The Quest for Life Beyond Earth: A Journey Through Time and Space

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As I conversed with NASA’s chief scientist about a potentially habitable planet 120 light-years from Earth, my mind wandered back to memories of my father and his telescope. The last time I used his telescope was in February 1986. We were standing in our driveway in Palos Verdes, a place far enough from the glare of downtown Los Angeles to see the night sky clearly. 

 

Halley’s Comet was approaching its perihelion at about 122,000 miles per hour, appearing as a small, silver-gray smudge in the sky. We had only a few hours to glimpse it before it disappeared for another 76 years. I was 13, and my father was 44. “The accident of the years of our births,” he mused quietly.

 

 

My father had built the telescope when he was 15 in his parents’ apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. He took it with him to medical school in Syracuse, then to Boston, Pittsburgh, and eventually Southern California. He viewed space with the same awe and curiosity he had for mathematics, analytic philosophy, the Torah, or Mozart’s twentieth piano concerto. It was beautiful, complex, infinite, and irresistible to explore.

 

Now, thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, which NASA launched into space on Christmas 2021, we are on the verge of knowing a little more about our place in the universe. The telescope, orbiting the sun about a million miles from Earth, recently captured several images of K2-18b, an exoplanet located 120 light-years away. Importantly, K2-18b resides in the habitable zone around its star, a region where conditions might be just right for an Earth-like atmosphere and potentially life.

 

 

Until the 1990s, humanity did not know exoplanets existed. Today, we know of over 5,000 in our galaxy alone, and astronomers estimate there may be as many as 40 billion in the habitable zones across the universe. “There might be simple life all throughout the galaxy,” said Jessie Christiansen, an astrophysicist at Caltech and chief scientist at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. She referred to microbes, bacteria, and single-celled organisms.

 

Alexei Filippenko, an astronomer from UC Berkeley, echoed this sentiment in an email: “If there is life on K2-18b, it would demonstrate that life on Earth is not unique—a very important discovery.” He added, “Perhaps it would change the religious outlooks of some people, but not others. It depends on whether one subscribes to the belief that God made Earth unique in terms of life.”

 

The big question, according to Christiansen, is whether there is intelligent life—organisms with brains or brain-like structures. Astronomers are currently analyzing the James Webb Space Telescope images, and in a few months, we will know whether dimethyl sulfide, a molecule associated with life, is present in K2-18b’s atmosphere. If it is, the likelihood of life on K2-18b increases significantly.

 

Nikku Madhusudhan, the Cambridge astrophysicist who first viewed the images of K2-18b, described the experience as “surreal, overwhelming, and humbling.” He said, “You are literally the first person looking at this outside world. You are no longer one scientist but a representative of the planet seeking to find the truth about the universe.” Because light takes time to travel, when we look at distant objects, we are seeing them as they were in the past. Filippenko explained, “You see the sun not as it is now, but as it was about 8.3 minutes ago.” The further away an object is, the further back in time we see. This means that the images of K2-18b are snapshots of a past era, making our exploration of exoplanets a journey through time as much as it is through space.

 

 

Imagining the inhabitants of K2-18b looking back at Earth, they would see our planet as it was 120 years ago—around 1904. This was decades before my parents were born, grew up, left New York, and created a life in California. It was a time when Halley’s Comet had already come and gone and would return again. My sister and I would traverse the continent and the world, enter a new century, and start our own families. My father’s life would slowly decline, culminating in his passing near the Pacific Ocean.

 

Gazing at exoplanets is supposed to provoke thoughts about the nature of life, our place in the universe, and the origins of everything. Reflecting on K2-18b, I remembered my father narrating as I watched Halley’s Comet through his telescope. The comet, a smudge of ammonia, carbon dioxide, ice, and rock, was about to vanish for the rest of his life, and maybe mine. “I’ve known this was coming for most of my life,” he said, “but somehow there’s something shocking about it.”

 

My father would have been thrilled at the prospect of life on another planet, pondering the shapes, lights, and ancient constellations slowly coming into focus. The piecing together of all these mysteries inevitably leads back to the greatest question: How did something come from nothing? For Jessie Christiansen, finding extraterrestrial life would be akin to a religious experience. “I have dreamed about it and thought about it,” she said, admitting, “I am scared that it’s true.” She pondered, “Is it more terrifying that we are alone, or that we aren’t alone?”

 

This curiosity and wonder reminded me of my six-year-old son, Ivan, who dreams of being an astronaut. His fascination with space is a constant topic during bath time, story time, breakfast, and dinner. My father would have been pleased. Ivan frequently asks about the conditions on distant planets and whether there might be life in other solar systems. Recently, I told him about K2-18b, and we discussed the possibility of parallel amoebas in parallel oceans on a distant rock. He was fascinated, and as he sat in the bath, he wondered about life on Neptune or Uranus and if there are beings out there pondering who we are right now.

 

In our quest to understand the universe, we are driven by the same curiosity that fueled my father’s love for space and the same wonder that inspires my son’s dreams. As we await more discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope, we inch closer to unraveling the mysteries of existence, forever expanding our understanding of where we come from and who we are.

 

Credit: The Free Press 2024-06-24

 

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[WDSmart]

We (humans) are fighting each other and destroying the biosphere of our own planet, the Earth. Until we learn to live compatibly, both socially and environmentally, on the Earth, we have no business trying to go to another one. If we do, it shouldn't be called "colonizing"; it should be called "metastasizing." 

You can read more about this in this book, The Icarus Syndrome. 

[Purdey]

People will never want to meet aliens that are smarter than them.

[nobodysfriend]

11 hours ago, Social Media said:

How did something come from nothing?

 

There never was ' nothing ' .

 

11 hours ago, Social Media said:

we inch closer to unraveling the mysteries of existence, forever expanding our understanding of where we come from and who we are.

 

We better wake up now , our species is busy destroying itself and the planet we live on .

 

Of course , there is intelligent extraterrestrial life . even within our galaxy .

 

What is it all good for ?

 

It is an evolutionary process , an experiment that will separate the intelligent species from the ones who only think that they are intelligent , but do not manage to enable their own further evolution , and fail and disappear ...

 

Everything is possible , but nobody knows what that implies ...

 

One thing is certain : everything is limited in time , and time itself is relative .

 

 

 

 

 

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Edited Monday at 07:35 AM by nobodysfriend

[Thingamabob]

1 hour ago, WDSmart said:

We (humans) are fighting each other and destroying the biosphere of our own planet, the Earth. Until we learn to live compatibly, both socially and environmentally, on the Earth, we have no business trying to go to another one. If we do, it shouldn't be called "colonizing"; it should be called "metastasizing." 

You can read more about this in this book, The Icarus Syndrome. 

Way too many people on Earth, more than 8 billion compared to just over 2 billion when I was born in 1941. Improvements in the environment are impossible with our population growth rate. 

[johng]

10 minutes ago, Thingamabob said:

Way too many people on Earth, more than 8 billion

Hence "the great reset"

"climate change" and

"plandemic" all designed to get rid of the overpopulation.

[roquefort]

4 hours ago, nobodysfriend said:

 

There never was ' nothing ' .

What was there?

[CanadaSam]

Anybody with the slightest intelligence would immediately realize that with "life" living in such hazardous conditions, even on our own planet, for instance at the bottom of the ocean where the pressure would crush most anything instantly, the cold, and non-availability of oxygen etc., would make it literally impossible for any type of "known" life to exist, but yet it does, amazingly!

 

So, why is so hard to imagine life of all sorts thriving on planets all over the universe?

 

They may not have radios or lasers etc. to communicate with us, but living their lives, I am pretty certain they are!

[WDSmart]

On 6/24/2024 at 2:42 PM, Thingamabob said:

Way too many people on Earth, more than 8 billion compared to just over 2 billion when I was born in 1941. Improvements in the environment are impossible with our population growth rate. 

Yes, overpopulation is one of the three causes of our (humans') continuing destruction of the Earth's biosphere in my book The Icarus Syndrome. The other two are technology and human hubris. 

[Fortean1]

Heckuva waste of space if no other life out there.