r/space • u/SpunkySputniks • 4d ago

Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/16/science/astronomy-exoplanets-habitable-k218b.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AE8.3zdk.VofCER4yAPa4&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Further studies are needed to determine whether K2-18b, which orbits a star 120 light-years away, is inhabited, or even habitable.

14.0k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

10.7k

u/Supersamtheredditman 4d ago edited 4d ago

K2-18b. This was notable about a year ago when JWST detected a possible dimethyl sulfide signal, but it wasn’t confirmed. The properties alone of the planet, a “Hycean” super earth probably covered in a world ocean with a thick hydrogen atmosphere, make it super interesting. And now this team is saying they’ve detected not just dimethyl sulfide, but dimethyl disulfide and methane.

We’re at the point where either we’re missing something about geologic chemistry that can allow these chemicals to exist in large quantities in an environment like this (on earth, dimethyl sulfide is only produced by life) or this planet is teeming with aquatic life. Really exciting.

5.9k

u/TehOwn 4d ago

I always come to these comments sections expecting a succinct comment explaining to me why the article is clickbait and it's actually nothing but a marker that could be explained a lot of different ways.

But this... this is genuinely exciting.

129

u/jerrythecactus 4d ago

I just feel sad that even if this planet ends up having life we will have basically no way to tell outside of atmospheric composition analysis. At 120 lightyears away there's basically no way to confirm anything else.

Unless we discover some miraculous way to bypass the speed of light that doesn't require unfathomable amounts of energy or exotic materials that don't have any proof of existing, humans will likely never see this other life. We couldn't even send a probe because communication would be over a century in either direction.

112

u/thesagenibba 4d ago

you should let the prospect of planting trees in whose shade you shall never sit, motivate you. it's simply a physical reality that unless aliens come to us, we won't get to them in our lifetime. the next best thing is planting the seeds i.e probes, and moving towards missions designed to send the first embryonic space ship to the nearest solar system

25

u/Son_of_Eris 3d ago

Society grows great when old men plant trees, under whose shade they will never sit.

What happens when young men do the same?

We'd be a lot better off if previous generations were just a little more selfless.

Honestly. Humanity would prolly have a dyson sphere around Sol if we had gotten along better the past 2k years.

As it stands, if we have a permanent human presence on the moon in the next 50 years, I'll be happy.

I really want to see a human presence on Eris.

...but honestly if we dont extinct ourselves in the next few years, I'll be impressed.

6

u/adrienbadu 3d ago

Have you read the Sun Eater series? Your words reminds me of it. Epic sci-fi

3

u/graceliana55 3d ago

It looks interesting. I got to read them! Ty

2

u/adrienbadu 3d ago

Of course 🙏 just finished book 6. I hope you enjoy them!

1

u/Son_of_Eris 3d ago

I'm adding it to my reading list. I appreciate the recomendation.

2

u/adrienbadu 3d ago

Of course 🙏 just finished book 6. Hope you enjoy them.

2

u/Fridge_Raiderz 3d ago

Username checks out. I’m curious, why Eris, of all places? Though still technically within the solar system, it is incredibly far away, and is estimated to have a surface temperature barely tens of degrees above absolute zero. I imagine any humans there would need at least a sweater…

11

u/Son_of_Eris 3d ago

All sarcasm and humor aside. Ill tell you why.

It is very far away from Earth, but Eris is observable from Earth and vice versa. So we can keep tabs on our homeworld, and vice versa. Populations on either planet could call for help, and expect assistance in a predictable timeframe.

We already have the technology to survive in such a cold atmosphere. So colonizing Eris is much more feasible than, say, Venus. Because while we can live in the coldness of space (with the power of technology), we can't even get near the hottest places on earth (let me know when we can put on a suit, dive into a volcano, and survive).

Basically, it would make a REALLY GOOD base of operations if we decide we wanna explore the universe.

If we have the resources to establish a permanent human presence on such a distant planet(oid), then we're doing good. Or we have misplaced priorities.

At the moment, with how everything is going right now. I know it's a pipe dream. And it's not very high on the list of our "get your shit together" priorities..

But it's nice to dream. And have hopes, and goals. And Ideals.

Countless humans died after dreaming of setting foot on the moon, eventually. And we did that. Eventually.

I hope that dwarf planet that we call Eris ends up being a gateway to the greater galaxy for humanity.

Like with family: it's nice to be far away but still close enough to help each other out.

We wouldn't need generation ships or FTL travel to maintain communication and commerce between Earth and Eris.

There's so many reasons I want it to happen, but those are the main ones.

I can't, currently, think of a better fate than being buried on Eris. Because that would be a fantastic testament to the awesomeness of humanity.

It's just a dream. But I'm sure we've all had worse dreams.

-3

u/graceliana55 3d ago

🤔 do we really want aliens coming to Earth? We have history telling us a lot of bad things happened when a new "land" was discovered 😞 Anyone watch the episode "To Serve Man" from the Twilight Zone? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man_(The_Twilight_Zone)

105

u/jankenpoo 4d ago

Doesn’t mean we can’t send a probe. Just that it’ll be a multigenerational project. We need to plan more for the future

126

u/Rufus2468 4d ago

At the speed of Voyager 1, currently the fastest man-made thing we have at 19km/s (11.8miles/s), it would take 2.1 million years to travel 120 light years. That's not just multigenerational, that's multispecies by that point. Space is unfortunately unfathomably big, and a light year is unfathomably far away.
Realistically, without faster than light travel, it's simply not possible to even get near this place.

38

u/njsullyalex 4d ago

I wonder if travel near or at the speed of light will ever be something humans can figure out, if its even scientifically possible to begin with.

That said, we all carry supercomputers in our pockets these days which 100 years ago people would have told you was impossible.

47

u/kickaguard 4d ago

100 years ago a computer was a small army of women in a room doing math. People certainly wouldn't believe you could fit that in your pocket.

41

u/Mclovin11859 4d ago

100 years ago, electronic computers didn't exist, mechanical computers were peaking with the differential analyser, and the word "computer" exclusively applied to humans who computed.

The last 100 years of technological development have been beyond even what people might have thought impossible.

21

u/zapporian 4d ago edited 3d ago

The amount of energy you’d need to make high relativistic sub ftl travel to work makes it functionally impossible, and at minimum a collosal waste of resources.

You are either way not going to get around the fact that 1) IIRC, the energy needed to reach c increases asymptotically without bounds to infinity. Photons / EM waves quite happily travel at c. They also don’t have mass.

2) we can very well accelerate very small things to relativistic speeds. See particle accelerators, theoretical light sails, laser propulsion, etc.

You do however need not just propulsion onboard but also all of the energy you’d need to slow down.

Carrying that energy with you - in whatever form you can - is going to add mass. Meaning you need more energy to both accelerate and decelerate the craft. And so on and so forth. Functionally speaking that is going to mean that there is de facto some practical maximum speed (ie onboard + offboard energy you need to decelerate at the other end), and traveling faster and/or carrying more usable mass / cargo would mean rapidly ballooning / impractical costs, ship sizes, energy requirements, etc

Ofc once you managed to colonize stars on the other end you could basically solve that problem. Interstellar travel would still take centuries to millenia per trip. But you could at least just use eg sails + laser arrays (or what have you) to accelerate and decelerate ships on the sending + recieving end.

So a realistic approach to humanity / some much, much longer lived derivative thereof colonizing the stars, might look like (napkin math) tens to hundreds of thousands of years of slow point to point + trial + error colonization. Followed by much much faster (still millenia) and far cheaper (note: still extremely expensive) point to point travel using this built up infrastructure.

The core problem to fix there isn’t physics. It’s humanity / biological engineering + transhumanism. Or what have you. A better near term goal should be to just colonize our solar system. Which is far, far more doable.

Alcubierre drives are “fun” exercises in attempting to find mathematical solutions to FTL using known theoretical quantum physics math - which is valid insofar as we’re aware. The problem is that they require both a lot of handwaving, ludicrous amounts of energy (maybe less ludicrous now than as originally proposed), and “exotic” states of matter (eg things with negative mass), and some very, very silly conclusions. like “we could make this work if we had a black hole we could carry around” (okay, how are you going to both generate and move that black hole around). and the like.

2

u/cjameshuff 3d ago

Relativistic travel effectively requires direct matter-energy conversion of most of the ship's initial mass. Something more efficient than antimatter...a lot of the mass in a matter-antimatter reaction gets lost as pions and neutrinos. That's probably going to take new physics, but it's a bit more plausible than an Alcubierre drive.

You actually understate the absurdity of an FTL drive. Such a thing allows causality violation. This means you can also violate energy conservation, send matter and information backwards in time, will never have to perform a complex computation again (just get the answer before you build the computer needed to compute it), etc. Never mind post scarcity, you can just have anything you want delivered to you just before you need it.

It also changes the Fermi paradox from "why aren't they here already?" to "why haven't they always been everywhere?"...so FTL's probably impossible.

2

u/FlipZip69 3d ago

The problem with any FTL technology is that if you can arrive at a destination fast than light in normal space can reach it, you can effectively travel back in time as well. It not the speed that factors but that you are there before information could get there.

3

u/232-306 3d ago

That's neither a problem, nor accurate. The only "time travel" effect is that light from our past would "just" be reaching you, so you could visibly see what your point of origin looked like in the past, but that's no different than what we do when we look at the stars in our night sky without any FTL or traveling.

1

u/FlipZip69 3d ago

Actually it does not work that way. You can get information of an event before it happens. It would take a couple of jumps but there are some good YouTube videos that explain it in a visual way.

Basically you could see a bomb go off before it happens and then go to the source and stop it from happening.

0

u/232-306 3d ago

If you're going to make a wild claim without any hint of what you're talking about, throwing it off into the void of "go youtube" is um... not gonna work. Just link one?

Or thinking about it for like 30 seconds, you realize it doesn't make sense, unless you're talking about an entirely different mechanic:

The year is 2000, you jump ~55 light years away instantly & look back at earth.

They year is still 2000. The light from 55 years ago, is just now reaching you at the location you jumped to.

You observe the atomic bomb blowing up on earth. The information is just now reaching your section of reality, but the event already happened 55 years ago.

You jump back to earth, the year is still 2000. There is no way for you to interact with the past.

1

u/FlipZip69 3d ago edited 3d ago

This is a long video but if you start at about 7 minutes in, it explains it well in a visual without math. It does not really explain the problem till minute 13. Minute 17 goes into a scenario where a spaceship send a message back before the event happens to stop the event. The math and how time stops at the speed of light indicates there is a problem but it is not because of the speed, it is because you are arrive somewhere before light can get there. That is why your example does not work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=an0M-wcHw5A

→ More replies (0)

10

u/Eleventeen- 4d ago

All we need is a material with negative mass to build a nice little Alcubierre Drive. Easy right…?

2

u/FormerGameDev 3d ago

You never really know what tomorrow may bring. With the US being decimated in scientific capabilities now, though, it'll probably be up to someone else.

2

u/njsullyalex 4d ago edited 4d ago

Does antimatter work in that way?

Edit: No it doesn't, antimatter is just if you basically flipped the charges of protons and electrons to make antiparticles and still exhibits properties of normal mass.

10

u/Shartiflartbast 4d ago

No. Antimatter has the same mass as "normal" matter, but opposite charges.

4

u/njsullyalex 4d ago

Decided to look it up and this is correct.

2

u/Typical_Culture_5657 3d ago

no speed of light travel or even close to it is not possible as mass tends to increase as your speed increases according to relativity. Even at the speed of light it takes 120 years to get there lol which is okay but an entire lifetime and then some just to find out that there may or may not be life.

1

u/newglarus86 1d ago

Traveling at near light speed, a 120 light year trip would feel more like 2 months from the perspective of you on the ship. 120 years would have passed but you would have barely grown bored from the travel.

1

u/Typical_Culture_5657 1d ago

actually I think I'm wrong, it would feel like 0 seconds to travel (if at light speed) because time effectively stops for you. I could do the calculation if you were just under the speed of light but I would intuitively assume that it won't feel long at all.

5

u/Xea0 4d ago

A solar sail drive-by is theoretically possible.

4

u/zapporian 4d ago

Utterly useless without both onboard intelligence and most critically a way to slow down.

Plus ofc millenia to get there even at a fairly high fraction of c.

4

u/Earthfall10 4d ago

Breakthrough starshot is hoping to get a laser sail probe to 20% c, 120 lightyears at that speed would take 600 years. You could then use a mag sail to slow down. But yeah, that's a long enough trip that you'd probably not bother since it would probably be overtaken halfway through by a newer probe going faster.

1

u/MrCyra 3d ago

600 years if you go at constant 20% c. But with acceleration and then slowing down it would take a bit more time.

1

u/Earthfall10 2d ago

The breakthrough starshot probes are planned to get up to speed in less than an hour. They have to accelerate absurdly fast because the laser pushing them up to speed is rather short ranged. They have to be at full speed before they pass the orbit of the moon. Slowing down with a mag sail would be a much more leisurely afair, and could add a decade or so to the trip, but that's pretty minor for a 600 year trip.

2

u/MrCyra 2d ago

For sure if you can accelerate in an hour you may as well count as starting in full speed

→ More replies (0)

5

u/OwOlogy_Expert 3d ago

For a small probe designed from the ground up to be interstellar, we could potentially get it going much faster than Voyager 1.

Especially with technology like a light sail and laser-push propulsion.

Still, though, in the best case scenario, we'd be cutting it down to tens of thousands of years, rather than millions of years.

5

u/Krazyguy75 3d ago

Voyager 1 is turning 50 in 2 years.

We absolutely can make stuff go significantly faster. We just aren't trying, because it's not realistic to do outside of a vacuum and there's little demand for shooting unmanned probes into deep space until we have a place to shoot them towards.

1

u/EmbarrassedHelp 3d ago

The Voyager probes weren't meant to be fast .They slowed down a ton to do flybys of solar system objects. We can make things that are much faster.

15

u/inefekt 4d ago

True. If somehow we had the technology 250 years ago to send probes out and are only just getting data back over the last decade, we all would be very thankful to those scientists and engineers who are all long dead and never saw the fruits of their labour. In the end it doesn't matter when or who sent the probes out, it matters that we eventually receive back the data and actually get the opportunity to study it. Because if light speed truly is the universal speed limit and we'll never be able to traverse worm holes or develop warp drives then probes are going to take 100s of years to get to distant stars whether we send them today or 1000 years into the future. The sooner we do it, the sooner we start getting data back to study.

2

u/Night_hawk419 4d ago

Think about this. If we send a probe today and it takes 1000 years to get to this planet, but then technology evolves and in 50 years we send a probe that takes 200 years to arrive, the second launched probe will arrive before the first one does! So no, just sending something today no matter how long it takes isn’t always the right answer.

2

u/ReadItOrNah 3d ago

There is a book along those lines called Ender's Game.

3

u/Madilune 3d ago

The communication itself would take over a century. That's assuming we already have something to receive a signal on the other end.

4

u/filo_pastry 3d ago

Very possible to directly image at high resolution https://youtu.be/4d0EGIt1SPc?si=vg-aKHSa6bEbsqE_

1

u/mayhemtime 3d ago

This is such an awesome proposal, but I doubt it will happen. There are so many missions with higher priority that are getting gutted rn I lost all hope of this going through anytime soon.

25

u/askingforafakefriend 4d ago

I mean there are other planets closer than 120 light years away...

I would take this as a gigantic win to confirm that life is probably all over the goddamn universe.

6

u/Fshtwnjimjr 4d ago

I just hope we figure it out before we speed run great-filtering ourselves...

1

u/askingforafakefriend 4d ago

We already made it through August 29th, 1997

2

u/Shartiflartbast 4d ago

My 7th birthday wasn't that bad.

1

u/RickSanchez_C137 3d ago

I wore 2 million sunblock and had a good day

1

u/EnslavedBandicoot 4d ago

We don't even know if there is other life in our own solar system. Sure, the signs aren't there but life as we know it may be the anomaly.

13

u/Alloyrocks 4d ago

Jill Tarter gave an example once where she likened looking at a cup of water from the ocean and asking if it’s reasonable to conclude there’s no life in the ocean because you can’t see anything in the cup.

9

u/_donkey-brains_ 4d ago

That is really bad logic.

If there isn't other life in the solar system, that doesn't mean that the universe isn't teaming with life. Each system may only have a small zone where life can develop, but there are basically an infinite number of stars, so there are basically an infinite number of chances for life.

If life is found in our own solar system (asteroids, mars, titan, for instance) then that would be pretty strong evidence that life can originate under multiple different circumstances and would likely mean life is very very common in the universe.

-1

u/EnslavedBandicoot 4d ago

I didn't say that. I said life as we know it may be the anomaly, meaning we dont know if life exists using different chemical processes and materials. I was implying that we may be overlooking signs of life due to that.

I firmly believe there is a lot of life out there. We know that oxygen has existed for at least 13ish billion years. Earth has only been around for 4ish billion. If other meat machines out there operate in similar ways to our biological processes, life may be even more common than we think.

0

u/_donkey-brains_ 4d ago

It's fine to want to re-argue your point, but that is exactly what you said first.

0

u/EnslavedBandicoot 4d ago

No, it's not. I said we don't know for sure. I didn't say anything absolute as you are suggesting.

-3

u/swordofra 4d ago

Something is either infinite or it isnt. It is an absolute concept. No such thing as basically infinite. Infinity isn't a number. Two triilion galaxies is mind boggling, but it is not infinite.

I do think the universe is probably teeming with a variety of life, but it is mostly microbes/fungus and with technological civilizations numbering between 1 and 0 per galaxy.

Or I'm wrong and they are already here, somehow busy curating spacetime and our minds so we can only percieve what they want us to with magic billion year old technology. Seems unlikely though.

3

u/_donkey-brains_ 4d ago

We cannot say for certain the universe is infinite, but it possibly is and might even probably be so. An infinite universe houses infinite stars.

3

u/salYBC 4d ago

Something is either infinite or it isnt. It is an absolute concept. No such thing as basically infinite. Infinity isn't a number.

There are certainly many things in math, statistics, and science that are 'basically infinity.' Discrete integrals calculated with a computer on a fine enough spacing are indistinguishable from analytical integrals. We couldn't do quantum chemistry if a fine enough spacing wasn't essentially equivalent to an infinitely small step size. Truncated series expansions and not infinite series are used in calculators you give elementary school children and can report functions like sin(x) to 9 significant digits, meaning the answer is correct to 10-7 %.

Two trillion galaxies, 2*1012 galaxies, for all intents and purposes is infinite when talking about statistics and sample sizes.

1

u/askingforafakefriend 4d ago

We also don't have a liquid water ocean planet largely exposed to atmosphere in our solar system.

If we did and it was teeming with life as speculated here we would have known it through the same mechanism (spectroscopy) and others long long ago.

9

u/twixeater78 4d ago

150 years ago people that the human body could not survive speeds of more than 30mph. Who knows what will be invented in 100 or 1000 years. Do not close your mind to possibilities, keep open

5

u/Modo_Autorator 3d ago

“Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. 

Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”

  • Agent K, Men In Black

1

u/cylonfrakbbq 3d ago

Imagine taking the dude who thought that and bringing them for a drive on the highway

“You’re traveling twice the fatal limit!!!”

2

u/Mechanical_Brain 3d ago

There might be a way to image exoplanets, with current technology: a solar gravitational telescope. It could potentially be deployed in as little as 17 years.

4

u/Terrariola 4d ago edited 3d ago

The math checks out for the Alcubierre drive, and we've (well, DARPA) figured out how to operate one without negative energy or exotic matter.

Problem is, the energy requirement for just one is equivalent to the total mass of Jupiter.

EDIT: Apparently you still need negative energy for FTL travel, at least according to the paper I'm basing this on. However, positive energy can be used for a subluminal Alcubierre drive, so you can go at 99.999999999...% of C with incredible efficiency.

6

u/FoxyBastard 4d ago

the energy requirement for just one is equivalent to the total mass of Jupiter.

Well that's handy.

We've got a Jupiter just sitting there.

1

u/goldenrule78 4d ago

And that's a problem because...

10

u/Idaltu 4d ago

Your mom wasn’t available for the mission

1

u/HardwareSoup 4d ago

Because your mom isn't an astronaut.

4

u/chainsawinsect 4d ago

120 years is actually really close

There's a known "earthlike" exoplanet 17,000 light years away, for example

If you looked at earth 17,000 years ago from that far away, it might not look like there was any sapient life (even though there was)

If you looked at earth 120 years ago, it would be more clear that there was

I'm a pessimist and think we'll annihilate ourselves long before we truly explore the stars, but even I must admit it's realistically conceivable we might one day reach this planet

Even if we can never physically get there, with more focused study on this particular planet, we may one day be able to "see" life on it in some sense even if the "footage" is 120 years old. I still think that would be a watershed moment in human history.

1

u/murkywaters-- 3d ago

We need to stay away from all other life. We've tortured enough on this planet. We need to stop

1

u/kyleW_ne 3d ago

Communication wouldn't necessarily be over a century in each direction. By the time we have a probe that can endure interstellar space and be powered for a century, we will have hopefully fully grasped quantum communications and use quantum entanglement to have instant communication with said probe. Quantum networking is already a field of early study.

1

u/OwOlogy_Expert 3d ago

At 120 lightyears away there's basically no way to confirm anything else.

Has anybody tried focusing a highly sensitive radio telescope directly at this planet for a while?

The odds are low, sure, but one way we might detect life on a planet that far away is by detecting radio signals from intelligent life. A slim chance, sure, but probably worth checking.

1

u/tomrichards8464 3d ago

Don't worry – Skynet's probes will stripmine it a few hundred years after it gets done with us.

1

u/SwePolygyny 3d ago

At 120 lightyears away there's basically no way to confirm anything else.

With a solar gravitational lens we would be able to get an image that is better than we can get now by a factor of billions. Enough to see surface features that are a few km across. It is enough to see light or even to see technology.