"Scientists have been closely monitoring the object - which is largely believed to be a natural comet and only the third of its kind to have been directly observed in the solar system - as it continued on its highly eccentric trajectory. The encounter with Earth, however, turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax, as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who has long championed the far-fetched theory that the object may be an alien spacecraft, lamented in a blog post titled " 3I/ATLAS Ignores Earth." Instead of doing something you might expect of aliens during their closest approach to Earth, it simply cruised on by."
"" The Voyager Golden Records, containing a time capsule of sounds, images, music, and messages from Earth, were attached to NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which are currently traveling out of the solar system," he wrote. "These records serve as humanity's message for any intelligent extraterrestrial life that might find them, essentially a 'message in a bottle' sent out to interstellar space.""
"By "riding 3I/ATLAS," which is traveling at a speed of 37 miles a second, he argued that we could reach "interstellar space by the year ~10,000 CE instead of the year ~30,000 CE.""
3I/ATLAS made its closest approach to Earth on December 19 at about 167 million miles. The object is largely believed to be a natural comet and is only the third interstellar visitor observed in the solar system, following a highly eccentric trajectory. Expectations of alien contact faded when the object passed by without interaction. A proposal suggests using high-speed interstellar visitors as transport for human spacecraft to reach interstellar space sooner. The Voyager Golden Records exemplify sending messages into interstellar space, and current probes have only recently reached the heliosphere boundary while true interstellar space lies beyond the Oort Cloud.
Read at Futurism
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