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“Most promising signs yet” of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

417 points by fuidani 1y ago

mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
This is very exciting. It's certainly approaching the best evidence we could possibly hope for from an exoplanet given current technology. Of course, the weak link here is the assumption that these bio-markers can't be produced abiotically, which is a pretty big assumption. Our understanding of planetary science is still in its infancy. This is (thought to be) a hycean planet, a type of planet unknown to us until very recently(post-JWST, I believe?). And given that the solar system has no hycean planets, it's a class of planets which is fundamentally poorly studied, with pretty limited access to data. We can make models, and we can get some spectral data on the contents of their gaseous atmospheres. But we have no way of looking at their surface oceans. Thinking about what kind of chemistry might be going on there is mostly just an act of speculative modelling. So the interesting question is, without new sources of data, can we determine whether these bio-markers are biological in origin? Not really. Not without a much better understanding of planetary science in general and hycean worlds in particular(of course, that's what this research is trying to do, and making progress at). As well as a deeper understanding of abiogenesis. I could imagine a working understanding of abiogenesis at least being able to eliminate some candidate planets, but even that assumes only one type of abiogenesis is possible, which is more or less unfounded. That is, unless the understanding includes some deep information theoretic/evolutionary perspective on abiogenesis which would probably have to include a completely unambiguous information theoretic and physical definition of what life even is. It is conceivable that such an understanding might provide very strong restrictions on what kinds of chemical systems are capable of abiogenesis, and that those restrictions could then be used to eliminate certain planets or even entire star systems from contention. And if these hycean worlds were eliminated that way, we'd know there must be some abiotic source of these "biomarkers", and knowing that, we would likely be able to figure out what it is. But ok, that's a lot of assumptions. Maybe we get lucky, and some chemists stumble on a non-biotic chemical system that can produce these chmicals in concentrations that can be detected by JWST at a distance of hundreds of light years. Or, conversely, maybe chemists somehow manage to prove conclusively that biotic origin is the only possible source. I'm not a chemist or a microbiologist, so I have no idea what that would look like. It's probably well beyond our current understanding. I guess what I'm rantingly saying is, while this result changes my credence that there's life on this planet about as much as is possible with current science and technology, it still barely changes it at all. Before it was maybe 0.5 + ε(habitable zone, liquid water), and it is now 0.5 + 2ε. I guess something which could move the needle much more significantly, is if we found a large number(say 10) of chemically unrelated potential bio-markers in the atmosphere of a planet very similar to earth, in a very similar star system. Then, the assumption of the impossibility of abiotic sources would be much more plausible. I believe doing this type of research for earth-sized exoplanets with JWST is still quite borderline(please correct me if I'm wrong). Having said all that, this result is still extremely exciting. For the first time, the field of exobiology has any contact with observational data from outside our solar system at all(besides mere astronomical data), and things will only improve from here. Future telescopes will be better at this type of observation, and our understanding of planetary science is evolving at an accelerating pace. I'm very excited to see where this research goes in the future.
throwaway290 1y ago
TL;DR - K2-18b - detected dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, false positive possibility is now very low - "produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth", possibility they were produced by other processes (unrelated to life as we know it) not high but maybe unknown unknowns - other factors like distance from the star are in favor of life & water - previous studies detected methane and carbon dioxide
- sph 1y ago
  > false positive possibility is very low No, it means we will soon discover how these compounds form naturally. Would love to be wrong, of course.
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    I meant (and I think the article meant) false positive of gas detection not life
  - actionfromafar 1y ago
    Maybe the are cooking a lot of paper over there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_process
  - nottorp 1y ago
    If plankton farts them, it's natural too, right?
- dvh 1y ago
  Parent is a flare star
  - throwaway290 1y ago
    Like the sun, I guess
- psychoslave 1y ago
  Is dimethil something expected to be generated with really procaryote life forms, or only from those with more complexe structures?
ZiiS 1y ago
Astronomers have yet again found possible signs of alien life.
- sgt 1y ago
  You're not thinking like a journalist. This is a breakthrough! Alien life has been found! SETI is making contact as we speak.
  - saaaaaam 1y ago
    To be fair, there’s a big difference between journalists and headline writers! Headline writing is the art of taking something that a journalist has thought about in detail and carefully crafted and making it into something that someone with low to zero interest in the topic might want to read. Having done both, I got annoyed when headlines misrepresented what I’d written, and journalists got annoyed when I took their perfectly crafted but pedestrian articles and gave them punchy headlines in a desperate attempt to get people to read them...
    - sgt 1y ago
      Fair enough! Also, to the credit of headline writers, I have sometimes clicked on a clickbait article and learned something. If it hadn't been clickbait, I might have missed it.
      - saaaaaam 1y ago
        You've made all headline writers a little happier by saying that!
weberer 1y ago
Here's the primary source https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 They possibly detected dimethyl sulfide, which is only known to be produced by living organisms.
- metalman 1y ago
  only know to be produced.....is a whoa bessy phrase,?¿ as in 70 years ago an undergraduate figured out that dimethyl sulfide was produced by living organisms and he asked his professor what else made it, and got shrug and "nothing else I know of" and everybody has been cutting and pasting since, OR, an international team spent years and millions working on the chemistry behind dimethyl sufide in an epic known to all quest to determine it's origins. Science does have an issue with cutting and pasting ancient mistakes, and then bieng exceptionaly reluctant to change and move forward, not to mention that SETI, and the rest of "alien" research is most definitly tainted with public fantasy and entertainment industry influence, so even with one of the notoriously oderiferous sulfide compounds present, I wont hold my breath
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    Ya, it’s a bit less exciting, but I bet we’re about to learn many new ways to produce dimethyl sulfide outside of a living organism
  - allan_s 1y ago
    actually we know how to produce it without involving living organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide#Industrial_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide#Industrial_pr...
    - poulpy123 1y ago
      actually a living organism is needed to produce it this way
      - 1y ago
seanhunter 1y ago
Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me. Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.
- ta8645 1y ago
  If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long. If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.
  - FL33TW00D 1y ago
    Not so! Humans are just early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg
  - aardvark179 1y ago
    You seem to be conflating life, multicellular life, and intelligent life. Life appears to have developed on Earth pretty quickly, multicellular life took a long time to appear, and we are only aware of one species that developed civilisation building capabilities. Life might be very common, but intelligent life still be incrediblY rare.
    - falcor84 1y ago
      Indeed. We might finally start getting some real estimates for those factors in the Drake Equation.
sph 1y ago
A bit clickbaity of OP to skip the operative word ‘promising’ signs of life.
- isolli 1y ago
  To be fair, the original title goes above HN's character limit, but the omission is almost worthy of a flag, in my opinion...
  - shrx 1y ago
    Better alternatives: - Promising signs of alien life found on a planet beyond our Solar System - Astronomers have found promising signs of alien life on an extrasolar planet
- quaintdev 1y ago
  This should be higher up
- bathtub365 1y ago
  And it isn’t actually signs of life. The first paragraph: > Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface.
eecc 1y ago
JSWT... again the most formidable piece of equipment ever shot into outer space. That think is going to shake our understanding of the Universe to its foundations a couple times around
- merek 1y ago
  I think you mean JWST, not to be confused with JSON Web Tokens :)
  - eecc 1y ago
    :-| ugh, autocorrect. I swear!
londons_explore 1y ago
This is happening 124 light years away from earth. That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years. Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.
- DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
  It would still be >124 years from the perspective of people on Earth, though.
- lucb1e 1y ago
  If you find that sort of thing interesting... I don't always know how seriously to take the things on this channel, but I discovered Fraser Cain not so long ago and find the ideas mentioned in the interviews to be fascinating, for example "Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI (warning: it's over an hour)
- mr_mitm 1y ago
  Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering. And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption. It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.
  - tiborsaas 1y ago
    > The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity This made me think that F = G((m1m2)/rr) is good enough to go to the Moon, but not good enough to give us GPS. Maybe some discovery could help us build antimatter drives one day.
tomelders 1y ago
My understanding is that the great filter theory means this is bad news for us humans here on earth. And considering the state of the world right now, it's especially ominous. Fate loves irony.
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  The great filter is only one of the possible explanations of the Fermi paradox however. There are other far less bleack including that there is actually no paradox at all: life is indeed frequent and but we are just bad at detecting it/have not been looking for it long enough.
  - consumer451 1y ago
    I used to think that rare earth/rare life was the bleak option. As I get older, I think the bleak thing would be a galaxy full of technologically advanced species with morals potentially equal to, or worse than ours.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
  How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.
- encrypted_bird 1y ago
  With due respect, the Great Filter is a hypothesis, not a theory. That being said, I agree. I read in a similar thread yesterday someone confused how this would be bad news rather than good news—that there are many other intelligent species indicates that such a filter either doesn't exist or is very easy to pass. But, like your point does, I think it's important to recognize that such a "good news" position is predicated on the notion that we as a species are already past the Great Filter, rather than that we're still behind it and the others are ahead.
MrPapz 1y ago
Maybe now we can stop this nonsense of competing among each other and start dedicating efforts to an international space program.
- Guthur 1y ago
  Why exactly? I'd prefer we'd just build some more houses so that owning one didn't require a life time of work to pay for.
  - Guthur 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
      I truly agree with this post. There was this post on HN that life can't be given to mars for 99.99% and even if it could, it would be the most miserable life with only 1-2 decades. It isn't self sustainable as people imagine it to be. So all we have is, is this Earth & our fellow human beings & instead of treating each other with basic necessities like housing, education , healthcare. Also these things, in my opinion of researching the space and giving housing, they aren't mutual. They can both be done but even if they are mutual,I would personally pick housing any day, because what point is of space, what point is of going to outer space some day and living shit there if humans are currently living shit here as well. Regarding Housing, I think it can easily be fixed and so much more like how we say tax the rich, if we could just tax lands. Because people think of land as some "asset" and that they "own it" ,when in actuality, I might argue that land is the only thing that I personally think the govt. has any right over. So I personally believe that we are better off taxing land so that these pesty landlords who get rich off of the housing crisis can really just suffer so much that the lands would just be productive and not speculative , reducing the price of lands down and even rents down till the point housing is way more favourable. Its a net win to everybody except those pesty landlords & maybe "investors" or people who bought housing pre-georgism because they might now believe that its unfair to them? Still I think that georgism is pretty flexible and this could be sorted out in such a way that it would have been less controversial and more net positive to the Society than the latest tariffs fiasco, though people didn't vote for housing, they voted for tariffs.
cdplayer96 1y ago
Here's to hoping we can learn more about this. But I feel like this could be caused by us simply not understanding how dimethyl sulfide can be formed on other planets, especially ones over 100 lightyears away..
what-the-grump 1y ago
[flagged]
- abenga 1y ago
  You are dismissing a lot of science off-hand by trivializing it snidely. Exactly which part do you think is wrong?
- bedane 1y ago
  a fart/sewer odor is indeed a sign of life
GenshoTikamura 1y ago
That literally smells fishy
milesrout 1y ago
Is there a source for this that isn't plastered with banner ads? I can't read more than a sentence at a time without having to scroll past adverts. I do wonder why I was stupid enough to pay for a phone with a bigger screen as it just seems to mean more and bigger ads on screen at once and the same amount of content.
- mkl 1y ago
  Why are you not using an ad blocker? Ads are optional - I didn't see a single one.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
tjpnz 1y ago
How far off are we from being able to image an exoplanet?
- t8sr 1y ago
  Directly imaging an exoplanet has been done about 20 times (maybe more, by now). If you're asking how far are we from resolving an exoplanet to more than a single point of light, the answer is we will never be able to do that from this distance.
  - rabf 1y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
  - mr_toad 1y ago
    There are proposals to use the solar gravitational lens. Failing that, you’d need thousands of optical interferometers larger than the Hubble spread across a distance wider than the Earth.
- dguest 1y ago
  Depends on what you mean by "image". We might be able to capture blurry blobs with our current telescopes. Let's say you want to take a picture of Alien Manhattan 100 light years away, where you can see e.g. bridges and buildings, stuff about 10m across. I think we could do it pretty well if we could launch around 50,000 space telescopes, each 30 km across. My math is below. Note: I'm not an astronomer. ---- The angular resolution limit for a telescope is roughly the wavelength of the light it's sensitive to over the diameter. If we want to sense things 10m across, with light at the shorter end of the visible spectrum (400 nm), we'd need a telescope with a diameter of about 1/4th of an AU (i.e. the distance from the earth to the sun), around 40 million kilometers. More practically we could use a telescope array with this diameter, which could conveniently be in lot of orbits about 1 AU out. But the area is still a problem: assuming this 100m^2 object is as bright as it would be on earth under midday sun, it's going to be reflecting around 100 kw of energy. One of these photons has an energy of around 3 eV, so we're getting 2e23 of them a second. Unfortunately these spread out over a sphere with a surface area of 1e31 km^2 by the time they reach earth, meaning we see one every second if we have a telescope array with an area of 50 million square km. Ok, so let's go kind of sci-fi and say we can build a 30 km diameter space telescope. It would be impressive (and unprecedented) but since it's floating in space and could be made of thin material you might be able to imagine it with today's technology and a lot of coordination. That gets us around 1000 square km! Now we just do it 50,000 more times. Great, now we have 1 Hz of photons coming from each 100 m^2 patch of Alien Manhattan! I'm sure in the process of building 50k mega-projects we'll figure out a way to filter out the noise, and with a few years of integration we'll have a nice snapshot!
davedx 1y ago
Some speculation On DMS: - DMS is a very specific configuration that’s rarely the endpoint of non-living chemical cycles. - The simplicity of DMS doesn’t make it less indicative of life—it actually makes it a very selective molecule, which only shows up in large quantities when life is involved (at least in Earth-like chemistry). - Until we find a compelling abiotic pathway, high DMS remains a strong biosignature, especially in the context of a planet with a potential ocean and mild temperatures Possible origins: We’re looking at some form of life that can: - Thrive in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - Possibly live in or on top of a global ocean - Generate large amounts of DMS—potentially thousands of times more than Earth The closest Earth analogy is: - Marine phytoplankton, particularly species like Emiliania huxleyi, produce DMS as a byproduct of breaking down DMSP, a molecule they use to regulate osmotic pressure and protect against oxidative stress. - If something similar is happening on K2-18 b, we’d be talking about an ocean teeming with such microbes—perhaps far denser than Earth’s oceans. Possibly "Giant photosynthetic mats" or sulfuric "algae" If there’s some landmass or floating structures, maybe the DMS producers are: - Photosynthetic, sulfur-metabolizing analogues to cyanobacteria - Living in dense floating colonies or mats like microbial reefs - Using dimethylated sulfur compounds in their metabolism, and leaking DMS as waste or signaling molecules =========== Of course there have been lots of ocean planets in sci-fi literature, but I'm most reminded of the "Pattern Juggler" Planet Ararat from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series. This is incredibly exciting news!
- rsynnott 1y ago
  > Of course there have been lots of ocean planets in sci-fi literature, but I'm most reminded of the "Pattern Juggler" Planet Ararat from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series. Erk. Couldn't you pick something from a less... apocalyptic universe? :)
  - mr_toad 1y ago
    The idea of floating mats of life reminded me more of Wang’s Carpets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang's_Carpets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang's_Carpets
- belter 1y ago
jmyeet 1y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376
- aurareturn 1y ago
  Even if this has 5% of being right, it should still be upvoted all the way to the top of HN. It's that important.
Xiol32 1y ago
Editorialized headline. Article is: > Astronomers have found the 'most promising signs yet' of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System
whiplash451 1y ago
Time to (re)read "Where is everybody?" [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180506.If_the_Universe_Is_Teeming_with_Aliens_WHERE_IS_EVERYBODY_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180506.If_the_Universe_I...
andreygrehov 1y ago
Let’s assume there is alien life on many planets beyond our solar system. Now what? What’s the practical benefit?
- foxglacier 1y ago
  Let's assume I wake up tomorrow still alive. Then what? You're basically asking what's the meaning of life.
  - andreygrehov 1y ago
    If you wake up tomorrow still alive, you can visit HN and downvote my comments. That will impact my karma value. Not a big deal, but still. If there is alien life, you can’t do anything about it. Zero impact.
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Suppose it were somehow possible to prove that alien life exists. Like, we get a radio signal saying "hey, Earth! We see you looking at us!" that's conclusive and undeniable. That would upend a lot of religious teachings which say we're unique and that the world was given to us, as the unique creations of a creator, to consume for our own benefit. It seems like there could be many practical benefits to showing that's not true. Hey, maybe the concept of infinite exponential growth is a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't burn the skies and boil the seas. Maybe we should be nice to other intelligent animals, at the very least.
- martopix 1y ago
  What's the practical benefit of Beethoven?
  - andreygrehov 1y ago
    Beethoven’s music directly impacts human lives. It evokes emotion and inspires creativity. Its value lies in its immediate effect. In contrast, knowing that life exists millions of light-years away offers no such tangible impact. It’s a data point. An interesting one, sure, but it doesn’t feed the hungry, cure disease, change policy, or even affect your commute. So yea, Beethoven is a lived experience, whereas aliens in Andromeda are an abstract concept.
phtrivier 1y ago
"Science, turning existential questions like 'Are we alone in the Universe ?' into 'Did something just fart over there ?' since 500 years".
pandemic_region 1y ago
Signs of alien life existing at least 124 years ago? Or are these types of observations exempt from the distance delay?
GistNoesis 1y ago
124 light years seems quite close, it seems to be some sort phytoplankton for now, what can we send there quickly to eradicate them before they become a problem. How much mass of galactic "roundup" should we send ? Do we have the technology yet for planet-scale sanitizing ? Can we pulse some high energy particles at roughly the speed of light and aim it at them ? Do we know if they have some magnetic field protection like earth does ?
belter 1y ago
This is a terrible title. The original title was: "Astronomers have found the 'most promising signs yet' of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System" "Astronomers have found signs of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System" means something completely different. Please @dang update or this looks like the Daily Mail. It's an example of scientists acting irresponsibly. They might have found dimethyl sulfide but it can be produced abiotically. Dimethyl sulfide (CH3SCH3, DMS) signatures were found in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and that is for sure not Times Square on Saturday night...: https://astrobiology.com/2025/02/on-the-abiotic-origin-of-dimethyl-sulfide-discovery-of-dms-in-the-interstellar-medium.html https://astrobiology.com/2025/02/on-the-abiotic-origin-of-di... The planet looks more like a Neptune or Uranus than Earth type. They need to find multiple examples of different types of biomarkers, before contacting the press as they obviously did. "Evidence for Abiotic Dimethyl Sulfide in Cometary Matter" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724 "On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892 Edit: I see title is now updated.
wolframhempel 1y ago
Maybe we need to widen our search for life. Earth is a planet with about 15 degree average temperature and abundant water and oxygen. So that's what live here consumes and where it thrives. But life is all about adaptation. So, father than looking for planets with similar temperatures and resources, shouldn't we be looking for other possible foundations for life? Maybe there's a thriving civilization out there, living happily at 300 degrees, breathing neon and eating sulfur?
yk 1y ago
Last time bio signatures where found (I believe on Venus), there was a flurry of papers on arXiv a week later, which all explained the signature by abiotic processes. Of course, if you have more than one explanation, then you really don't have one explanation. So I fully expect the same thing to happen here, and perhaps sometime in a decade or so follow up observations will have ruled out all but one explanation, until then exciting but ultimately it's not over before the fat lady sings.
wg0 1y ago
So 355% tariff then? Say what?
croemer 1y ago
The ads on that website are horrible, constantly shifting the text as they load. Don't recommend clicking on it.
rotis 1y ago
Atmosphere of this exoplaned is rich in hydrogen. Also it has likely different atmospheric pressure than we have on Earth. Doubtful there is any life form as we know it. I suspect best we can expect there is something like a primordial soup: a mix of relatively simple organic compounds.
VP2262 1y ago
K2-18 is a red dwarf. These stars often emit powerful flares that can "sterilise" lifeforms on nearby planets. Maybe microbial forms can protect themselves though?
skc 1y ago
Every once in a while for a good chuckle I visit r/UFOs or r/aliens where people go gaga over blurry videos of balloons in the sky. I've never understood how that stuff seems to capture the imagination more than actual science like this.
- throwaway743 1y ago
  User5 on youtube.
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
Phelinofist 1y ago
Aren't we looking into the past when looking at things this far away? So, just assuming here, that these are indeed signs of life, would that mean that "they" might have been primitive when these signatures were sent out into space and are now further developed?
- ChicagoBoy11 1y ago
  Yes, but isn't it "just" 124 light years away. So, we're looking at it 124 years ago, which, in the scale of evolution, isn't particularly long ago?
emorning3 1y ago
Oh please, it's a detection of dimethyl sulfide on a planet far far away whose natural chemistry we don't understand. Morons, I'm surrounded by morons.
southernplaces7 1y ago
It would be somewhat worrisome to actually find signs of primitive extraterrestrial life because of the Fermi Paradox. Given the age of the universe, and how long it took both complex life to develop on earth and for a creature such as us to emerge from that, finding life elsewhere would beg a return to Fermi's question of "Where is everyone?" implying that something comes along and causes evolving civilizations to be exterminated before they ever show signs to their presence to the wider galaxy. If life, even of a very primitive sort, were found, it would stand to reason that it had done so in the past and that other civilizations, possibly even many of them, had formed in our huge galaxy long ago, giving them time to develop enough to be detectable even to us, so then, where are they? Then again of course, there are probably many, many known unknowns and unknown unknowns lurking amidst all of the above supposition.
- rossant 1y ago
  Maybe sufficiently advanced civilizations just stay under the radar to avoid being exterminated by others.
- n4r9 1y ago
  One problem with the Fermi paradox is that the Drake equation simply multiplies expected values together without regard to the underlying distributions. You can think about it this way: what if the actual mechanisms of the evolution of life result in there being a very high probability of 1 or 2 space-faring civilisations evolving, and a tiny probability of trillions of space-faring civilisations? The expected value coming out of the Drake equation would be large but useless. A few years ago some researchers at the Future of Humanity institute explored what happens if you take distributions into account. It turns out that this makes a surprising difference and results in a substantial probability of no other intelligent life. No need for speculation about great filters, predatory civilisations, etc... . The paper is freely available on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404
Iwan-Zotow 1y ago
Molecule of beer, mmm...
mediumsmart 1y ago
Most signs promise that life is to become alien on our planet.
tsoukase 1y ago
Unfortunately we cannot answer fundamental questions about ET life. Like, how long an advanced civilization lasts, which is capable of manipulating radio signals. Because we can since the last 100 years and we don't know how long we will be able. If that time is a few hundred years, then very few happen to be functioning _now_ (in relativistic meaning) and very far away to have meaningful contact.

417 points by fuidani 1y ago

This is very exciting. It's certainly approaching the best evidence we could possibly hope for from an exoplanet given current technology. Of course, the weak link here is the assumption that these bio-markers can't be produced abiotically, which is a pretty big assumption. Our understanding of planetary science is still in its infancy. This is (thought to be) a hycean planet, a type of planet unknown to us until very recently(post-JWST, I believe?). And given that the solar system has no hycean planets, it's a class of planets which is fundamentally poorly studied, with pretty limited access to data. We can make models, and we can get some spectral data on the contents of their gaseous atmospheres. But we have no way of looking at their surface oceans. Thinking about what kind of chemistry might be going on there is mostly just an act of speculative modelling. So the interesting question is, without new sources of data, can we determine whether these bio-markers are biological in origin? Not really. Not without a much better understanding of planetary science in general and hycean worlds in particular(of course, that's what this research is trying to do, and making progress at). As well as a deeper understanding of abiogenesis. I could imagine a working understanding of abiogenesis at least being able to eliminate some candidate planets, but even that assumes only one type of abiogenesis is possible, which is more or less unfounded. That is, unless the understanding includes some deep information theoretic/evolutionary perspective on abiogenesis which would probably have to include a completely unambiguous information theoretic and physical definition of what life even is. It is conceivable that such an understanding might provide very strong restrictions on what kinds of chemical systems are capable of abiogenesis, and that those restrictions could then be used to eliminate certain planets or even entire star systems from contention. And if these hycean worlds were eliminated that way, we'd know there must be some abiotic source of these "biomarkers", and knowing that, we would likely be able to figure out what it is. But ok, that's a lot of assumptions. Maybe we get lucky, and some chemists stumble on a non-biotic chemical system that can produce these chmicals in concentrations that can be detected by JWST at a distance of hundreds of light years. Or, conversely, maybe chemists somehow manage to prove conclusively that biotic origin is the only possible source. I'm not a chemist or a microbiologist, so I have no idea what that would look like. It's probably well beyond our current understanding. I guess what I'm rantingly saying is, while this result changes my credence that there's life on this planet about as much as is possible with current science and technology, it still barely changes it at all. Before it was maybe 0.5 + ε(habitable zone, liquid water), and it is now 0.5 + 2ε. I guess something which could move the needle much more significantly, is if we found a large number(say 10) of chemically unrelated potential bio-markers in the atmosphere of a planet very similar to earth, in a very similar star system. Then, the assumption of the impossibility of abiotic sources would be much more plausible. I believe doing this type of research for earth-sized exoplanets with JWST is still quite borderline(please correct me if I'm wrong). Having said all that, this result is still extremely exciting. For the first time, the field of exobiology has any contact with observational data from outside our solar system at all(besides mere astronomical data), and things will only improve from here. Future telescopes will be better at this type of observation, and our understanding of planetary science is evolving at an accelerating pace. I'm very excited to see where this research goes in the future.

throwaway290 1y ago

TL;DR - K2-18b - detected dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, false positive possibility is now very low - "produced by marine-dwelling organisms on Earth", possibility they were produced by other processes (unrelated to life as we know it) not high but maybe unknown unknowns - other factors like distance from the star are in favor of life & water - previous studies detected methane and carbon dioxide

sph 1y ago
> false positive possibility is very low No, it means we will soon discover how these compounds form naturally. Would love to be wrong, of course.
- throwaway290 1y ago
  I meant (and I think the article meant) false positive of gas detection not life
- actionfromafar 1y ago
  Maybe the are cooking a lot of paper over there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_process
- nottorp 1y ago
  If plankton farts them, it's natural too, right?
dvh 1y ago
Parent is a flare star
- throwaway290 1y ago
  Like the sun, I guess
psychoslave 1y ago
Is dimethil something expected to be generated with really procaryote life forms, or only from those with more complexe structures?

ZiiS 1y ago

Astronomers have yet again found possible signs of alien life.

sgt 1y ago
You're not thinking like a journalist. This is a breakthrough! Alien life has been found! SETI is making contact as we speak.
- saaaaaam 1y ago
  To be fair, there’s a big difference between journalists and headline writers! Headline writing is the art of taking something that a journalist has thought about in detail and carefully crafted and making it into something that someone with low to zero interest in the topic might want to read. Having done both, I got annoyed when headlines misrepresented what I’d written, and journalists got annoyed when I took their perfectly crafted but pedestrian articles and gave them punchy headlines in a desperate attempt to get people to read them...
  - sgt 1y ago
    Fair enough! Also, to the credit of headline writers, I have sometimes clicked on a clickbait article and learned something. If it hadn't been clickbait, I might have missed it.
    - saaaaaam 1y ago
      You've made all headline writers a little happier by saying that!

weberer 1y ago

Here's the primary source https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/adc1c8 They possibly detected dimethyl sulfide, which is only known to be produced by living organisms.

metalman 1y ago
only know to be produced.....is a whoa bessy phrase,?¿ as in 70 years ago an undergraduate figured out that dimethyl sulfide was produced by living organisms and he asked his professor what else made it, and got shrug and "nothing else I know of" and everybody has been cutting and pasting since, OR, an international team spent years and millions working on the chemistry behind dimethyl sufide in an epic known to all quest to determine it's origins. Science does have an issue with cutting and pasting ancient mistakes, and then bieng exceptionaly reluctant to change and move forward, not to mention that SETI, and the rest of "alien" research is most definitly tainted with public fantasy and entertainment industry influence, so even with one of the notoriously oderiferous sulfide compounds present, I wont hold my breath
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  Ya, it’s a bit less exciting, but I bet we’re about to learn many new ways to produce dimethyl sulfide outside of a living organism
- allan_s 1y ago
  actually we know how to produce it without involving living organism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide#Industrial_processes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimethyl_sulfide#Industrial_pr...
  - poulpy123 1y ago
    actually a living organism is needed to produce it this way
    - 1y ago

seanhunter 1y ago

Firstly that is completely badass science. The idea that you can use observations to detect the chemical composition of an exoplanet millions of kilometres away is an absolute triumph of the work of thousands of people over hundreds of years. Really amazing and deeply humbling to me. Secondly, my prior was always that life existed outside of earth. It just seems so unlikely that we are somehow that special. If life developed here I always felt it overwhelmingly likely that it developed elsewhere too given how incredibly unfathomably vast the universe is.

ta8645 1y ago
If life is very common in the universe, then that is probably bad news for us. It means that civilizations should exist that are millions of years more technologically advanced than us; and should be leaving telltale signatures across the sky that we'd likely have detected by now. And the absence of those signs would be relatively strong evidence that life, while common, isn't long-lived. Suggesting that our demise too, will come before too long. If, on the other hand, life is relatively rare, or we're the sole example, our future can't be statistically estimated that way.
- FL33TW00D 1y ago
  Not so! Humans are just early: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3whaviTqqg
- aardvark179 1y ago
  You seem to be conflating life, multicellular life, and intelligent life. Life appears to have developed on Earth pretty quickly, multicellular life took a long time to appear, and we are only aware of one species that developed civilisation building capabilities. Life might be very common, but intelligent life still be incrediblY rare.
  - falcor84 1y ago
    Indeed. We might finally start getting some real estimates for those factors in the Drake Equation.

sph 1y ago

A bit clickbaity of OP to skip the operative word ‘promising’ signs of life.

isolli 1y ago
To be fair, the original title goes above HN's character limit, but the omission is almost worthy of a flag, in my opinion...
- shrx 1y ago
  Better alternatives: - Promising signs of alien life found on a planet beyond our Solar System - Astronomers have found promising signs of alien life on an extrasolar planet
quaintdev 1y ago
This should be higher up
bathtub365 1y ago
And it isn’t actually signs of life. The first paragraph: > Astronomers say they've found "the most promising signs yet" of chemicals on a planet beyond our Solar System that could indicate the presence of life on its surface.

eecc 1y ago

JSWT... again the most formidable piece of equipment ever shot into outer space. That think is going to shake our understanding of the Universe to its foundations a couple times around

merek 1y ago
I think you mean JWST, not to be confused with JSON Web Tokens :)
- eecc 1y ago
  :-| ugh, autocorrect. I swear!

londons_explore 1y ago

This is happening 124 light years away from earth. That means if we develop a way to make a space ship accelerate at 1g for a long period of time, you could go there in just 10 relativistic years. Unfortunately, whilst science allows such a rocket, our engineering skills are far from being able to build one.

DiogenesKynikos 1y ago
It would still be >124 years from the perspective of people on Earth, though.
lucb1e 1y ago
If you find that sort of thing interesting... I don't always know how seriously to take the things on this channel, but I discovered Fraser Cain not so long ago and find the ideas mentioned in the interviews to be fascinating, for example "Interstellar Travel Without Breaking Physics with Andrew Higgins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkGRVvA23qI (warning: it's over an hour)
mr_mitm 1y ago
Calling it simply an engineering issue is not properly conveying the ridiculousness of such a journey. For a small space ship of 1000 tons, this would take ten thousand times the current yearly energy consumption of mankind. So we'd need to figure out how to generate the energy and then store it on a space ship before even thinking about the engineering. And that's ignoring the mass of the fuel. The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity, which makes this endeavor even more mind bogglingly ridiculous. We'd actually need 2 million years worth of our current yearly energy consumption. It's fun to think about, but being clear about the challenges puts quite the damper on it.
- tiborsaas 1y ago
  > The classical rocket equation has the mass going exponentially with the velocity This made me think that F = G((m1m2)/rr) is good enough to go to the Moon, but not good enough to give us GPS. Maybe some discovery could help us build antimatter drives one day.

tomelders 1y ago

My understanding is that the great filter theory means this is bad news for us humans here on earth. And considering the state of the world right now, it's especially ominous. Fate loves irony.

StopDisinfo910 1y ago
The great filter is only one of the possible explanations of the Fermi paradox however. There are other far less bleack including that there is actually no paradox at all: life is indeed frequent and but we are just bad at detecting it/have not been looking for it long enough.
- consumer451 1y ago
  I used to think that rare earth/rare life was the bleak option. As I get older, I think the bleak thing would be a galaxy full of technologically advanced species with morals potentially equal to, or worse than ours.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 1y ago
How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.
encrypted_bird 1y ago
With due respect, the Great Filter is a hypothesis, not a theory. That being said, I agree. I read in a similar thread yesterday someone confused how this would be bad news rather than good news—that there are many other intelligent species indicates that such a filter either doesn't exist or is very easy to pass. But, like your point does, I think it's important to recognize that such a "good news" position is predicated on the notion that we as a species are already past the Great Filter, rather than that we're still behind it and the others are ahead.

MrPapz 1y ago

Maybe now we can stop this nonsense of competing among each other and start dedicating efforts to an international space program.

Guthur 1y ago
Why exactly? I'd prefer we'd just build some more houses so that owning one didn't require a life time of work to pay for.
- Guthur 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    I truly agree with this post. There was this post on HN that life can't be given to mars for 99.99% and even if it could, it would be the most miserable life with only 1-2 decades. It isn't self sustainable as people imagine it to be. So all we have is, is this Earth & our fellow human beings & instead of treating each other with basic necessities like housing, education , healthcare. Also these things, in my opinion of researching the space and giving housing, they aren't mutual. They can both be done but even if they are mutual,I would personally pick housing any day, because what point is of space, what point is of going to outer space some day and living shit there if humans are currently living shit here as well. Regarding Housing, I think it can easily be fixed and so much more like how we say tax the rich, if we could just tax lands. Because people think of land as some "asset" and that they "own it" ,when in actuality, I might argue that land is the only thing that I personally think the govt. has any right over. So I personally believe that we are better off taxing land so that these pesty landlords who get rich off of the housing crisis can really just suffer so much that the lands would just be productive and not speculative , reducing the price of lands down and even rents down till the point housing is way more favourable. Its a net win to everybody except those pesty landlords & maybe "investors" or people who bought housing pre-georgism because they might now believe that its unfair to them? Still I think that georgism is pretty flexible and this could be sorted out in such a way that it would have been less controversial and more net positive to the Society than the latest tariffs fiasco, though people didn't vote for housing, they voted for tariffs.

cdplayer96 1y ago

Here's to hoping we can learn more about this. But I feel like this could be caused by us simply not understanding how dimethyl sulfide can be formed on other planets, especially ones over 100 lightyears away..

what-the-grump 1y ago

[flagged]

abenga 1y ago
You are dismissing a lot of science off-hand by trivializing it snidely. Exactly which part do you think is wrong?
bedane 1y ago
a fart/sewer odor is indeed a sign of life

GenshoTikamura 1y ago

That literally smells fishy

milesrout 1y ago

Is there a source for this that isn't plastered with banner ads? I can't read more than a sentence at a time without having to scroll past adverts. I do wonder why I was stupid enough to pay for a phone with a bigger screen as it just seems to mean more and bigger ads on screen at once and the same amount of content.

mkl 1y ago
Why are you not using an ad blocker? Ads are optional - I didn't see a single one.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

tjpnz 1y ago

How far off are we from being able to image an exoplanet?

t8sr 1y ago
Directly imaging an exoplanet has been done about 20 times (maybe more, by now). If you're asking how far are we from resolving an exoplanet to more than a single point of light, the answer is we will never be able to do that from this distance.
- rabf 1y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
- mr_toad 1y ago
  There are proposals to use the solar gravitational lens. Failing that, you’d need thousands of optical interferometers larger than the Hubble spread across a distance wider than the Earth.
dguest 1y ago
Depends on what you mean by "image". We might be able to capture blurry blobs with our current telescopes. Let's say you want to take a picture of Alien Manhattan 100 light years away, where you can see e.g. bridges and buildings, stuff about 10m across. I think we could do it pretty well if we could launch around 50,000 space telescopes, each 30 km across. My math is below. Note: I'm not an astronomer. ---- The angular resolution limit for a telescope is roughly the wavelength of the light it's sensitive to over the diameter. If we want to sense things 10m across, with light at the shorter end of the visible spectrum (400 nm), we'd need a telescope with a diameter of about 1/4th of an AU (i.e. the distance from the earth to the sun), around 40 million kilometers. More practically we could use a telescope array with this diameter, which could conveniently be in lot of orbits about 1 AU out. But the area is still a problem: assuming this 100m^2 object is as bright as it would be on earth under midday sun, it's going to be reflecting around 100 kw of energy. One of these photons has an energy of around 3 eV, so we're getting 2e23 of them a second. Unfortunately these spread out over a sphere with a surface area of 1e31 km^2 by the time they reach earth, meaning we see one every second if we have a telescope array with an area of 50 million square km. Ok, so let's go kind of sci-fi and say we can build a 30 km diameter space telescope. It would be impressive (and unprecedented) but since it's floating in space and could be made of thin material you might be able to imagine it with today's technology and a lot of coordination. That gets us around 1000 square km! Now we just do it 50,000 more times. Great, now we have 1 Hz of photons coming from each 100 m^2 patch of Alien Manhattan! I'm sure in the process of building 50k mega-projects we'll figure out a way to filter out the noise, and with a few years of integration we'll have a nice snapshot!

davedx 1y ago

Some speculation On DMS: - DMS is a very specific configuration that’s rarely the endpoint of non-living chemical cycles. - The simplicity of DMS doesn’t make it less indicative of life—it actually makes it a very selective molecule, which only shows up in large quantities when life is involved (at least in Earth-like chemistry). - Until we find a compelling abiotic pathway, high DMS remains a strong biosignature, especially in the context of a planet with a potential ocean and mild temperatures Possible origins: We’re looking at some form of life that can: - Thrive in a hydrogen-rich atmosphere - Possibly live in or on top of a global ocean - Generate large amounts of DMS—potentially thousands of times more than Earth The closest Earth analogy is: - Marine phytoplankton, particularly species like Emiliania huxleyi, produce DMS as a byproduct of breaking down DMSP, a molecule they use to regulate osmotic pressure and protect against oxidative stress. - If something similar is happening on K2-18 b, we’d be talking about an ocean teeming with such microbes—perhaps far denser than Earth’s oceans. Possibly "Giant photosynthetic mats" or sulfuric "algae" If there’s some landmass or floating structures, maybe the DMS producers are: - Photosynthetic, sulfur-metabolizing analogues to cyanobacteria - Living in dense floating colonies or mats like microbial reefs - Using dimethylated sulfur compounds in their metabolism, and leaking DMS as waste or signaling molecules =========== Of course there have been lots of ocean planets in sci-fi literature, but I'm most reminded of the "Pattern Juggler" Planet Ararat from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series. This is incredibly exciting news!

rsynnott 1y ago
> Of course there have been lots of ocean planets in sci-fi literature, but I'm most reminded of the "Pattern Juggler" Planet Ararat from Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" series. Erk. Couldn't you pick something from a less... apocalyptic universe? :)
- mr_toad 1y ago
  The idea of floating mats of life reminded me more of Wang’s Carpets. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang's_Carpets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang's_Carpets
belter 1y ago

jmyeet 1y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43711376

aurareturn 1y ago
Even if this has 5% of being right, it should still be upvoted all the way to the top of HN. It's that important.

Xiol32 1y ago

Editorialized headline. Article is: > Astronomers have found the 'most promising signs yet' of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System

whiplash451 1y ago

Time to (re)read "Where is everybody?" [1] [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180506.If_the_Universe_Is_Teeming_with_Aliens_WHERE_IS_EVERYBODY_ https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/180506.If_the_Universe_I...

andreygrehov 1y ago

Let’s assume there is alien life on many planets beyond our solar system. Now what? What’s the practical benefit?

foxglacier 1y ago
Let's assume I wake up tomorrow still alive. Then what? You're basically asking what's the meaning of life.
- andreygrehov 1y ago
  If you wake up tomorrow still alive, you can visit HN and downvote my comments. That will impact my karma value. Not a big deal, but still. If there is alien life, you can’t do anything about it. Zero impact.
kstrauser 1y ago
Suppose it were somehow possible to prove that alien life exists. Like, we get a radio signal saying "hey, Earth! We see you looking at us!" that's conclusive and undeniable. That would upend a lot of religious teachings which say we're unique and that the world was given to us, as the unique creations of a creator, to consume for our own benefit. It seems like there could be many practical benefits to showing that's not true. Hey, maybe the concept of infinite exponential growth is a bad idea. Maybe we shouldn't burn the skies and boil the seas. Maybe we should be nice to other intelligent animals, at the very least.
martopix 1y ago
What's the practical benefit of Beethoven?
- andreygrehov 1y ago
  Beethoven’s music directly impacts human lives. It evokes emotion and inspires creativity. Its value lies in its immediate effect. In contrast, knowing that life exists millions of light-years away offers no such tangible impact. It’s a data point. An interesting one, sure, but it doesn’t feed the hungry, cure disease, change policy, or even affect your commute. So yea, Beethoven is a lived experience, whereas aliens in Andromeda are an abstract concept.

phtrivier 1y ago

"Science, turning existential questions like 'Are we alone in the Universe ?' into 'Did something just fart over there ?' since 500 years".

pandemic_region 1y ago

Signs of alien life existing at least 124 years ago? Or are these types of observations exempt from the distance delay?

GistNoesis 1y ago

124 light years seems quite close, it seems to be some sort phytoplankton for now, what can we send there quickly to eradicate them before they become a problem. How much mass of galactic "roundup" should we send ? Do we have the technology yet for planet-scale sanitizing ? Can we pulse some high energy particles at roughly the speed of light and aim it at them ? Do we know if they have some magnetic field protection like earth does ?

belter 1y ago

This is a terrible title. The original title was: "Astronomers have found the 'most promising signs yet' of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System" "Astronomers have found signs of alien life on a planet beyond our Solar System" means something completely different. Please @dang update or this looks like the Daily Mail. It's an example of scientists acting irresponsibly. They might have found dimethyl sulfide but it can be produced abiotically. Dimethyl sulfide (CH3SCH3, DMS) signatures were found in comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and that is for sure not Times Square on Saturday night...: https://astrobiology.com/2025/02/on-the-abiotic-origin-of-dimethyl-sulfide-discovery-of-dms-in-the-interstellar-medium.html https://astrobiology.com/2025/02/on-the-abiotic-origin-of-di... The planet looks more like a Neptune or Uranus than Earth type. They need to find multiple examples of different types of biomarkers, before contacting the press as they obviously did. "Evidence for Abiotic Dimethyl Sulfide in Cometary Matter" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724 https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.08724 "On the abiotic origin of dimethyl sulfide: discovery of DMS in the Interstellar Medium" - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892 https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.08892 Edit: I see title is now updated.

wolframhempel 1y ago

Maybe we need to widen our search for life. Earth is a planet with about 15 degree average temperature and abundant water and oxygen. So that's what live here consumes and where it thrives. But life is all about adaptation. So, father than looking for planets with similar temperatures and resources, shouldn't we be looking for other possible foundations for life? Maybe there's a thriving civilization out there, living happily at 300 degrees, breathing neon and eating sulfur?

yk 1y ago

Last time bio signatures where found (I believe on Venus), there was a flurry of papers on arXiv a week later, which all explained the signature by abiotic processes. Of course, if you have more than one explanation, then you really don't have one explanation. So I fully expect the same thing to happen here, and perhaps sometime in a decade or so follow up observations will have ruled out all but one explanation, until then exciting but ultimately it's not over before the fat lady sings.

wg0 1y ago

So 355% tariff then? Say what?

croemer 1y ago

The ads on that website are horrible, constantly shifting the text as they load. Don't recommend clicking on it.

rotis 1y ago

Atmosphere of this exoplaned is rich in hydrogen. Also it has likely different atmospheric pressure than we have on Earth. Doubtful there is any life form as we know it. I suspect best we can expect there is something like a primordial soup: a mix of relatively simple organic compounds.

VP2262 1y ago

K2-18 is a red dwarf. These stars often emit powerful flares that can "sterilise" lifeforms on nearby planets. Maybe microbial forms can protect themselves though?

skc 1y ago

Every once in a while for a good chuckle I visit r/UFOs or r/aliens where people go gaga over blurry videos of balloons in the sky. I've never understood how that stuff seems to capture the imagination more than actual science like this.

throwaway743 1y ago
User5 on youtube.

curtisszmania 1y ago

[dead]

Phelinofist 1y ago

Aren't we looking into the past when looking at things this far away? So, just assuming here, that these are indeed signs of life, would that mean that "they" might have been primitive when these signatures were sent out into space and are now further developed?

ChicagoBoy11 1y ago
Yes, but isn't it "just" 124 light years away. So, we're looking at it 124 years ago, which, in the scale of evolution, isn't particularly long ago?

emorning3 1y ago

Oh please, it's a detection of dimethyl sulfide on a planet far far away whose natural chemistry we don't understand. Morons, I'm surrounded by morons.

southernplaces7 1y ago

It would be somewhat worrisome to actually find signs of primitive extraterrestrial life because of the Fermi Paradox. Given the age of the universe, and how long it took both complex life to develop on earth and for a creature such as us to emerge from that, finding life elsewhere would beg a return to Fermi's question of "Where is everyone?" implying that something comes along and causes evolving civilizations to be exterminated before they ever show signs to their presence to the wider galaxy. If life, even of a very primitive sort, were found, it would stand to reason that it had done so in the past and that other civilizations, possibly even many of them, had formed in our huge galaxy long ago, giving them time to develop enough to be detectable even to us, so then, where are they? Then again of course, there are probably many, many known unknowns and unknown unknowns lurking amidst all of the above supposition.

rossant 1y ago
Maybe sufficiently advanced civilizations just stay under the radar to avoid being exterminated by others.
n4r9 1y ago
One problem with the Fermi paradox is that the Drake equation simply multiplies expected values together without regard to the underlying distributions. You can think about it this way: what if the actual mechanisms of the evolution of life result in there being a very high probability of 1 or 2 space-faring civilisations evolving, and a tiny probability of trillions of space-faring civilisations? The expected value coming out of the Drake equation would be large but useless. A few years ago some researchers at the Future of Humanity institute explored what happens if you take distributions into account. It turns out that this makes a surprising difference and results in a substantial probability of no other intelligent life. No need for speculation about great filters, predatory civilisations, etc... . The paper is freely available on ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404 https://arxiv.org/pdf/1806.02404

Iwan-Zotow 1y ago

Molecule of beer, mmm...

mediumsmart 1y ago

Most signs promise that life is to become alien on our planet.

tsoukase 1y ago

Unfortunately we cannot answer fundamental questions about ET life. Like, how long an advanced civilization lasts, which is capable of manipulating radio signals. Because we can since the last 100 years and we don't know how long we will be able. If that time is a few hundred years, then very few happen to be functioning _now_ (in relativistic meaning) and very far away to have meaningful contact.