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For Simple Life, I’ll Wait Until We Find It Elsewhere in Our Solar System…
The fact that the news about possible evidence of life being detected on K2-18 b was taken up by mainstream media may offer a much-needed boost for space exploration in general, at least in terms of public awareness, especially now when NASA’s budget joins those of so many other important US agencies on the chopping block, but I wouldn’t exactly get excited over it on its own. Yes, maybe someday, in that increasingly unlikely distant future scenario where we won’t only still exist as a civilization but also thrive and develop enough to reach other star systems and actually find life on them, and possibly even confirm this particular detection, if life is indeed the source of those compounds, the moment will be marked in the history books. But at the moment I see it as mainly a technical matter, a test of what substances current technology may allow us to detect, if used at its very limits, without inferring much from any such detections, and even without really caring about what may, in theory, be inferred.
The thing is that, if life, at least in its simplest forms, is actually common in the universe, we still have a pretty good chance of finding it elsewhere in our solar system, if only we’d actually look. There is also the possibility of finding traces of past life on worlds that are currently completely lifeless, the obvious first option being Mars, but despite the proximity, the existing missions and the chances of actually sending researchers there in a relatively foreseeable future, that actually seems more difficult than finding actual life on the major moons of Jupiter or Saturn. So I for one will hold off any excitement until that happens. Or, of course, until we’ll find signs of technology, of an actual civilization elsewhere in the galaxy, or in the universe in general… But that may well be reason for fear as well…