#992

Wormwood, Warnings, and the War of Worlds

Signs In The Sky

“Then there will be strange events in the skies—warnings, evil omens and portents in the sun, moon and stars; and down here on earth the nations will be in turmoil, perplexed by the roaring seas and strange tides. 26 The courage of many people will falter because of the fearful fate they see coming upon the earth, for the stability of the very heavens will be broken up. (Luke 21:25-26, TLB)

Jesus, when asked by His disciples what would be the sign of His coming He told them these things in these two verses. Ever since then every time people hear about an asteroid coming near the earth like the one called Apophis which is thought to actually hit earth in April of 2029 Christians look to these prophetic words and try to connect the prophetic dots. And now there is talk of another mysterious object in the news as we read in an article from The Daily Mail:

The appearance of a mysterious interstellar object has reignited debate over whether extraterrestrial technology could be hiding in our solar system. NASA detected the object, dubbed 3I/ATLAS, on July 1, sparking a flurry of scientific analysis to determine its origin.

But not everyone thinks that the object is a natural one:

While more than 200 researchers have concluded it is likely a comet, Harvard physicist Avi Loeb has raised doubts in a newly released pre-print paper, pointing to one glaring omission: 3I/ATLAS has no visible tail.

'There were claims of a tail,' Loeb said, 'but since 3I/ATLAS is accelerating and its current size is not much larger than the angular resolution of Earth-based telescopes, it is not easy to avoid fictitious elongation of the image as a result of the object's motion.'

He actually has a scale to judge if it’s artificial or not:

He also questioned the object's unusual lack of gas emissions and its precise, retrograde trajectory, which aligns suspiciously well with the inner solar system. Loeb has developed what he calls the 'Loeb Scale', a ranking system to evaluate the likelihood that an object is artificial, and gave 3I/ATLAS a six out of ten. That suggests it is more likely than not to be engineered, though he emphasized that this score may change as more data becomes available.

And not people are getting a lot of exercise jumping to conclusions that it’s an alien spacecraft:

Among his more provocative theories, Loeb suggested 3I/ATLAS could be an alien mothership releasing small probes to intercept Earth. 'The more likely scenario from an engineering perspective involves a mothership that releases mini-probes which perform a reverse Oberth maneuver to slow down at perihelion and intercept Earth,' Loeb wrote. This type of maneuver uses the sun's gravitational pull at the object's closest approach to adjust the trajectory efficiently, enabling the probes to reach Earth without large amounts of fuel.

ET Phone Home

Although not a perfect fit, the title does suggest an alien contact pretty soon and Loeb wants us to be ready:

According to Loeb, these hypothetical probes could arrive between November 21 and December 5, 2025, based on 3I/ATLAS's expected position behind the sun in October, an ideal window for a covert approach.

'It may come to save us or destroy us,' he said. 'We'd better be ready for both options and check whether all interstellar objects are rocks.'

Of course Loeb has his critics:

Chris Lintott, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, dismissed Loeb’s theory as ‘nonsense on stilts,’ calling it ‘an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.’

Loeb still thinks he’s right and he’s written about it a lot. He thinks Nasa needs to take advantage of it, too:

However, Loeb said his analysis remains rooted in observational data. Loeb has authored four scientific papers on 3I/ATLAS and recently proposed using NASA's Juno spacecraft to intercept the object near Jupiter in 2026, calling it a rare opportunity for 'interstellar archaeology.'

He then goes further about us being ready for this alien encounter and he doesn’t think we will be:

He also believes governments should already be forming task forces, including scientists, policymakers and even psychologists, to determine how to respond and how to break the news to the public without triggering panic. If 3I/ATLAS is more than just a rock, he said, Earth is woefully unprepared.

Of course his timeline only makes things worse:

'The visitor,' he warned, 'is already in our backyard.'

Even if the object turns out to be artificial, Loeb admitted there's little humanity could do. At nearly 60 miles per second relative to Earth, it's moving far too fast for any of our current rockets to reach.

'If the hypothesis that 3I/ATLAS is a technological artifact proves correct, there are two possible implications: either its intentions are entirely benign, or they are malign, said Loeb.

'In the first case, humanity needs only to wait and welcome this interstellar messenger with open arms. It is the second scenario that causes serious concern.'

Loeb then proposes a common strategy by a famous scientist to deal with this:

He added that because the second possibility has serious consequences, we can use the idea behind Pascal’s wager.

'Blaise Pascal argued that it’s smarter to believe in God because the possible benefits of believing are much greater than the losses if you’re wrong,' Loeb explained.

'Similarly, in our case, it makes sense to warn humanity about the risk from 3I/ATLAS, even if it turns out to be just a theory.

'The cost of not warning could be much worse than the cost of being wrong.'

What Does Scripture Say?

Specifically the Bible doesn’t address alien contact at all, at least not like this one, but it does mention asteroids or meteors in our future as seen in an article from gotquestions.org:

"Wormwood" is the name of a star in Revelation 8:10-11: “The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water—the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.” This is the third of the “trumpet judgments” described in Revelation. The seven trumpets are the judgments of the seventh seal (Revelation 8:1-5). The first trumpet causes hail and fire that destroy much of the plant life in the world (Revelation 8:7). The second trumpet brings about what seems to be a meteor, comet, or other heavenly body hitting the oceans and causing the death of one-third of the world’s sea life (Revelation 8:8-9). The third trumpet is similar to the second, except it affects the world’s lakes and rivers instead of the oceans (Revelation 8:10-11). It will cause a third part of all fresh water on earth to turn bitter and many people will die from drinking it.

He article goes on to mention how the actual word “wormwood” plays out in prophecy:

The word wormwood is mentioned only here in the New Testament, but it appears eight times in the Old Testament, each time associated with bitterness, poison and death. The Revelation passage may not be saying that the star falling to the earth will actually be called Wormwood by the inhabitants of the earth. Rather, wormwood was a well-known bitter herb in the Bible times, so by naming the star Wormwood, we are told that its effect will be to embitter the waters of the earth, so much so that the water is undrinkable. It won’t be a matter of simply a bitter taste to the water; it will literally be poisonous. If drinking water is unavailable to one third of the earth’s population, it’s easy to see how chaos and terror will result. Humans can only survive about three days without water, and the inhabitants of the affected areas will be so desperate as to actually drink the poisoned water, causing the death of thousands, if not millions of people.

It then concludes by telling us that it is yet to come and in only one part of the terrible events to befall the planet and the people living at the time:

This is a prophecy that is yet to come in the last seven years of this age, also known as the 70th week of Daniel. This is only one of the natural disasters in the seven trumpets that will usher in the rise of the Antichrist to world power very quickly (see Revelation, chapter 13). Since one-third of the earth is destroyed by these trumpet judgments, this is only a partial judgment from God. His full wrath is yet to be unleashed.

Looking Up Is Good

 Now when these things begin to happen, look up and lift up your heads, because your redemption draws near. (Luke 21:28, NKJV)

All this talk about objects in the skies does make us wonder exactly what is heading our way in the future and to those who aren’t Christians it can cause fear and anxiety. Add in the alien conspiracy theories and you have the recipe for an apocalyptic panic the likes of the novel War of the Worlds. As many of us know the radio broadcast by Orson Wells on October 30, 1938 did indeed stir things up as we read from this article:

Orson Welles’s radio play remains the most famous adaptation of Wells’s novel. On October 30, 1938, Welles presented an adaptation of The War of the Worlds on his radio program, The Mercury Theatre on the Air. As Welles later told reporters, he wrote (and performed) the radio play to sound like a real news broadcast about an invasion from Mars. Some listeners who missed the introduction to Welles’s performance mistook the broadcast as actual news coverage of a Martian invasion. The resulting reaction was greatly exaggerated by the press. Headlines across the U.S. reported that “Attack from Mars in Radio Play Puts Thousands in Fear,” “Radio Listeners in Panic, Taking War Drama As Fact,” and “Radio Fake Scares Nation.” On October 31, The New York Times reported that thousands of people “called the police, newspapers, and radio stations here and in other cities of the United States and Canada seeking advice on protective measures against the raids.” In all, the broadcast is estimated to have fooled about 20 percent, or less than a million, of its listeners.

But for Christians the sage advice of Jesus guides us to be joyful when signs occur in the heavens because our hope is when He is the one coming down from the Heavens to the earth. And I intend to be with him and so should you.