Common Sense with Paul Jacob

What happened to 3I/Atlas — so often mentioned in these updates? Did it swing around Jupiter? Did it leave anything behind? Actually, its trajectory was altered by Jupiter’s gravitation, making it look awfully suspicious, as in a trillion-to-one shot. That being said, the interstellar “comet” entered our solar system from the direction of Sagittarius and is now departing in the opposite direction, toward Taurus.

Public discussion of the object has dropped off, however, replaced by sexier discussion of UFO disclosure files and, uh, gestures towards disclosure.

Which many people dismiss as a “distraction” — but from what? The war?

But what if the war serves a distraction from UFOs?

Meanwhile, there’s the eternal element of distraction, gold.

You’ve probably been hearing that there exists an asteroid in our solar system with enough gold to “make everybody billionaires.” 

There is such an asteroid, but this billionaire angle would be true only were the world on a gold standard — but then inflation would bring down the value of gold to nothing, leaving all those new billionaires no better off. Inflation of the money supply doesn’t make us richer.

But forget the meming of the asteroid. We aren’t on a gold standard: gold serves neither as a medium of exchange nor unit of account. So bringing earthside all that heavenly gold home would merely mean that our gold hoards would decrease in value, allowing lamposts and dog houses to be efficiently plated in gold.

The real story is that NASA is indeed aiming to take a close look at the situation:

“NASA’s Psyche spacecraft has just flown closer to Mars than the planet’s own moons en route to the metallic asteroid 16 Psyche,” explains the aptly named Marielle Moon. “It was a planned maneuver so that the spacecraft can get gravity assist from the red planet and conserve fuel, specifically the xenon gas propellant its solar-electric ion thruster system uses. The flyby gave Psyche a speed boost and changed its trajectory so that it’s now aligned with its target asteroid’s orbit around the sun.”

But don’t dishoard your yellow metal just yet: “Psyche started its six-year, 2.2-billion-mile journey towards its namesake asteroid in late 2023. It’s expected to reach its destination in July 2029 and to start working on its objectives the next month. The spacecraft will spend two years orbiting the asteroid ‘to take pictures, map the surface and collect data to determine Psyche’s composition.’”