31/Atlas, the third interstellar object that we have watched travel through our solar system (there have undoubtedly been countless others; we just didn’t have any way to see them before now) is currently barreling along at 130,000 mph. Please click on this link to see some blurred images, courtesy of the Hubble.

It won’t be coming anywhere near here, but, as we noted in The Week, Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb and two associates have written a paper in which they hypothesize that, based on certain anomalous characteristics, “this new interstellar interloper” might be a “functioning technological artifact,” while carefully adding that they do not “necessarily” subscribe to this hypothesis. Loeb has floated similar hypotheses about ʻOumuamua, our first known interstellar visitor, and about the true nature of some metallic spherules found at the bottom of the Pacific.

Loeb and his colleagues’ best guess (and mine, although I am no astrophysicist) is that 31/Atlas is something of completely natural origins, but in reading some of the Loeb team’s writings about Atlas, I was delighted to find this rather dark explanation as to why we have yet to discover any extraterrestrial life, despite the mathematical (near) certainty that it’s out there somewhere. The usual explanation (and one that makes sense to non-astrophysicist me) is that technologically speaking we still only have a needle, and the cosmic haystack is very, very big.

However, there’s also this (via Loeb):

One of the solutions to Enrico Fermi’s question about extraterrestrials: “where is everybody?” is offered by the dark forest hypothesis, popularized by Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel “The Dark Forest.” This hypothesis proposes that our cosmic neighborhood is dangerous, filled with intelligent civilizations that are hostile and silent to avoid detection by potential predators. In this context, the silence in searches for radio signals by the SETI community is not caused by the lack of extraterrestrial intelligent civilizations, but is instead a consequence of them fearing mutual destruction.

At this point, The Cure’s “A Forest” showed up, an uninvited earworm:

I’m running towards nothing
Again and again and again and again . . .

I give the dark-forest hypothesis full marks for its gothic, paranoid flair, somewhat reminiscent of German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s inspiring statement (part of one of his lessons of darkness): “Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger.”

Ahab smiles.