Having recently become a septuagenarian, I think back to 1976. It was a memorable year for me – the details of which I will not bore you with Dear Reader – suffice to state that it was also the year that my late father became a septuagenarian. I make mention of this as I recall him commenting upon things that in 1976 were very different from things back in 1946 and earlier!
One of the most notable things from 1976 that are now very different 49 years later is language. For one thing, whilst words in the English language have not changed, the meaning applied to many of them has!
Today’s one word title is a splendid example of this!
Ask many teenagers today to define the word “hacked” and they will describe a process of unlawfully accessing data on a computer system. Of course, a teenager living in a rural area in 1976 would have replied that “hacking” was (and still is) the term used to describe non-competitive horse riding that’s undertaken outside of the arena, usually on the roads or bridleways. Most horse riders who go on a “hack” will do so for pleasure, but hacking is also a great opportunity to undertake training and fitness work. Riders will usually choose to ride on bridleways where possible, but often they’ll have to ride on the road to reach them. I happen to know that the teenage daughter of a neighbour knows the meaning of both as applied to hacking as she “hacks” in the equestrian sense herself.
Recently, our local Co-Op (along with other Co-Op stores) was inconvenienced when “hackers” broke into their computer system as part of a criminal enterprise. This form of “hacking” has sadly become fairly common these days.
I’ll come back to this very 21st Century problem shortly but I’ll now focus on Professor Avi Loeb and our Solar System’s current interstellar visitor, 3iATLAS. Professor Loeb has gone and got himself embroiled in a bit of a “hornet’s nest” by postulating that 3iATLAS might be an example of extraterrestrial technology.
3iATLAS made it’s closest approach to the planet Mars a week ago now and photographs were taken of it by spacecraft in Martian orbit and landers on the Martian surface.
Dr. Loeb comments: “But the best [collection of images] is yet to come. The highest resolution images, down to 30 kilometers per pixel, are expected from the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The HiRISE camera has a diameter of 50 centimeters, allowing to detect the glow around 3I/ATLAS out to larger distances than possible with CaSSIS. The brightest pixel in the HiRISE image will provide the best constraint ever on the diameter of 3I/ATLAS. We eagerly await NASA’s data. The brightest pixel in the HiRISE picture is worth more than the thousand words used in this essay to discuss the CaSSIS image.”
Source: https://avi-loeb.medium.com/first-images-of-3i-atlas-from-exomars-tgo-3dd902ff8849
British Gazette comment: À propos of 3iATLAS being an example of ET technology or a natural object there are three possibilities:
#1: It is a entirely an artificial object.
#2: It is a entirely a natural object.
#3: It is a combination of both inasmuch it is a natural object that has been adapted/altered/converted to serve a technological purpose and thus as with possibility #1, IS an example of an extraterrestrial technology.
Of course, the reason why Dr. Loeb and many others are eagerly awaiting NASA’s data is because of the US government shutdown!
Now, as you will know Dear Reader, one of the phrases we hear a lot of nowadays is “conspiracy theory”!
Well, I will propose that a potential “conspiracy theory” will inevitably result IF NASA’s data on 3iATLAS is not published and with it a plausible reason as to why it has not been published. A plausible reason might be that the computer system on which the data was stored was hacked and infected with “malware” and/or a “virus” and this data has sadly been lost!
Now clearly, there are criminals and malicious persons who may very well seek to commit criminal damage and do such a thing.
IF such criminal damage was perpetrated and the data which showed that 3iATLAS was clearly an example of #1 or #3, then civil servants in bureaucracies across the globe would breathe a sigh of relief!
Herewith the greatest and most ironic of paradoxes: That bureaucrats in Israel and the Palestinian West Bank authority (along with the Hamas terrorists in Gaza and the Hamas political bureau in Qatar) would be united in their common relief along the bureaucrats in Russia and Ukraine!
Understand this: There is NOT a government bureaucrat on this planet that will breathe other than a sigh of relief that there is NO evidence that 3iATLAS is an example of an extraterrestrial technology!