NASA’s current position remains that the cosmic snowball is a comet. Regardless of ATLAS’s origin, Loeb believes it’s likely that aliens visited our cosmic neighborhood before. “My counterpoint is simple: humanity launched technological objects into space, so we must conclude that alien life forms could do the same,” he wrote. He cited the astronomical gaffe in January, when The Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., announced the discovery of an asteroid zooming close to Earth — only to learn it was actually a Tesla sports car launched by Elon Musk as a publicity stunt seven years ago. “Musk, statistically, is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky Way over the past 13.8 billion years,” Loeb wrote. Chris Michel/National Academy of Sciences “Musk, statistically, is not the most accomplished space entrepreneur in the Milky Way over the past 13.8 billion years,” Loeb wrote. “There are about a hundred billion stars with similar properties to the Sun in the Milky Way; roughly a tenth of them host a habitable Earth-size planet.” He explained that it’s statistically very likely that some of these star systems harbored “space entrepreneurs,” one of whom potentially launched 3I/ATLAS. Loeb explained that even something as primitive as the Voyager spacecraft, with its 1970s technology, could traverse the galaxy in a billion years. This means that there was plenty of time for a far more advanced civilization from beyond to dispatch an interstellar object to our neck of the celestial woods.