Carl Sagan’s “Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence” Meets the 3I/ATLAS “Don’t Look Up” Moment

But what if this weren’t a question for astronomers, but a case before a judge? What if the issue wasn’t scientific certainty, but legal plausibility? Could the evidence — or even the absence of it — convince a court that this object might not be natural?

In science, you need extraordinary evidence to elevate an extraordinary claim. But in court, you only need to show that something is more probable than not. If 3I/ATLAS were a defendant in a legal proceeding, the plaintiff’s case might rely on a combination of circumstantial and direct evidence: anomalous trajectories, out-gassing inconsistent with known physics, chemical compounds that appear engineered, or perhaps a sudden deviation during its period of invisibility behind the Sun. Each individual point might not prove the case — but taken together, they could persuade a reasonable judge that something artificial is at play.

Avi Loeb has argued that as the object approaches solar conjunction, it could theoretically perform an Oberth maneuver— using the Sun’s gravity to slingshot itself in a new direction. “If you want to take a vacation, take it before then, because who knows what will happen,” he joked, only half-seriously. He’s estimated a 30–40 percent likelihood that the object isn’t entirely natural — a “black swan” scenario that could, in his words, “masquerade as a comet.”