Avi Loeb has revived debate around 3I/ATLAS, the interstellar object that passed through the solar system last year, by suggesting it may have scattered life-building material as it travelled. The Harvard astronomer floated the idea in a recent blog post, and even allowed for the possibility that an 'interstellar gardener' might have deliberately designed the object to seed habitable planets.
Loeb has spent months treating 3I/ATLAS less like an ordinary comet and more like a cosmic provocation. In earlier commentary he argued that the object's unusual path and behaviour merited serious scrutiny, while conceding that the mainstream view still points to a natural origin.
