OrbitalHub

Look at the image above. A teardrop-shaped cocoon of dust drifts against a backdrop of smeared star streaks. The streaks are not an aesthetic choice; they are the signature of a tracking problem. The Hubble Space Telescope was locked onto the comet and the sky slid behind it, smearing every background star into a line. The dust cloud we are looking at has to be tracked because it is moving fast. 3I/ATLAS, the third confirmed interstellar object ever seen passing through the solar system, was discovered on 1 July 2025 by the ATLAS survey telescope in Rio Hurtado, Chile, and was already 365 million kilometers away when Hubble photographed it on 21 July (NASA, ESA; heic2509).

What makes 3I/ATLAS different from its predecessors, 1I/'Oumuamua in 2017 and 2I/Borisov in 2019, is not its speed. At a hyperbolic excess velocity near 57 km/s, it is comparable to Borisov. The difference is that we have had time and the James Webb Space Telescope. A paper led by Martin Cordiner at NASA Goddard, posted to arXiv in March and published in Nature on 22 June 2026, reports JWST spectra that pin down isotopic ratios in the gas around the nucleus, and those ratios say where the object came from (Cordiner et al., 2026, arXiv:2603.06911).

The first two interstellar visitors were case studies in frustration. 'Oumuamua showed no detectable coma and accelerated away from the Sun with no visible tail, generating a decade of papers arguing about whether it was a hydrogen iceberg, a fragment of nitrogen ice, or a piece of exotic rock. Borisov behaved more like an ordinary comet but was already past perihelion when discovered and faded fast. Both passed through the inner solar system in weeks, neither caught by an instrument capable of high-resolution infrared spectroscopy.

3I/ATLAS was caught early and held for months. Perihelion came on 29 October 2025 at 1.36 AU, deep enough inside the snow line for volatiles to drive an active coma. JWST observed it with NIRSpec on 6 August 2025 while it was still inbound at 3.32 AU, and again on 22–23 December 2025 as it climbed back out. Program 5094 put the integral-field unit on the target with a 0.1-arcsecond pixel scale, resolving structures about 130 kilometers across inside the coma (Cordiner et al., 2026).

The headline numbers are extreme. The CO₂-to-H₂O ratio at ingress is 7.6 ± 0.3, which sits 4.5 sigma above the trendline for solar-system comets. The CO-to-H₂O ratio is 1.65 ± 0.09. Methane was detected for the first time on an interstellar object, but only on the outbound side, which suggests it lives buried deeper than the more volatile CO and CO₂. The dust spectrum shows a strong 10-micrometer amorphous-silicate feature rather than the crystalline silicates that dominate solar-system comets (Cordiner et al., 2026).

What makes the paper worth reading past the abstract is the isotopic table. The deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio in the water coming off the nucleus is (0.95 ± 0.06)%, more than thirty times higher than in typical solar-system comets and comparable to dense interstellar-medium ices. The ¹²C/¹³C ratio runs 141 to 191 in CO₂ and 123 to 172 in CO, both well above the solar value of about 89 (Cordiner et al., 2026).

In astrophysics, isotopes are clocks. Deuterium is fragile: it is destroyed in stars and rebuilt only by spallation and the Big Bang. A high D/H ratio means the water never spent long inside a hot stellar environment. It was locked in cold ice, somewhere below about 30 K, for most of its existence. The ¹²C/¹³C ratio is a slow clock that runs on stellar nucleosynthesis. Older stellar populations in the galactic disk have more ¹²C because ¹³C is produced by hot CNO burning and mixed in over time. A high ¹²C/¹³C ratio points to material that formed before the disk had been stirred by many generations of stars.

Plug those constraints into a simple galactic-chemical-evolution model and 3I/ATLAS dates itself. The numbers are consistent with formation between roughly ten and twelve billion years ago, when the universe was at its peak rate of star formation, what astronomers call cosmic noon (Cordiner et al., 2026). That is almost three times the age of the Sun. The comet we are watching today was already a respectable lump of ice before the disk of gas that would become our solar system had finished collapsing.

There is one caveat, raised by Maggiolo and colleagues in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Galactic cosmic rays can rewrite the surface chemistry of an interstellar object over billions of years, converting CO into CO₂ and building an organic-rich irradiated crust roughly fifteen to twenty meters thick. The volatiles we see today may sample that processed shell rather than the pristine interior (Maggiolo et al., 2026, ApJL).

The instrument is NIRSpec on JWST, in integral-field-unit mode. The IFU slices the field into a 30-by-30 grid of 0.1-arcsecond spaxels, each a tiny spectrograph feeding a 0.6-to-5.3-micrometer spectrum through crossed dispersers. The high-resolution gratings G235H and G395H deliver a resolving power near 2,700, enough to separate the vibration-rotation lines of H₂O, CO, CO₂, and their rarer isotopologues, including HDO and ¹³CO₂.

To go from line intensity to abundance requires radiative-transfer modeling. For a spherical, expanding coma with constant velocity, the column density of a species is proportional to its production rate divided by its photodissociation rate times its lifetime, scaled by a Haser-model factor of 1/r where r is the projected distance from the nucleus. The Cordiner team used the Planetary Spectrum Generator to fit line fluxes at multiple spaxels simultaneously, then propagated the uncertainties through the production-rate inversion. The 0.95% D/H ratio is the marginalized posterior after fitting both HDO and H₂O lines at multiple offset positions, and the precision is what makes it significant (Cordiner et al., 2026).

The engineering lesson is that an instrument designed to stare at the first galaxies is also a perfectly serviceable high-resolution infrared spectrometer for a faint, fast, mid-plum comet. JWST's sunshield keeps the telescope cold enough that its own thermal background does not swamp the molecular lines, the IFU's fine spatial sampling lets the team disentangle nucleus emission from extended coma, and the orbit at L2 means the same target can be re-observed weeks later with the same geometry.

3I/ATLAS is the first object we have ever measured that we can confidently call older than the solar system. Its isotopes tell us it condensed out of interstellar ices near cosmic noon, that it survived a passage through a planetary system without being torn apart, and that it has spent billions of years coasting through the galaxy getting slowly sandblasted by cosmic rays. It is, in a real sense, a piece of archaeology delivered free of charge to the inner solar system.

Two questions now drive the field. How much of the unusual composition is primordial and how much is the irradiated crust, and how thick is that crust? And harder: are there more like it? LSST at the Vera Rubin Observatory is scanning the southern sky in earnest, and its 3.2-gigapixel camera will catch the next interstellar interloper at a much earlier phase. If the JWST spectrum of this comet is representative, future visitors will be obvious from their CO₂ excess long before a big telescope has to swing.

The interstellar comet has already whipped past Jupiter, in March 2026, and is now climbing out of the solar system toward the constellation Gemini on a hyperbolic escape trajectory. It will not come back. We caught it once. The next one will not surprise us.

Sources: Cordiner, M. A. et al., "Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS," Nature, published 22 June 2026 (arXiv:2603.06911); NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image heic2509, "3I/ATLAS," NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA), image processing J. DePasquale (STScI), 7 August 2025; NASA Science Mission Directorate, "Comet 3I/ATLAS" page, science.nasa.gov/solar-system/comets/3i-atlas/; Maggiolo, R. et al., "Galactic Cosmic Ray Processing of Interstellar Object Volatiles," The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2026.

Abstract

The blogpost explores relativistic effects on proof-of-work based cryptocurrency protocols. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay and it is quite plausible that future human colonists spread across the solar system and beyond will use a decentralized cryptocurrency as opposed to a fiat currency issued by a central authority. The low transaction fees, the ubiquitous access, not being bound by exchange rates or interest rates, not being controlled by financial institutions who are serving foreign interests -- these are some of the advantages cryptocurrencies will enjoy in the thriving exo-economy.

Motivation

At present, on a cryptocurrency network, the information exchanged by the nodes in the network reaches each node almost instantaneously. The speed at which the TCP/IP packets travel on the network and the fact that the Internet spans only the Earth and the LEO makes this possible. However, once the region the network is spread across will reach certain boundaries, the network size would have negative impact on the network: increasing communication failures due to network delays, more frequent and longer blockchain forks as part of the proof-of-work protocol, network segregation into local sub-networks (let us call them topological forks), just to name a few.

Nullius in verba... as they say. Let's go deeper into details and figure out a feasible solution for a truly interplanetary cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency 101

You can think of a cryptocurrency as a digital money ecosystem. Plain and simple. A collection of technologies are part of this ecosystem, all of them the result of years of research in the cryptography and distributed systems fields: a decentralized network of computers, a public transaction ledger -- also known as a blockchain, a protocol that consists of a set of rules for transaction validation, a decentralized consensus mechanism. [ANTO]

A decentralized network of computers ensures the resilience of the network. We can think of both computing power and data storage capabilities. As the computing power is distributed across the network, any disruption can be successfully handled by the network. Transaction data resides on all nodes of the network. This implies that even physical damage done to network nodes will not take out the network.

The blockchain is a public distributed ledger which stores all transactions handled by the network. As the name suggests, the blockchain is a list of data blocks. Each of these blocks contains a set of transactions, as many as can fit in the block, given the maximum size of the block (a characteristic of the network). Transactions contain sender and receiver info, and the amount/asset that is changing ownership, and they are broadcasted and added to blocks by network nodes. Blocks are linked to the previous block in the chain by a cryptographic hash (the hash of the previous block becomes part of the current block). This backward link leads all the way to the first block in the chain, the Genesis block. Each cryptocurrency blockchain has one. The cryptographic hashes have an important role in protecting the blockchain from tampering attempts.

The transaction validation rules enforced by the nodes in the network ensure that the content of each block in the blockchain is valid. By far, the most frequent form of fraud is double spending. The validation process makes sure that the inputs on the transactions exist and that they have not been already spent. The transactions marked as invalid are rejected by the network and do not make it on the blockchain.

The consensus mechanism is designed so that all the nodes in the network can agree on the set of transactions to be included in the current block. It shifts the authority and the credibility required by a central clearing house to a network of nodes. Important to mention here that, inherently, the nodes do not trust each other, and they do not have to because the trust is enforced by the consensus mechanism itself.

The Proof-of-Work

We mentioned above that one of the key innovations that make cryptocurrencies possible is the decentralized consensus mechanism. Currently, the de facto consensus mechanism is the proof-of-work.

The proof-of-work consensus mechanism was proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 [NAKA]. In general, a proof-of-work is a piece of data that requires costly and time consuming computational effort, but it is very easy to verify. A very good analogy is one of your semester projects in college... it takes you a whole semester to finalize it, but it takes very little time and effort for your supervisor to evaluate and grade it. Similarly, proof-of-work is used by cryptocurrencies for block generation. For the network to accept the block, nodes must complete a proof-of-work which also guarantees the integrity of the transactions included in the block. The difficulty of the proof-of-work is adjusted by the network so that a new block can be generated every fixed time interval. This fixed time interval is characteristic to every cryptocurrency. Most notably, for Bitcoin this time interval is set to 10 minutes.

Satoshi Nakamoto's solution, emobodied by the proof-of-work algorithm above, achieves consensus on the network without a central trusted authority (hence the name decentralized consensus mechanism).

Enter the Ansible

For the astute reader, it is quite obvious at this point that communication delays between the network nodes have a direct effect on the protocol described above. An important assumption made when the protocol was designed is that these delays are small, and this is why they can be handled by the network when the nodes choose to follow and validate the blocks on the longest blockchain fork. Also, this is the reason why all the nodes in the network can have a say in the network consensus. They all can find a solution for the current block, and they all can be rewarded when they find the solution. The communication delays witnessed by the peripheral nodes will cripple their ability to find solutions and these nodes will not be incentivized to remain in the network. Hence, the segregation of the network effect mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, given the current technological level of our civilization, we do not have at our disposal a technology that allows us to communicate fast and reliable over the large expanse of space. It would take a hell of a wait time to proces a payment made by a mining corporation in the TRAPPIST-1 system, 12 parsecs within the constellation of Aquarius, to a planetary engineering corporation located in the Sol system... twice 39 years plus the block confirmation time.

Fortunately, the Sci-Fi literature already offers a solution for our problem. For those of you, Sci-Fi nerds like myself, that have already read Rocannon's World [LEGU] and Ender's Game [CARD], the Ansible device must sound very familiar. The ansible is a fictional device capable of faster-than-light communication. To word this differently, an operator of such device can send and receive messages to and from another device over any distance with no delay.

Hence, even if only in the realm of science fiction, we will be able to devise a solution for the problem that the future cryptocurrency enthusiasts, living in the outer space colonies, will eventually face.

The Special Relativity Theorem

Before elaborating more on a required upgrade of the network protocol, we have to discuss the special relativity theorem and its implications on how time and distance are perceived in reference systems.

Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. He received it for his contributions to the understanding of the photoelectric effect, after publishing a paper on it in 1905. At that point his contributions to the understanding of gravity through his theory of relativity were well known, but the new perspective on gravity offered by Einstein's theory was so controversial that the Nobel Prize Committee members chose to protect their reputation. They decided that it was appropriate to award Einstein the Nobel Prize for "his services to theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect."

During his research Einstein attempted to reconcile the principle of relativity with the principle of the constancy of the velocity of light. This attempt led Einstein to the discovery of the special relativity theorem. Einstein's Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) with a test subject travelling by train is very well known in the scientific community. If our human subject is walking towards the front of the train with velocity w with respect to the train, and the train is moving with velocity v with respect to the embankment, then an observer on the embankment will measure as W = v + w the velocity of our subject on the train. If instead of our traveller, we consider a beam of light propagating with velocity c, the velocity measured by the observer on the embarkment would be v + c. However, this violates the principle that the velocity of light is constant in any inertial reference system and equal with c. Einstein found a solution for this problem and thus resolved the incompatibility.

One direct consequence of the special relativity theorem is the Lorentz transformation.

Before the relativity theorem, time in physics had an absolute significance, independent of the state of motion of the reference system. However, every inertial reference system has its own particular time. We always have to be told which inertial reference system the statement of time refers to. If you look at your watch, the time you read is the time as measured in the Earth inertial reference system. By the way, the Earth circles the Sun on an almost circular orbit, which means that any body maintaining a constant position in the Earth reference system should experience some centripetal force. However, this centripetal component is negligible compared to the gravitational pull of the Earth. Hence, engineers use this aproximation when calculating satellite orbits.

Back to our original trail of thoughts... the axiom that lays the foundation for the Lorentz transformation states that every ray of light possesses the velocity of transmission c relative to any inertial reference system. That is the velocity of transmission in vacuo (in a vacuum).

If following Einstein's thought experiments [EINS], the above-mentioned axiom leads to a set of four equations that explain the relation between dimensional and temporal coordinates in two inertial reference systems:

  x' = (x - vt)/sqr(1 - v²/c²)
  y' = y
  z' = z
  t' = (t - x*v/c²)/sqr(1 - v²/c²)

where:

 x, y, z, t coordinates in inertial reference system K,
 x', y', z' , t' coordinates in inertial reference system K',
 v the relative velocity between inertial reference systems;

also, the expression 1//sqr(1 - v²/c²) is known as the Lorentz factor.

The Lorentz transformation equations are a more general case of the Galilean transformation:

  x' = x - vt
  y' = y
  z' = z
  t' = t

which is the basis of the assumptions of the classical mechanics as to the absolute character of both dimensional and temporal coordinates. The above are the result of replacing velocity c with ∞ in the Lorentz transformation equations.

The Lorentz transformation has a few corollaries which have an impact on time dilation, length contraction, relativistic mass, relativistic momentum, and relativistic kinetic energy. The one that concerns us is the time dilation corollary:

 Δt = γΔt'
 
where γ is defined by

 α = 1/γ = sqr(1 - v²/c²)

Assuming a clock at rest in inertial reference system K, and moving with the velocity v in the inertial reference system K', the time Δt' between two ticks as measured in the frame K' is longer than the time Δt between the same ticks as measured in the rest frame of the clock, K.

Relativistic Effects on Proof-of-Work

To better understand the relativistic effects on how relative time is perceived in two inertial reference systems (or Galilean reference systems [EINS]) we have to mention the twin paradox. The twin paradox is a thought experiment that involves two identical twins. One of the twins makes a journey into space onboard a relativistic spaceship, and upon his return to Earth discovers that his twin has aged much more than he did. Depending on how fast the spaceship moves through space and/or how long the journey was, our traveller could return to Earth and realize that several generations have passed meanwhile.

As a direct application of the twin paradox, we have Mazer Rackham, International Fleet Admiral and Ender Wiggin's mentor, as portrayed by Orson Scott Card [CARD]. The fighter pilot who destroyed the Formic Fleet Flagship, killed the Hive Queen, and ended the Second Formic Invasion, Mazer Rackham is sent on a journey on a relativistic spaceship and returns to Earth 100 years later in order to assist the International Fleet. Upon his return he has barely aged a few years.

Similarly, if a subnetwork is moving relative to the rest of the network, the nodes in the subnetwork would experience time dilation as predicted by the special relativity theorem. Hence, they are at a disadvantage compared to the rest of the nodes because they have less time available to find a solution for the proof-of-work problem. In order to make thing square for all the nodes in the network, the difficulty of the problem should be adjusted in each subnetwork using the Lorentz factor: in order to compensate for time dilation, the relativistic nodes should have to solve a simpler problem. Also, their block confirmation time should decrease as well.

One element is missing still... how do ansibles synchronize? What value has the Lorentz factor for each one of them? One simple solution for this problem is having one of the ansibles (let us say the Earth-bound one) broadcasting a beacon every fixed number of seconds. The ansibles interfacing to subnetworks would pick up the broadcast, and by measuring the time interval between the beacons, infer the Lorentz factor. Once the Lorentz factor is determined, the nodes mining on the subnetworks will have their proof-of-work difficulty and the block confirmation time adjusted accordingly.

A more Down-to-Earth Solution for the Problem

We will fork the storyline (pun intended) at Enter the Ansible paragraph, and suggest a more down-to-earth solution for the problem. The peripheral nodes are not to participate in the consensus. Their function would be just to relay messages (a.k.a. payment information) across the network. In our multi-planetary scenario, the nodes working on the proof-of-work would reside on/around the Earth, and the network nodes on Mars or any other region in the Sol system would have to wait 2x (network packets travel time) + (block confirmation time) in order to confirm a payment. However, such a solution would have an Achilles heel very hard to defend... if starting its mining engine, any peripheral node could take over the local network and force a topological fork of the network. For a node, the incentive of staying honest on the current network must be stronger than any reward obtained by cheating.

Concluding remarks

While the blogpost contains some elements of fiction, it accurately describes the cryptocurrency ecosystem, the special relativity theorem, the Lorentz transformation and its corollaries. We would like to thank the readers that went through this exercise with us. Undeniably, cryptocurrencies are disrupting the global economy and they are here to stay. Undeniably, we -- as a species -- will explore and migrate farther than the LEO. History has taught us that decentralization is the key to survival and prosperity. Let us together make the future happen.

References

[ANTO] Antonopoulos, Andreas M., Mastering Bitcoin, Second Edition, O'Reilly Media, Inc., June 2017;
[CARD] Card, Orson Scott, Ender's Game, A Tor Teen Book, 2014;
[EINS] Einstein, Albert, Relativity, The Special and the General Theory, Princeton University Press, 2015;
[LEGU] Le Guin, Ursula K., Rocannon's World, Harper & Row, 1977;
[NAKA] Nakamoto, Satoshi, Bitcoin - A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System, www.bitcoin.org, 2008;