By Samuel Lopez | USA Herald
USA HERALD – In a time when public trust in scientific institutions is under increasing strain, the announcement of SETI’s revised Post-Detection Protocols on October 16, 2025, deserves closer scrutiny. The protocols, which outline how the world should respond to the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, appear at first to be a well-intentioned roadmap. Yet, when viewed in the context of our Constitution, the Law of Large Numbers, and the unfolding mystery of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS, they raise serious ethical and legal questions that the public deserves to understand.
At the center of this cosmic and constitutional crossroads stands 3I/ATLAS, a recently analyzed interstellar object whose physical properties have baffled even seasoned astrophysicists. Dr. Avi Loeb and his collaborators, Adam Hibberd and Adam Crowl, have documented nine distinct anomalies that together make a purely natural origin statistically improbable. Among them are its retrograde orbit, low inclination, an unusually bright surface suggesting recent resurfacing, and only slight, temporary outgassing despite a visible coma. Loeb’s team applied Bayesian reasoning to argue that the conjunction of such rare traits raises the likelihood that 3I/ATLAS could be of artificial or technological origin. For many scientists, this is not a declaration of alien design but a prompt to reexamine how we interpret improbable events within a finite observational window.
