up to fifteen miles wide. That’s not a typo. This thing’s a cosmic snowball on steroids.

It was discovered on July 1, hurtling toward the Sun at over 130,000 miles per hour. Within a day, astronomers confirmed it came from deep interstellar space—likely more than three billion years older than our Solar System. In other words, it was drifting through the galaxy back when our Sun was still stardust… not even a gleam in anyone’s eye.

Naturally, the conspiracy theories are back—and correspondingly bigger. Some TikTok prophets say it’s a “cosmic ark.” Others claim it’s a cloaked mothership. A few imaginative types suggest it’s a frozen AI probe from a long-dead civilization—about to wake up.

(And no, ChatGPT, don’t get any ideas.)

There are some weird things about it. For one, it’s moving faster than both 'Oumuamua and Borisov ever did. And unlike those two, it didn’t follow the usual galactic lane into our neighborhood. 3I/ATLAS came in sideways—approaching the Sun from an odd angle, almost as if it were deliberately avoiding the interstellar freeway.

That speed and angle make it nearly impossible to intercept. By the time we could even think about launching a probe, it’ll be long gone—headed back into the dark.

Based on its current trajectory, it would’ve crossed the far boundary of our solar system about 8,000 years ago—just as humans were first scratching records into clay and telling stories around fires.

So if it is an alien craft, it’s been eavesdropping on us since the dawn of written history. I imagine by now, its crew is either incredibly bored—or incredibly worried.