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Elon Musk has chimed in on the debate surrounding the mysterious comet, which some experts believe could be an 'alien spaceship'.
It's only the third known object from outside our solar system to end up on NASA's radar, so it's sparked quite the buzz among the scientific community.
That's where the number 'three' comes into the comet's name - 3I/ATLAS - while the I references 'interstellar', meaning from beyond our solar system, and the ATLAS part gives credit to the team who discovered it.
And Musk reckons it's 'one hell of a name', if you were wondering.
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NASA's Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) crew first flagged the mystery space rock at the beginning of July, after observing it via the Hubble Space Telescope.
London-born astronomer David Jewitt explained that 'no one knows where it came from' and the speed at which it was travelling made a lot of its features difficult to discern.
"It’s like glimpsing a rifle bullet for a thousandth of a second," he said previously. "You can't project that back with any accuracy to figure out where it started on its path."
The comet is about the same size as the city of Manhattan, and a snap of it taken by the Hubble Telescope showed how a 'teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust [was] coming off of the comet's solid, icy nucleus'.
Despite NASA insisting the 3I/ATLAS 'poses no threat to Earth' and that it 'will remain far away', other boffins don't share the same opinion - such as Harvard physicist Avi Loeb.
He suggested there was a 30 to 40 per cent scenario chance that the comet was not a 'naturally formed' object and could possibly have 'active intelligence' in a research paper.
Loeb then told LADbible that he had noticed qualities about the interstellar object which 'could be related to a power supply that is not natural, that is technological in origin, some kind of an engine'.
It's interesting behaviour over recent weeks - such as the comet growing a tail and an anti-tail - has only fuelled the theory that 3I/ATLAS could actually be some kind of alien 'mothership'.
Although Loeb and his colleagues acknowledge that 3I/ATLAS being a 'completely natural interstellar object is the most likely outcome', the experts don't think we should take aliens off the table just yet.
So, amid all this debate, it's about time that the CEO of SpaceX shared his thoughts on the current space saga, which has got scientists in a chokehold.
During his latest appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience, Elon Musk shared his perspective on what 3I/ATLAS might actually be.
But before he got down to business, the billionaire made a point of saying that he would 'never' take his own life.
"One thing I can say is, if I was aware of any evidence of aliens, Joe you have my word that I will come on your show and reveal it," Musk said. "I keep my promises."
He then added: "I'm never committing suicide, to be clear. Ever!"
Moving swiftly on, Musk and podcast host Joe Rogan then discussed the 'fascinating' composition of the comet, explaining that nickel vapour has been detected in its gas cloud.
The Tesla boss then told the UFC commentator that there are a few 'comets and asteroids that are made primarily of nickel' and went on to detail how humans have benefited from these smashing into the planet.
"The places where you mine nickel on Earth are actually where there was an asteroid or comet that hit Earth that was a nickel-rich meteorite," Musk said. "You definitely didn't want to be there at the time, because anything would have been obliterated. But that's what the sources of nickel and cobalt are these days. There are cases where very nickel-rich asteroids meet Earth."
Musk said the presence of nickel doesn't necessarily prove that the comet isn't naturally occurring - but whether it is alien-related or not, he warned that its makeup could make the impact of 3I/ATLAS formidable if it did hit Earth.
"It would be a very heavy spaceship if you made it all out of nickel," he continued. "That's a heavy spaceship. It would like, obliterate a continent type of thing. Maybe worse."
NASA's Acting Administrator Sean Duffy has insisted that there are 'no aliens' and 'no threat to life here on Earth' posed by the comet.
Topics: Aliens, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Podcast, Science, Space, NASA
Olivia Burke