This week, my son told me an interesting story – about life imitating art.
I asked him to write it for you because I knew I couldn’t do it justice because I found it fascinating, and I hope you do too. Although it is an unlikely story for Town Talk, we too are a part of the whole.
Here is Kent’s story.
In 1973, one of the world's preeminent futurists, Arthur C. Clarke, released his 16th novel ‘Rendezvous with Rama’.
Within its pages, he described a very plausible scenario for humanity’s first encounter with an interstellar spacecraft, and the subsequent exploration of the vehicle by the crew of the research vessel Endeavour in the year 2131.
Rama is initially thought to be an asteroid, although its size is unprecedented – a cylinder 50 kilometres long, and 20 kilometres in diameter.
Its path through our solar system also causes concern as it appears as though Rama will pass close to the inner planets (including Earth), and the Sun.
In the book, Rama is initially discovered by Spaceguard, a survey project established after the city of Venice is wiped from the face of the planet by an asteroid impact.
In the nineties, the real world began to take the early detection of dangerous bodies in space very seriously, and some of those efforts were referred to as “Spaceguard Surveys.” (Obviously, some of NASA’s people were fans of Clarke.)
And, his novel would have quickly sprung to mind for astronomers and other scientists when 3I/ATLAS was first discovered on the second of July 2025.
3I/ATLAS is a gigantic interstellar body, currently making its way through our solar system at a mind-boggling speed in excess of 209,000 km/h, more than 5 times faster than any human has ever travelled.
What is truly extraordinary about the initial discovery of 3I/ATLAS is just how closely the circumstances mirror those described in Clarke’s novel more than 50 years ago.
So strikingly similar were the particulars that Harvard University astrophysicist Dr Avi Loeb published several reports speculating that Clarke’s predictions might be about to come true, some 106 years early.
His concerns were driven by the gigantic size of 31/ATLAS, and the apparent absence of a comet’s familiar gas cloud.
The initial fears that it is intelligent were dismissed by NASA, which also recently, rather anti-climatically, announced that the object is unlike Rama in two key characteristics – it is nowhere near as large (although at 11.2 kilometres in diameter it is a monster, and by far the largest interstellar object ever discovered), and it does, in fact, possess a comet-like gas trail.
Given its current speed and course, 31/ATLAS may have been ejected from the densest part of the Milky Way before the Earth was even fully formed.
It will come within 210 million kilometres of the Sun at the end of October and then leave the solar system forever.
Kent
P.S. Text from Kent 22/9 ‘Apparently ATLAS is now emanating light – as opposed to reflecting it.
This was from the Harvard guy I referenced.
I think he really wants it to be aliens!’
My turn
For a few weeks there, the fear that this gigantic ‘thing’ was intelligent or controlled by intelligence, was real enough for a Harvard astrophysicist to publish warning reports.
If that had not been dismissed, I don’t think I’d have given it to you to read.
We’ve all got enough to worry about, without thinking about the end of the world.
ATLAS will be gone soon.
Spring is five days away, and I’ve just picked a bunch of daffodils and jonquils. May it be easy, my friends.
Marnie,
Email: towntalk@sheppnews.com.au
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