The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, April 25, 2025

Notably: There’s something immensely bracing and beautiful about our search for life in the universe, and just as tragic, when you push the idea of the search to certain logical conclusions. It is just about impossible that there would not be some kind of life in the universe, in trillions of variations in trillions of places. It seems to be just math, even if life on earth was a fluke. There’s so much space, so much stuff, that flukes are like dark matter. They’re everywhere. Bill Bryson pointed this out in his Short History of Nearly Everything: “Under Drake’s equation you divide the number of stars in a selected portion of the universe by the number of stars that are likely to have planetary systems; divide that by the number of planetary systems that could theoretically support life; divide that by the number on which life, having arisen, advances to a state of intelligence; and so on. At each such division, the number shrinks colossally—yet even with the most conservative inputs the number of advanced civilizations just in the Milky Way always works out to be somewhere in the millions.” Just in the Milky Way. The Milky Way is one, just one, of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Billions. Keep trying to grasp the notion and you’ll go mad. That’s why thinking too much about eternity is a recipe for insanity, actual, clinical insanity. It is worse than looking into the abyss. It is the abyss. Of course I’ve digressed from what started me down this wormhole: the discovery, reported on April 16, of possible life on another planet, the planet so poetically called K2-18b (must be a progenitorial relative of R2-D2). Based on a study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the New York Times reported: “A repeated analysis of the exoplanet’s atmosphere suggests an abundance of a molecule that on Earth has only one known source: living organisms such as marine algae.” And how did they figure that out? First astronomers discovered the planet thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, then the James Webb Space Telescope, which went up in December 2021 as Hubble’s newest progeny. (A sad aside, this headline from an obscure publication: “Trump Trying to Cancel NASA’s Successor to the James Webb Space Telescope, Even Though It’s Already Built.”) Yes, but how did they know that there was algae on the planet? “As an exoplanet passes in front of its host star, its atmosphere, if it has one, is illuminated. Its gases change the color of the starlight that reaches the Webb telescope. By analyzing these changing wavelengths, scientists can infer the chemical composition of the atmosphere.” I don’t know how anyone reading that explanation can help not falling to the ground in wonder at what we are capable of. The planet is 120 light years from the 7-Eleven on A1A. 120 light years. In other words, Teddy Roosevelt was president when the light astronomers are seeing from that planet left K2-18b to make its way here. The tragedy in all this is that even if the astronomers are correct, then what? it’s not as if K2-18b is within reach. It’s not as if any communication is possible, even if its life was more than algae. It’s not as if traveling there, traveling anywhere close to there, is possible. It would only be a confirming discovery of the inevitable: that yes, there is life in the universe, though knowing it for sure makes our lonely nowhereness, or isolation, that much more painful,  and of course cherishable. K2-18b is an anthem to our existentialism in the Camus sense of the term. Maybe somewhere out there a telescope is peering back at us and figuring that, from the shimmers of our atmosphere as our earth passes in front of our sun, there’s a whole lot of methane going on here, which can only mean one thing. Incidentally, on this very day (April 25) in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope, that Magellan of the universe, launched from Florida.

—P.T.