How many of you have been bombarded recently – once or twice daily, in my case – with reports on Facebook of 3i/Atlas’s progress through our solar system, artificially guided by someone or something, and on a mission that its latest messages have just revealed to us? That mission is to examine our planet in order to discover how its people are behaving, with a view to assessing whether or not they deserve to join a wider confederation of technically advanced worlds, in a galaxy far away. Apparently the verdict has now come down: excluding the Earth from the federation, on grounds that we might recognise – our continual wars and social inequalities. Our punishment, according to the denizens of 3i/Atlas, is to be banned from venturing beyond our solar system, and deprived of our memory of the science that has brought us thus far, so that we can’t try to repeat it.

OK; it reads like science-fiction. One of the reasons I’ve been following the story is my life-long fascination with this genre, which I’ve mentioned before (see https://bernardjporter.com/2026/02/15/3i-atlas/). But if it’s true, then why aren’t the mainstream media making more of it? You would have thought it was rather more significant than most of the stories currently printed in the British press (it might be different elsewhere); warning as it does of an existential threat to us all. And the way it’s presented to us on social media, fronted by leading (I assume) astrophysicists like the American Professor Michio Kaku, and even our own Professor Brian Cox, looks convincing enough. But then so do the ‘genuine’ photos of Martian cities and creatures that are also featured on Facebook, which are obviously fake (aren’t they?). One can do a lot with AI these days. Brian Cox, as he’s portrayed in these videos, looks a bit ‘manipulated’ to me. It’s about time that he disowns them. Unless, of course, it really is him, and 3i/Atlas is an alien spaceship after all.

Incidentally, and for the little it’s worth (I’m no expert): I do believe there’s intelligent life beyond our planetary system. How could it be otherwise, in this vast universe? But it’s not necessarily humanoid; and unlikely to want to take a great hike to us in a lump of hollowed-out rock, just to make us better people. If it were, we might want to call it ‘God’.