Shuffle a deck of cards, and statistically no one has ever shuffled the same sequence in all of human history.

It is extraordinarily unlikely you will shuffle one particular order of cards. It is 100% likely you will result in a sequence of cards.

Space is full of trillions and trillions and trillions of these. Given the rate of detection, we’ll probably see them come through regularly.

That's my point. If you turn on several telescopes particularly good at seeing these things and see three objects in fairly quick succession, the implication is probably (not certainly) that there are lots of interstellar objects hammering in all the time, not that the first ones you see are particularly special, even if one of them seems to be making a statistically unlikely near approach to Mars.

Yeah, like exoplanets. When I was in middle school there were none. Now there’s 6,000 confirmed ones.

Surely no one was actually thinking there weren't exoplanets though. We didn't need experimental proof that they exist to be reasonably sure that they do.

The existence of exoplanets was an open question still in the 80s. They were pretty sure that they existed, but no one had any evidence of it. It fell kind of in the same category of whether the Riemann conjecture is true. Mathematicians are pretty sure it is, but they don’t know for sure.

I’m curious how unlikely it is. Seems very, very unlikely to pass by 2 major planets.

Any path it could possibly take is equally unlikely.

It is. It’s similarly unlikely that I win the lottery. But someone always does!

The situations are in no way analogous.

Sure they are. There are likely trillions of these things. We are likely gonna see them everywhere. Like scratch-off lottery cards.

We have seen 3.

Yes. In very quick succession, right after we put the tech in place to find them.

In the mid 1990s we’d only seen a handful of exoplanets. That they were basically everywhere we looked early on clued us in to their prevalence.

We have seen 3 and one of them makes a very close pass to 2 major planets. Seems very unlikely.

If you are unaware of gravity, sure. It is accelerating towards the sun, which also happens to be where the planets are.

I urge you to take a look at how much empty space there is around the Sun.

Pretty likely if there are a lot of them!

Then I guess we'll see another one soon (unless we freak them out by noticing them and broadcasting about it!).

Once more survey telescopes like Nancy Grace Roman and Xuntian come online we'll increasingly find out how many there really are and I suppose if they seem to like buzzing the proverbial tower.

In fact, we already have; that's why there's a 3 in its name.

The other two didn't make a planetary close pass. As we see more of them, the statistical strangeness of the third one getting so close to Mars will fade. (Or, I suppose, they keep doing it and then we really will have a puzzle on our hands!)

Aliens have been doing this every few years for 250,000 years but we've just only managed to build barely decent telescopes ;)