It’s flying too close for comfort.
There has been much talk about the Manhattan-sized comet 3I/ATLAS that reportedly was going to reach its closest approach to the Sun last Thursday.
However, in doing so, there was some unusual maneuvering, like how it was flying suspiciously close to Jupiter, Venus and Mars, that led some to believe it could be an extraterrestrial spacecraft.
While on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, although totally unsure, Elon Musk agreed ATLAS could be “aliens,” since something beyond gravity is affecting the comet’s trajectory.
Something Musk is sure about is that due to its massive size and the fact that it’s made almost entirely of nickel, the 3I/ATLAS, which could potentially be a spacesip, has the potential to “obliterate a continent…maybe worse.”
Musk appeared on a recent episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” where the two talked about the Manhattan-sized comet 3I/ATLAS. Youtube/PowerfulJRE
“It’s a real problem if it hits,” Rogan said to a nodding Musk, “Probably kill most of human life.”
“It depends on what the total mass is,” Musk said to the podcast host. “The thing is, in the fossil record, there’s arguably five major extinction events, like the biggest one of which is the Permian extinction, where almost all life was eliminated, that actually occurred over several million years.”
“There’s the Jurassic, I think that one’s pretty definitely an asteroid… but what they don’t count are the ones that merely take out a continent because those don’t really show up on the fossil record,” the businessman said.
The change of pigment also has experts concerned. NASA
“So, unless it’s enough to cause a mass extinction event throughout Earth, it doesn’t show up in a fossil record that’s 200 million years old. So there have been many impacts that would have sort of destroyed all life on half of North America or something like that through the course of history,” he added.
“And there’s nothing we could do about it right now,” a shocked Rogan responded.
NASA.com originally reassured that at its closest point, the comet would only be passing within 170 million miles of our planet, meaning that it wouldn’t pose any threat to Earth.
However, with ATLAS’s recent trajectory, in a recent blog post, Harvard scientist Avi Loeb claimed that the “non-gravitational acceleration might be the technological signature of an internal engine,” which might also be the reason behind the comet’s change in pigment — brighter and bluer — as it neared our solar system’s light source.