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Is There Life on 3I/ATLAS?

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Avi Loeb Medium

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Images of 3I/ATLAS, taken in the wavelength range of 0.75–5.0 microns between the 8 and 15 of December, 2025. Each image spans 300,000 kilometers on a side, comparable to the Earth-Moon separation. The brightness contours represent 5, 20 and 50 times the background noise; color bars are in mega-Jansky per steradian. The Sun is towards the left and the object’s velocity is towards the right. On the large scales displayed, the brightness map of dust and organics was found to be pear-shaped, with an anti-tail elongation in the direction of the Sun. All six other gas plumes were found to be nearly round. (Image credit: C.M. Lisse et al. 2026)

Imagine our civilization being ambitious enough to spread life-as-we-know-it among the stars. Seeding fertile territories with life is not a novel concept, but a prerequisite for long-term survival of any species here on planet Earth. Throughout history, humans survived by having kids, but they also aspired to build monuments like the pyramids to cement their mark on history.

The exchange of rocks between early Mars and Earth could have led to the transfer of life between these neighboring planets. Mars is smaller body and hence cooled earlier than Earth, because its surface to volume ratio is larger. As a result, Martian rocks that were lifted off the Martian surface by impacts of asteroids 4.2 billion years ago, could have delivered microbes to Earth and seeded life-as-we-know-it. The feasibility of this transfer was demonstrated by the Martian rock ALH84001, which was not heated to more than 40 degrees Celsius throughout its journey (as discussed here). Indeed, the origin of life in the form of our last universal common ancestor (LUCA) lived 4.2 billion years ago, based on the comparison of the genomes of a diverse range of 700 modern microbes. This is just a few hundred million years after Earth’s formation. For all we know, we might all be Martians.

The natural transfer of life by the delivery of rocks from one planet to another, called panspermia, is an inefficient process because only a tiny fraction of the space rocks reaches a fertile ground without burning up in the atmosphere. In principle, an interstellar gardener with ambitions to spread life technologically can do it far more effectively. The possibility of “directed panspermia” raises a fundamental question in astrobiology:

Was most life in the Universe seeded naturally or artificially?

Of course, the ambitions of humans should not be dictated by natural practices in our cosmic neighborhood. We can aspire to send life on interstellar journeys with the hope that it will land on a fertile ground, just as the dandelion flower spreads its seeds in the wind (a concept contemplated by Chris McKay, Paul Davies and Pete Worden here). By spreading life to blossom in multiple places throughout the Milky-Way galaxy, we would have constructed the longest-lived monuments of our existence, lasting beyond the 7.6 billion years left for the lifespan of the Sun.

What would be the most economic and technologically feasible technique to accomplish interstellar gardening?

As a matter of fact, the opportunity is currently passing in front of our eyes, in the form of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. The latest data from the Webb telescope (reported here) indicates that the plume of gas and dust surrounding 3I/ATLAS contains water (H2O), carbon dioxide (CO2), carbon monoxide (CO) and methane (CH4), which can all be consumed by terrestrial lifeforms.

Consider the following hypothetical scenario. As soon as 3I/ATLAS was discovered on July 1, 2025, our space agencies launch an interceptor spacecraft on a trajectory that is designed to cross the forecasted path of the interstellar object at its closest approach to Earth on December 19, 2025. The spacecraft crashes into 3I/ATLAS as planned and deposits a capsule containing the seeds of terrestrial life into the belly of 3I/ATLAS. The delivered capsule contains radioactive material that keeps its environment warm and allows the terrestrial lifeforms to evolve, multiply and establish a stable colony of interstellar lifeforms inside 3I/ATLAS. Once 3I/ATLAS arrives to the vicinity of a habitable exoplanet after traveling for billions of years at 60 kilometers per second — more than twice as fast as all our spacecraft so far, its surface ice sublimates and released the lifeforms on dust particles like dandelion seeds.

An interstellar seeding mission of this type would be less expensive than the ~4 billion dollars cost of a terrestrial monument like the Freedom Tower (One World Trade Center) in New York City. It is feasible to accomplish with current technologies and space budgets and its realization is just a matter of priority.

Of course, if we can imagine doing that, other civilizations might have done so already. After all, we are latecomers to the cosmic stage and other space entrepreneurs could have had an earlier start for their seeding ambitions. This leads to my third question:

Are there any lifeforms on the dust shed by 3I/ATLAS?

The latest data from the SPHEREx space observatory includes the detection of organic molecules like CH3OH, H2CO, CH4, and C2H6 with a production rate that is 14% of water molecules (as reported here).

The most notable finding from the latest SPHEREx and Webb data is the robust spectroscopic detection of methane (CH4) production. Methane was only detected after the passage of 3I/ATLAS near the Sun. Its delayed production raises interesting questions because methane ice is hyper-volatile, with a significantly lower sublimation temperature than carbon dioxide (CO2). This implies that methane ice near the surface of 3I/ATLAS would have been vigorously sublimating at the time of the first reports of outgassing from 3I/ATLAS before perihelion. However, neither the Webb spectroscopy nor the SPHEREx spectrophotometry from August 2025, detected methane. This suggests that methane is depleted in the outermost layers of 3I/ATLAS and was exposed to warming by sunlight only close to the Sun. Within this scenario, the early detection of carbon-monoxide (CO) outgassing on 3I/ATLAS is surprising as carbon monoxide is more volatile than methane and should therefore be depleted from the surface, yet it was detected prior to methane. Could it be that the detected methane is produce by lifeforms?

These facts lead me to repeat my question once again:

Does 3I/ATLAS carry any lifeforms?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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(Image Credit: Chris Michel, National Academy of Sciences, 2023)

Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

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