3I/ATLAS is calculated to have passed through its closest point to Earth.

According to calculations, approximately two hours ago, at approximately 4:16 UTC, the 3I/ATLAS object passed its closest point to Earth. The distance to the object at that moment was, and, in fact, still is, 268,918,000 km—a huge distance by terrestrial standards, though, of course, completely insignificant in terms of interstellar distances.

The object is not being continuously monitored (at least, none of the sky-surveillance systems have reported it), so this morning, and perhaps all day, will still leave time for the wildest fantasies, including that the celestial body is no longer on its trajectory and is heading toward Earth. However, it is likely that these assumptions will soon be dispelled. For now, all that can be confirmed is that the media have not reported any alien landings on Earth. However, the flight of an alien ship has always seemed an extremely strange idea. It's objectively difficult to imagine the patience and logic of intelligent beings crawling at a snail's pace through an alien star system for about a year and then suddenly changing their course. More reasonable considerations for automated outer probes, however, presuppose no stops and, on the contrary, require, for maximum plausibility, a completely ballistic trajectory, typical of an ordinary rock.

The next important stop for 3I/ATLAS (assuming, of course, that its trajectory is confirmed—let's leave some room for imagination for now) will be Jupiter, which the celestial body will pass on March 16 at a distance of approximately 53 million km. NASA's Juno spacecraft, costing approximately $1.5 billion, is currently operating near the planet. Although the instruments installed on it are, strictly speaking, poorly suited for studying comets (most of them operate in the infrared, ultraviolet, and microwave spectral ranges), there's no doubt that the tireless Avi Loeb will expend all his efforts to create a background information environment to "force" NASA to point the probe's cameras at the comet or even perform a rendezvous maneuver between Juno and 3I/ATLAS. The latter idea, however, would pose certain philosophical problems for NASA. Currently, the probe's expendable fuel reserves are designed for deorbit and destruction in Jupiter's atmosphere, to avoid accidental biological contamination of its satellites in the event of an unplanned collision. Using thrusters to maneuver toward 3I/ATLAS may prevent this plan from being realized.

In the second half of next year, the celestial body will pass beyond Jupiter's orbit and completely disappear from the field of view of all Earth-based instruments. And then, perhaps, humanity, waking up, will understand the most important thing. That this whole story about waiting for aliens, gods, contactees, super-civilizations, observers—about waiting for at least someone to come and do something with our lives here—is, in fact, not about aliens. This story was about us.