The James Webb Space Telescope had a weak detection of the microbial life biomarker, dimethyl sulfide. There is a 1 in 66 chance that it was instrument noise. There will be a follow up analysis with the MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) on the James Webb. This should scan the exoplanet K2-18B at the wavelengths for easier detection of dimethyl sulfide.
This will let us know for certain if the signature for microbial life was detected or not. There would still be the chance that there is an unknown chemical and geological processes on a different world are making a chemical that microbes make or the industrial process of making pulp on earth.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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Yep, watched her video the other night. Life’s a possibility. Although, given that the surface water is under a hydrogen atmosphere, I don’t see much prospect of there being anybody we can talk to.
It’s funny how many folks don’t seem to discriminate between “alien life” and “intelligent tool-using alien life forms that it may be possible to communicate with.”
Part of the problem, I suspect, will be that most environments that can engender life won’t provide any means for it to evolve into the more complex forms we would find more interesting (i.e. folks kinda like us that make tools and ask big questions).
It’s also unlikely that very many of the places that can permit any sort of life, will be able to go the distance for billions of years, remaining habitable for life, while forcing it to jump through hoops evolving in order to stay alive, yet without being wiped out completely.
Earth has had a good number of mass-extinction events (separated by sufficient time to recover) that were probably necessary to get us to this point before the Sun bakes away all life in another billion years. The unlikeliness of it all (and many other factors) suggests that this is vanishingly rare, even in a galaxy with 3 or 4 hundred billion stars.
Even so, finding solid evidence of extra-solar bacteria would be cool, all the same.
Digressing, life on Mars would be cool, too, but on a much lesser scale, as I expect that, if found, it will likely just be extremophiles living miles deep in the rock, as on Earth, and that they will be found to be related to our own.
*Hopefully* any life found on Mars is related to Earth life. More than one instance of unrelated abiogenesis in the same star system means there’s at least replicating slime all over the galaxy — and then you do the math and come to the conclusions that there should be a relatively large number of old biospheres, and then you start *really* wondering why the galaxy hasn’t been paved over yet by some 800 million-year-old technological civilization.
Enjoyed your evocative use of metaphors!
Oh, I agree. In fact, I consider the Fermi Paradox to be best resolved by concluding that we are so rare that we are also first in this galaxy–otherwise someone just a bit earlier than us would have already taken all the good real estate and we would have been out of luck, probably even before we developed an oxygen atmosphere without (so far as we know) outside help.
Because once even a tiny fraction of a species anything like ours starts spreading to other star systems, I very much doubt it will disappear without heirs before the stars themselves all go out.
It would probably be harder than repackaging all the COVID on Earth and sending it back to Wuhan.
The opposite of nearly everything you said is infinitly more likely. Life is likely incredibly common and intelligent life is probably also pretty common.