With all the ongoing stories about interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, you may enjoy an earlier video from Cool World Labs titled “Could 3I/ATLAS Be Technological?” Columbia University Associate Professor David Kipping looks at the claims by Harvard Professor Avi Loeb that the comet is not only from another solar system, but it may in fact be a spacecraft.
Professor Kipping focuses his discussion on an earlier paper by Professor Loeb titled Is the Interstellar Object 3I/Atlas Alien Technology? The points discussed in the video are broken down into three categories: (1) trajectory, (2) speed, and (3) excessive size. In each case, he provides plenty of technical points, but the main point seems to be that the evidence is often arbitrary or contradictory. Professor Kipping also notes those occasions where the paper goes “off the rails” to make the idea of a spacecraft possible.
All of these points continue to bounce around as we learn more about the comet, but it is interesting to see the scientific community represented here by Professor Kipping doing a great job of parsing the evidence while keeping all of it professional. He made it clear throughout the video that he has great respect for Professor Loeb’s work over the years, even if this particular theory about a spacecraft does not seem plausible.
Check it out for yourself.
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