Harvard professor suggests intercepting mysterious object 3I/ATLAS | NewsNation Prime [6:47]

YouTube ^ | August 3, 2025 | NewsNation

[RoosterRedux]

Harvard doing their part to distract people from Russia gate. Keeping useful idiots in line. That’s all this is. Narrative creation fed thru the TV.

Pure nonsense.

This is Avi Loeb, astrophysicist.

Dismissing Avi Loeb’s work as a distraction tactic is lazy and cynical. Loeb has been pushing these questions for years—long before 3I/ATLAS, Russiagate, or any current narrative cycle. In this interview, he’s simply pointing out anomalous data and suggesting a testable way to investigate it using a spacecraft that’s otherwise being retired. That’s not narrative control—that’s science. If your first reaction to new ideas is “it must be a psyop,” maybe the real distraction is your own inability to separate honest inquiry from conspiracy fatigue.

[SunkenCiv]

Hey, when he says he's going to "drain the lizard", ya better pay attention.

[SunkenCiv]

Yes, he's got a nice long history of doing pure research in the field, hence the topics list from FR is pretty long. That doesn't mean he's not being used by bad actors (in and out of media) to pursue the left's agenda. I guess I'm not quite the white line down the middle of the road. :^)

[simpson96]

“...which he says could be some sort of alien tech”

That’s code for “Give us more grant money, we love our cushy ‘jobs’ “.

[fidelis]

Ah, but Blue Origin just gave another crew a ride in their “reusable” suborbital thrill ride.

"Crew" should be in quotation marks. They were merely passengers on that suborbital thrill ride.

[SunkenCiv]

Also.

[I want the USA back]

Renowned theoretical physicist or not, there is nothing that tells us this is an inhabited spacecraft with aggressive intentions.

Going to meet it might just turn a peaceful mission into an aggressive one.

[SunkenCiv]

If we could catch it, a probe could hitch a ride on it. But then we wouldn’t need to catch it.

[Bullish]

Rule of thumb these days... If a Harvard professor says to do something then it’s a safe bet to do the opposite.

[faithhopecharity]

Professor Loeb has been pursuing such space alien contact ventures for many years. He is not a complete flake, either, he is actually quite intelligent. But whether he’s correct about this? I wonder. If this one is an alien craft, what would it be doing on its flight path?

[PIF]

This is the plot of Rendezvous with Rama.

—
Except the Juno probe, Dr. Avi Loeb mentioned, is unmanned. The object may be solid and not comet, which would make it 10-20 km in diameter. traveling at 100km per sec relative to the Earth.

If were some sort of Dark Forest object, and it changes course behind the Sun om Oct 29th, and comes toward Earth at that speed, its ELE time, baby!

This object is the largest by far that we have ever observed passing through the solar system; the odds of this size interstellar object randomly making very close approach to Mars, Venus and Jupiter, while traveling at 100km/sec, are so vanishingly small that it would take reams of paper to write the number.

Just to make matters a bit more scary, the object does not change brightness, but rather seems to be obscured by a dust cloud, which it should not have, that far from the Sun. Some observations seem to imply it does indeed rotate, and that its is thinner than it is wide. but no one can say for sure about this characteristic at the current distance.

To add more fuel to the fire, spectrographic analysis of the object has detected no chemical out-gassing whatsoever. Further, the ‘tail’ or glow does not point away from the Sun, but toward it. Which could possibly be explained by a plasma engine braking thrust ... cf: the Vasmir Engine.

But if the worst case scenario comes true, then we have nothing, nothing that would be capable of diverting a 10k object intent on hitting the Earth.

Ocean Impact:
Impact in the Atlantic at 40degN 66degW 500 miles off NYC, water depth 100-200 meters deep: Energy released would be 2.9X10 to the 8th power megatons, aka 290 million megatons; the fireball would consume the entire NE - as far as west to NY, PA, north to ME, New Brunswick, northeast to Nova Scotia, & south to VA. Over pressure wave would be 80lb per sq in, wiping out all buildings as far west as MI, OH, KY, TN, SC, & north to most of eastern Canada. Blast wind would exceeds 1,000km/h, eliminating everything sown to bedrock, followed by an earthquake.

The impact ocean crater would be 100-150km in dia, about 20-40km deep, pushing 10 Trillion kg of material into the atmosphere, 10% of which would reach the stratosphere. The following molten ejecta would cover the east coast, but not to worry, no one would be alive to see the 200-500 meter [ over 1,600 feet ] high tsunami extinguish the fires. Most major cites in Europe would also be taken out by the wave.

Land Impact:
Kansas City MO, USA. The devastation is even worse. Force and blast would be similar, but the area consumed would be bigger: gone with 100% casualties are MN, WI, IN, KY, TN, AL, MS, LA, TX, OK, IA, IL, MO, NE, AR, SD, CO, KS. Over pressure wave obliterates the center of the USA as far west as AZ, MT, WY, as far north as ND, MT, Canada & the Great Lakes region, as far east as PA, NY, GA, south to the FL panhandle, northern Mexico. Accompanied by a magnitude 7 earthquake.

and that was just for starters ... as a trillion kg of molten debris falls out of the stratosphere distributed over the entire planet, causing a short term surface temperature increase of between 5-20deg Celsius for a few hours ... over the entire planet with humans in the open suffering 2nd to 3rd deg burns 10,000 km away from the impact point.

and it gets worse, as the thrown up debris in the upper atmosphere would blot out the Sun, reducing the temperature by 10-20 C. With vast areas of the northern and southern hemispheres completely uninhabitable, conditions would exist for years, and take 100s of 1000s of year for Earth’s ecology to recover.

If human civilization survived at all, it would be set back centuries, if not millennia ...

What will happen if 3I Atlas hits the Earth? [ The Dark Forest Hypothesis ... by the time you need to do something, it will be too late ]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21EH7ttGqJo

Food for thought.

[yesthatjallen]

"...seems to be obscured by a dust cloud, "which it should not have", that far from the Sun."

And we know everything about astrophysics to make such a claim? Perhaps it's large enough to have it's own gravitational field and it's shrouded in something akin to a dust 'atmosphere'.

[PIF]

“And we know everything about astrophysics to make such a claim?”

No one is claiming that - just that this is a very unusual object that is exhibiting never before seen behavior, while crossing the solar system in such a way that it defies random chance to the vanishing point.

“Perhaps it’s large enough to have it’s own gravitational field and it’s shrouded in something akin to a dust ‘atmosphere’.”

All solar objects have their own gravitational field: some almost none [ a 20 foot diameter asteroid ], to a lot [ the Sun ]. In this case, as explained, the ‘cloud’ [ if it is a cloud of particles ] is not supposed to be there yet, as it is too far away from the Sun to form, and has a tail facing the wrong way. The ‘cloud’ itself shows no chemical signatures, if it were an out-gassing like a normal comet. It is too small to have a shroud of particles together by gravity alone - and such a thing has never before been seen in the millions and millions of objects surveyed.

There are extreme explanations for most of the features seen, but none in this combination, and in a combination that some features would preclude some others.

What it actually is, we will know more by Oct 29th, until then ...