In the last few days, opening Instagram, it seemed that the aliens had finally decided to come out into the open: posts and reels everywhere, videos with apocalyptic music and flashing writings like “NASA doesn’t want you to know”, “An alien ship headed towards Earth”, “The mystery of 31 Atlas”. Yes, 31 Atlas, which is actually written 3I / ATLAS, but many (including certain newspapers) mistook the I for a number (they don’t even check what it’s called, let alone what it is), and from there started the usual epidemic of digital aliens, improvised scientists, cosmological influencers and conspiracy theorists who believe they are Galileo with a video on Tik Tok.
The problem is that, as always, everything begins with a mystery, and as always the mystery is never a secret: it is just something that we have not yet understood (and when we understand it it will not be anything positive for us and our lives, which remain what they are). For many it is more reassuring to believe in the supernatural than in astrophysics, and even aliens have ended up in the supernatural (regularly thought of as superior beings, bacteria on Mars are of no interest to anyone apart from science). Similar cases? An avalanche. Like when in 1977 an astronomer from Ohio recorded an anomalous signal and wrote “Wow!” on the paper: since then the Wow! signal has remained, the scream of nothingness transformed into contact. In the 1960s pulsars were thought to be transmissions from alien civilizations, they even called them Little Green Men, until they were discovered to be neutron stars. In 2017 Oumuamua arrived, which for some was an alien probe and for others an interstellar rock, in 2019 Borisov, and now, in 2025, the protagonist is 3I / ATLAS, already promoted on social media as a passing spacecraft.
Except that 3I / ATLAS has nothing mysterious about it, other than the fact that it is incredibly interesting precisely because it is natural: discovered on July 1, 2025 by the ATLAS observatory in Chile, according to NASA, it will reach its closest point to the Sun on October 30, at around 210 million kilometers, and will be visible in telescopes around the world. The curious thing is that it emits about 40 kilograms of water vapor per second (a surprising phenomenon, at that distance the ice should not even sublimate, and astronomers suspect that in its core there is an unusually high concentration of volatile materials, or a cracked crust that allows the heat to penetrate deeper.
In the meantime, ESA probes, including Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, have imaged the comet as it crossed the orbit of Mars and initial analyzes have confirmed that the trajectory is hyperbolic, typical of a body coming from another star system. However: no artificial thrust, no radio signals, no alien technology, no spaceships: it’s a comet being a comet, albeit with more lively behavior than expected. Some scientists speculate that 3I/ATLAS came from a binary system, where a gravitational interaction ejected it into space millions of years ago, but all of this, of course, is too complex for social media.
Sociologically, the hashtag #31Atlas exploded because it was wrong: thousands of users, convinced they had discovered the hidden truth of NASA (ah, the hidden truths!), started posting videos with the robotic voice announcing “imminent contact”, images generated by AI and titles like “Scientists are silent”, in short, guys, always the same script: you start from a fact, you simplify it until it becomes absurd, you exclude what you don’t like with the narration, you transform it in faith. On the other hand, the click religion (like all religions in the past) needs a miracle a day.
The scientific community, meanwhile, observes and measures in silence: 3I / ATLAS is not a message, it instead shows us how the fragments of other star systems appear, and reminds us that space is not full of secrets but of distances, distances that we cannot even imagine. Even light, whose speed is three hundred thousand kilometers per second, is slow in space, except that distances do not become viral.
It becomes viral that aliens are looking for us, or (seriously) we are looking for them: from the Arecibo message of 1974, to the golden plaque of Voyager in ’77, up to the most recent messages from the SETI project, we continue to send greetings into space, hoping that someone will intercept them. The odds of anyone hearing us are ridiculous: a signal sent today could be received in a thousand years, or a billion, or never.
And in any case, even if a message arrives, are we sure we know who we are calling? It’s something I always wonder about scientists (like those at SETI) who send signals expecting a response: are we really certain (in the hypothesis of a relatively nearby alien civilization much more advanced than us who have only been emitting radio signals for just over a century) that ET and not Alien will receive our call? For goodness sake, due to the little sympathy I have for the human species, I would prefer Alien.