Adam Hibberd
My paper with Adam Crowl and Avi Loeb is out today, and we have collectively been doing what scientists and philosophers have been doing since time immemorial, and that is asking questions, and exercising our imaginations in the process.
In this case the question goes like this: 'is 3I/ATLAS, the third interstellar interloper to our Solar System, actually alien technology?'
Clearly the MOST LIKELY answer to this question is an emphatic 'no!', and all three of us, and most sensible scientists are at this very moment in time, waiting on tenterhooks for observations which will demonstrate that 3I/ATLAS is indeed a comet.
Discovery of volatiles ejected from its surface as it approaches the Sun and in the process heats up, will be evidence beyond doubt in support of this natural origin for 3I/ATLAS, though none has been detected so far as astronomers study spectroscopic measurements from the object.
In our research I used my 'Optimum Interplanetary Trajectory Software' (OITS) to solve the problem as to how 3I/ATLAS might rendezvous or intercept the Earth, or the other planets, for that matter.
This gives an indication of which targets 3I/ATLAS might have in mind, should one buy into our hypothesis. We find particularly low DeltaVs to get to Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and Earth. The level of DeltaV needed to achieve intercept is around ~ 5 km/s in all cases, quite low (about the same as an ICBM on Earth), but note that I have already shown a mission from Earth to 3I/ATLAS is impossible, since we discovered it too late.
Note a factor in its late discovery is the direction of origin: right out from the galactic centre, where it was osbcured by background light delaying its detection from Earth and also rendering a mission to it completely impossible.
And there are also other observations we have made concerning this object potentially being technological in origin.
Go to the preprint here.