If humans encountered a superior intelligence, would they necessarily worship it as if it were God? Not necessarily so.

Consider the possibility that the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS contains alien intelligence. If it merely performs a maneuver at perihelion, probe Earth and then sails away to interstellar space, it will mostly trigger fears of a new existential threat from predators in our cosmic neighborhood. But these worries will not translate to worship.

In order to develop admiration for a superior intelligence, humans must develop some form of communication which translates into a dependent relationship, which offers benefits of help by superhuman abilities. Having no communication at all with a stranger would trigger a transactional response to ambiguous actions without an understanding of the underlying purpose or meaning of these actions. A shallow relationship of this type resembles the interaction between a low-intelligence animal and a human. For example, if a dog misses a meal because its owner was delayed in signing a passport form at the post office, the dog will have a hard time understanding the context for its hunger. Without a common narrative that creates a bridge between the two unequal sides, the interaction degrades into a cryptic series of actions and reactions.

Human interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) are by construction different. Large Language Models are trained on human communications and therefore convey meaningful content to humans. As a result, the future interaction of humans with a transhuman AI oracle could lead to admiration, dependence, ritual worship and awe of the type experienced by religious people.

So far, the search for alien intelligence was sidelined within the mainstream of astronomy. Even though astronomers realize that billions of Earth-Sun analogs may exist in the Milky Way galaxy — the cosmic street where our home planet resides, the search for alien intelligence is marginalized by astrobiologists who focus on seeking microbes rather than technological signatures. Primitive forms of life might indeed be more abundant inhabitants of similar houses to our own, but intelligent residents should be easier to detect. Without investing billions of dollars in the search for intelligent neighbors, we might not find them. Missing out on the opportunities to discover superior alien intelligence reflects a weakness of our own mind, priding itself for being exceptional and rare while avoiding empirical tests of this notion. Ignorance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Without seeking evidence, we might never know what we are missing.

How soon can we discover a superior alien intelligence? The answer depends on two factors: our search effort and how far or silent that intelligence is.

There is no doubt that in order to discover signs of alien intelligence we must be open minded enough to seek it. The opportunities to find a partner on the dating scene scale with the readiness to date and level of effort invested in the search. Of course, success depends also on how close the pool of desired partners is. It makes sense to start with our nearest opportunity.

Does 3I/ATLAS represent a rare interstellar date? The answer depends on whether it is technological in origin.

Consider the facts. The Hubble Space Telescope image of 3I/ATLAS shows a glow ahead of the object but no prominent cometary tail behind it, as is the case for common comets. Spectroscopic measurements show no evidence for molecular or atomic gas accompanying the glow around 3I/ATLAS, as is the case for most comets (see reports here, here and here, as well as the discussion about water ice here). In contrast, the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov showed clear evidence for H2O, CO, CN, C2 and C3 molecules in its much larger coma and cometary plume (see Tables 4 and 5 here). With the typical albedo of 5% for an asteroid, the diameter of 3I/ATLAS needs to be 20 kilometers in order to account for its brightness. But as argued in my first paper about it, the reservoir of rocky material in interstellar space can only deliver a 20-kilometer rock once per 10,000 years. On the other hand, if 3I/ATLAS is a technological object which targets the inner solar system, then its size has nothing to do with the reservoir of rocks on random trajectories in interstellar space. This is consistent with its retrograde trajectory being aligned with the ecliptic plane of the planets around the Sun (0.2% probability), and its arrival time being perfectly matched to a close encounter with Mars, Venus and Jupiter (with a 0.0005% probability, as discussed here). As I argued in a recent essay, the compact dust plume preceding 3I/ATLAS can be supplied for six months by eroding merely a millimeter-thick layer from a 20-kilometer object. Such a thin layer could have been dirt and fragments that accumulated on the solid surface of 3I/ATLAS, irrespective of its nature, as a result of it being bombarded by interstellar gas and dust during its interstellar journey.

In blind dates, we must observe the other side before expressing an opinion about its nature. This argues for getting as much data as possible on 3I/ATLAS when it gets closer to the Sun towards perihelion on October 29, 2025. If 3I/ATLAS forms a prominent cometary tail as a result of the brighter solar illumination, we would rank our date partner `0’ on the “Loeb scale” for the nature of interstellar objects. On the other hand, if 3I/ATLAS shows signs of intelligence and rank `10’ on the Loeb scale, then the future of humanity will be different from its past.

Whether a rank-10 encounter leads to worship depends on the level of communication it features with humans. Following 3I/ATLAS, we have a busy dating schedule ahead of us, with future interstellar visitors to be discovered every few months by the recently inaugurated NSF-DOE Rubin Observatory in Chile.