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Quote:UPDATE 31OCT25: Avi Loeb accuses NASA (Never A Straight Answer) of withholding data on 3i/ATLAS.
I will open today’s missive by stating that I subscribe to the Electric Universe/Plasma Cosmology model. I am convinced that the long-sought Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is as simple as saying “zap”.
It’s a very long, detained conversation to describe the theory, its predictions, and successes. I recommend the reader enjoy The Thunderbolts Project channel, which has many hours of videos exploring the topic. What I want to focus on here, though, is the concept of comets and asteroids, and how it relates to an object called 3i/ATLAS.
Despite popular miseducation, comets and asteroids are the exact same thing behaving differently. Comets are most emphatically not “dirty snowballs,” nor even “snowy dirtballs”. They are dry, dusty rocks similar in all ways to asteroids. Various spacecraft have visited several comets, taking samples of their tails, images of their surfaces, and even orbiting and landing on one for long-term study. There are no giant balls of ice, nor powerful jets of steam, as dramatized in the film Armageddon (1998), or in Star Trek: Enterprise.
A comet is actually an asteroid with a strong negative charge moving perpendicular to a positively charged field, causing electrical machining of the surface in a way very similar to the process used in industrial applications. It also causes something similar to St. Elmo’s Fire on the rims and sharp edges of craters and mountains.
The machining creates a very fine dust from the rock, which is propelled away from the comet by static electricity, forming the coma and tail of the comet. The tail flows away from the Sun following the Sun’s magnetic field lines and the flow of protons commonly called “solar wind”.
I apologize if your eyes have defocused from this technical summary, but we need to know the basics of comet behavior to understand why 3i/ATLAS (3iA) is so unusual. On almost all comets, the tail follows the “solar wind” away from the Sun. A few occasionally have an “antitail” that points toward the Sun, caused by a particularly strong current “pulling” material off the surface. It’s rare, but has been observed.
Now for the woo-woo fun!
Comet 3iA is considered to be an interstellar object. By calculating a part of its orbital arc, it is possible to estimate its origin, and its speed tells us whether it will leave the Solar System, or hang around for a few million years.
Most comets form a “coma” (dust cloud around the rock) and tail (flowing away from the Sun) out beyond Jupiter, and sometimes even beyond Saturn. Comet 3iA did not form a tail until it was near the orbit of Mars, and the tail pointed TO the Sun, not away. This may be due to unusual chemistry, as some scientidiots are suggesting, or it may be…something else.
Sci-Fi fans are likely familiar with one of Arthur C. Clarke’s signature novels, Rendezvous with Rama. In the novel, a long cylindrical object enters the Solar System, clearly on an interstellar orbit. An Earth ship lands on the object, finds a way in, and discovers a manufactured habitable world inside. Sequels follow events surrounding identical objects following in a specific pattern of 72 years.
For those who keep up with their astronomy, you may recall the object named “Oumuamua,” a long cylindrical object that passed through the Solar System in 2017. It did not exhibit the usual coma and tail of a comet, and seems to have accelerated out of the Solar System in a way that cannot be explained by gravity or “sling shot” moves around the Sun.
Oumuamua literally scraped the face of the Sun at closest approach, yet did not seem to suffer any harm. Comet 3iA, on the other hand, will not pass closer than Mars on its way through. Yet, both are showing unusual velocity changes—Oumuamua sped up, 3iA seems to be slowing down. Also, it’s just been announced that 3iA’s tail has swung around from pointing at the Sun, to point away from the Sun. This behavior could imply a braking maneuver like our spacecraft perform when dropping into orbit around an object.
Dr. Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard, predicted that if 3iA were a manufactured object, it might display this kind of behavior at this particular point in its travel around the Sun. Naturally, he’s generating headlines crowing about the alien origins of the comet, and well…he has a point.
According to Loeb, 3iA is too big, too bright, too unusual, and too close to the ecliptic (where the planets orbit)—not to mention particularly close to Mars, Venus and Jupiter, as if doing a grand tour of the inner Solar System. He gives it s 30% to 40% chance of being technology, rather than a stray rock. Loeb gives all this a probability of ≲ 0.005% for all-natural random chance.
The fun part of all this is Loeb has the general scientidiot community clutching its pearls and sniffing indignantly at Loeb’s artificial argument, much less the Electric Universe (EU) in general. Loeb does these exercises and a means of stirring the pot and keeping minds open and limber. The EU folks are looking for a far better cosmology that doesn’t require constant applications of bubble gum and baling wire to hold it together.
Once upon a time, astronomy—and science in general—was not populated by creaking fossils wrapped in sheep’s skin, but rather by vibrant minds fighting the status quo, making world-changing discoveries in their home labs and workshops (one of my favorites being Tycho Brahe).
One of the primary malfunctions of the world today is it has become calcified, ossified, fossilized. There is a sad dearth of free thinking and open-mindedness. I suspect future historians will view our era as not unlike the Spanish Inquisition, with people literally being murdered for unorthodox opinions and preaching heretical gospels.
Public discourse has devolved from a dynamic marketplace of ideas competing against each other in a civil crucible of acceptance. Instead, we now have hardened bunkers of ideology lobbing rhetorical grenades across no-man’s-land, more interested in destruction than persuasion. Debate has been replaced by denunciation; curiosity by certainty. What was once a contest of reason is now a siege of slogans, each side mistaking volume for truth and outrage for conviction.
Today’s column isn’t so much an exploration of comets and cosmologies, as a look at the flights of fancy that are possible with the facts at hand. We need to lighten up, loosen up and open up. Locks are made to be picked, and walls are built to be breached. We need to reform our educational institutions and rethink our media, so that they once again reward curiosity instead of conformity. We’ve traded wonder for obedience.
Just some thoughts on this monsoon evening in the concrete jungles of Jakarta.
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Today’s cinematic main course is a weird but wonderful film called Coherence (2013). I don’t know anyone involved in this film, and I wouldn’t call it high art, but it does a great job setting up a unique situation loosely based on H. G. Wells, and following through with a well-built mystery. Well worth an hour and a half of your leisure time. If you can find it, pair it up with Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), a British made-for-TeeVee spectacle with James Mason, David McCallum and Michael Sarrazin. It’s a real treat for the persistent seeker.
"It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong." – Thomas Sowell
