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> clandestine reverse Solar Oberth Manoeuvre

is now my favourite xkcd 2326 example.

Is Avi Loeb preparing to sell you another book?
> November/early December of 2025

I guess I'll try to keep my calendar free for interstellar contact

Of course it is, why wouldn't it be something mundane like always. I'll bet they've got some ulterior motives and that Elvis is with them.
> The relevance of this is that had the object indeed been discovered earlier, then there would have been some possibility that humanity could have mounted an intercept mission, a recourse that was out-of-the-question by the time 3I/ATLAS was actually detected

The only kind of intercept mission that would make sense to me from a game theory perspective is a totally blind, large scale thermonuclear weapon strike. The first thing that it wakes up to shouldn't be a harmless probe that can only phone home the bad news.

It’s probably an alien escape pod that ejected from their civilization when their clickbait plague reached even their scientific journal articles.
Let's hope so, the U.S. and the world as a whole could either use a savior or factory reset