The two phone calls from Washington DC arrived at the same split of a second but I declined both on my Apple Watch as I was answering questions on a live TV interview about the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS discovered on July 1, 2025. As soon as the interview ended, I listened to the two recorded messages and found that one was from the office of Representative Anna Paulina Luna and the second from Reuters. Both wanted to know more about 3I/ATLAS. I informed Representative Luna about the opportunity to get a closer look of 3I/ATLAS with the Juno spacecraft in orbit around Jupiter, based on a paper that I submitted for publication a few hours earlier (accessible here) with Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl from the Initiative for Interstellar Studies.
If I had only a few months left to live with a choice of where to spend them, I would have loved to board Juno on a collision course with 3I/ATLAS. The pre-collision view of a large interstellar object that travelled through interstellar space for billions of years must be magnificent.
A few hours later, I was informed that Joe Rogan posted a YouTube segment in which he discusses my recent papers on 3I/ATLAS. This segment received more than a million views within 12 hours. It was followed by interview requests that I received from CBS, CNN, NewsNation and international TV channels.
Communicating my research to the public is an important responsibility. However, I find less value in talking about scientific work than doing it. This is why I wrote a total of nine new scientific papers over the past month alone (accessible here). Before the internet was invented and when written news was printed on paper, it was often said that “Today’s newspaper is tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.” People forget the news of yesterday, but the physical reality maintains its nature. Therefore, any new scientific knowledge about that physical reality is far more precious than the chitchat in social media or news outlets about it. The nature of 3I/ATLAS will not be revealed by listening to opinions of commentators but rather by analyzing data collected by state-of-the-art telescopes. We can learn more by observing the interstellar show of 3I/ATLAS on the sky during the coming months with our best telescopes from the radio band to X-rays.
As a scientist, I respond to evidence collected by instruments. As of now, we have anomalies but we need more data on 3I/ATLAS or other interstellar objects in order to ascertain whether any one of them is technological in origin. Once we find an interstellar artifact beyond a reasonable doubt, the next step will be to figure out its technological capabilities and intent. The analysis of the available data could benefit from artificial intelligence (AI), especially if the object shows complex patterns. The reverse engineering of the alien technologies could spark new growth frontiers in human-made products. Those would represent a quantum leap in our abilities if the aliens benefitted from thousands or millions of years of advanced scientific research compared to the one century we had so far after quantum mechanics was discovered.
But there is also a security aspect to technological interstellar objects. For objects inside the Earth’s atmosphere, it is necessary to employ state-of-the-art cameras to monitor the sky around the globe at infrared, optical and radio wavebands and then analyze the data with the best AI software available. This is the approach taken by the Galileo Project, under my leadership. For interstellar objects far away from Earth, one would like to analyze data coming from the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in the southern hemisphere and build a similar observatory in the northern hemisphere. Again, the data should be analyzed by AI algorithms. Over the coming decade, the Rubin Observatory is expected to discover a new interstellar object every few months.
To do a good job on both types of objects, it is imperative to allocate major funds and attract the best minds in the world, as I noted in a congressional briefing, attended by Representative Luna, on May 1, 2025 (accessible here).
When approaching a `blind date,’ it is prudent to listen to the other side before speaking. This is a particularly good practice for a blind date with a visitor from another star, since all bets are off. We must first learn what the alien visitor is about and then design optimal communication and mitigation strategies. A friendly appearance might be misleading as it may potentially reflect a `Trojan Horse’. A neighbor with superior intelligence could manipulate us. This is a concern for the artificial intelligence we are currently creating, but even more so for alien intelligence. It is unclear which type of AI poses a bigger existential threat to the future of humanity. The answer will depend on the nature of any interstellar artifacts uncovered by the Rubin Observatory and other survey telescopes over the next decade.
As I suggested in my CBS interview (accessible here), it is important to establish a risk scale for interstellar encounters, with 0 marking a natural comet or asteroid and 10 marking an alien spaceship of unknown intent.
The U.S. government has little to offer other than alert citizens to major natural disasters, such as the new Tsunami Warning to Hawaiian residents — triggered by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake off Russia’s eastern Kamchatka Peninsula. An encounter with an artifact on the interstellar risk scale of 10 would be a tsunami of astronomical proportions. Trading options on the stock market volatility would not make much sense because money will lose its value in the aftermath of the encounter.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.