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

NASA’s own scientists, including Tom Statler, disagree. “It looks like a comet. It does comet things. It behaves like a comet,” Statler told The Guardian. “The evidence overwhelmingly points to this being a natural body.” That’s the official position — the one rooted in peer-reviewed observation, repeatable data, and conservative judgment.

Still, the Don’t Look Up analogy looms large. In Adam McKay’s film, scientists frantically warn the world of an approaching comet only to be ignored until it’s too late. 3I/ATLAS is not on a collision course with Earth, but it shares something eerie with that fictional story — a sense that humanity may again be watching an event of cosmic significance without fully understanding it. And if it were artificial, we might not even know until after it had already acted.

Right now, 3I/ATLAS is slipping behind the Sun — a period known as solar conjunction. During that window, Earth-based telescopes can’t see it. It will reach perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, on October 29. That’s when comets tend to release volatile gases and change brightness — and, in Loeb’s more radical hypothesis, when an artificial object could execute a controlled maneuver. When it re-emerges from behind the Sun, scientists will compare its position and speed against predictions. Any unexplained shift would fuel the kind of public frenzy seen only in Hollywood thrillers.