Commentary

Seventy-two beats a minute

April 24, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Gentlemen! Start your engines and get ready for Planet K2-18b! What is 7 trillion miles or 124 Light Years to the likes of you? Forget Mars – we already know there is no one there to colonize – boring! The moon? That is only a rock which, if we over-mine it, which is guaranteed, we could actually throw the earth off its kilter so that the only thing about this planet that has not been molested – its daily spin and its yearly orbit around the sun – could be shifted even ever so slightly.

“Har, har,” says the elephant – try living with that! 

Forget the moon; just appreciate it for the fun eclipses it creates from time to time.

Pack your snorkels and tanks for Planet K2-18b – and we will have to do something about that for a name: we’ll just stage a competition but K2-18b is entirely water! A whole planet, two and a half times the size of Earth is one all-consuming ocean and the promise is that it is TEEMING with life. So, that is either lunch forever or abundant slaves once we find a way to dry them out.

Hold on, hold on. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk both know what I’m talking about: a planet far far away but still spotting and identifying and giving that ID of K2-18b has postulated that there is life there.

Quoting this first in on the BBC: “The strongest evidence of life on another planet yet – a Cambridge team studying the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b has detected signs of molecules which on Earth are only produced by simple organisms.

“This is the second, and more promising, time chemicals associated with life have been detected in the planet’s atmosphere by Nasa’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).”

Best of all: “… Prof. Madhusudhan [lead researcher at Cambridge] went further: “If we confirm that there is life on K2-18b, it should basically confirm that life is very common in the galaxy.”

How I love that man. He has bounced that bowling ball right down the middle of the alley to give us, at long last, a full strike.

Finally and at last we will be able to stop boasting or snivelling or straight-out denying that we are it for the whole infinite, as we are beginning to believe the universe – the one planet only that has produced the miracle that is …us. That, otherwise we are all alone – wahhh.

Indeed, Dr. Robert Massey, who is the deputy executive director of the Royal Astronomical Society, London UK did make the point that when one understands the emergence of life on Earth, how it was so complex. It took such a long time for multi-cellular life to emerge and then evolve into diverse life forms.

From our essentially non-existent knowledge of who else has evolved and to what extent on other worlds, now that we must admit to those possibilities, we ought to step back about how hard we boast.

The burning questions begin. Are other life forms of intelligence and ingenuity as war-like as we? Do they lust after the nests and benefits of each other in ways that insist on murder? Do they despise their own planet and have clear systems invented to deplete it, perhaps as an excuse to discover and conquer other worlds?

Do they create their own forms of beauty in addition to what exists naturally in their own lands? Do they have versions of love and anything like family?

Back to Jeff and Elon, Gold Metal Boasters by anyone’s standards. 

The great scientist, Stephen Hawkins warned us well before his death, that if mankind is to survive, he must find another world in which to live, as we have ruined this one beyond sustaining us much longer.

Clearly, Elon’s very short-sighted plans for Mars, which a reasonably bright child could have told him were doomed to failure, must be just about off the books by now.

And as for Jeff – I don’t know what his spaceship dreams have been except to have a flourishing Space Tourism Business but there is a caveat I really ought to offer him: Garbage. Tourism necessarily leads to the disposal of lots of garbage, already a big problem cluttering the space around the earth, to the point, as I understand it that much more garbage and a flight to the great beyond will be stalled by all the rubbish blocking the way out.

Boys, I’m telling you. Combine your forces and start getting really big ships ready for multi-generational one-way journeys to – well – K2-18b or just head in a direction like the sailors of old, dipping their oars in the Ocean. Certainly, space has been compared to that and it is time to let the rhetoric become the plans.

The tremendous news about K2-18b opening the floodgate to our knowing and eventually accepting that there are other planets with life arrived just before World Earth Day and what could be more poignant?

The brave tenacity of many people to save this world, to treasure its miracles – like bees – sees the news there are other planets where other miracles might exist. It will take many of our own generations and considerable changes to how we think to make contact with them. 

Now that we realize that, we had better roll up our sleeves and prove Stephen Hawkins wrong by saving Earth so the generations following us can continue to live here and some distant day, meet other beings with pride….

Now that we know: A fitting discovery for Earth Day

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