Hello, SFIA audio listeners, in this month's Nebula exclusive, Big Alien Theory,

we're asking the reason alien civilizations might be rare is because most aliens are huge.

To hear it and every episode early and add free, plus hours of bonus content,

check out go.nebola.t.v.t.v. And use my code, Isaac Arthur.

Is 3Eye Atlas, the interstellar comet now passing through our solar system, an alien artifact?

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All right then, welcome to Science and Futurism with Isaac Arthur, and I am your aforementioned

host, Isaac Arthur.

While space, science, and futurism are our main topics here, we spend a lot of time to talk

about hypothetical aliens, and mostly why alien civilizations are probably very rare,

and we probably have this whole galaxy, likely

many more to ourselves. Normally I do not like to tackle individual phenomena because there's

inevitably very little data. You cannot say for sure what one phenomena is without deeper

study unless you really shouldn't be saying what it isn't either. However, back when the first interstellar asteroid got found, Amuamua, I said if we found another eye, I'd talk about it, but until we had a few interstellar asteroids, it was kind of premature, and I got reminded about that recently, so it's time to talk about them. We might as well begin with the name, and 3-Eye indicates the third interstellar object found,

Amu-a-Mua being 1-I-Mu-A-Mua in 2017, and 2-Ei Borosov in 2019, which was less discussed.

Astronomers first spotted this object on July 1st, 2025, using the Asteroid-Trestial

Impact Last Alert System, or Atlas, or short.

A set of wide-field survey telescopes scan the skies for anything big and fast enough to cause trouble here on Earth.

Instead, Atlas causes something far more intriguing, an object not from Earth's neighborhood at all.

Its official designation is C-2025-N1 Atlas.

The C stands for comet, 2025 and 1 tells it was the first comet discovered in the second

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