Mike Bandoni

Just to be clear - given recent drivel on line - Comet 3I/Atlas is a comet, made of carbon dioxide and water ices and bits of other stuff. It is entirely natural in origin, its orbit is as expected and it will whizz around the sun and then disappear off into the galaxy again. If it ever encounters another inhabited solar system in the far future I hope the living things there are more sensible than us and enjoy it for what it is - a visitor from elsewhere in the galaxy - a pristine lump of rock and ices which formed around a distant, maybe long-dead star billions of years ago and many light years away, just passing through. Isn’t that wonderful enough?

Everyone should listen to @carolynporco … this alien spaceship stuff is completely out of hand - it’s OVERWHELMINGLY likely to be a lump of ice and rock. We went through similar nonsense with the ‘LHC might create a black hole and destroy the world’ fiasco. There is value in thinking about highly unlikely possibilities of course - and it can be fun to publish a paper or two on them - but some people who are not scientifically / statistically literate really worry about these things when they read about them out of context in the press or on social media.