The Trump administration is quite possibly the biggest enemy of scientific advancement in the history of mankind. These people’s entire worldview is antithetical to the scientific process, and it’s hard to find another group of folks after the Dark Ages who stood so opposed to the basic tenets of scientific discovery. Trump and his unelected ketamine billionaire Elon Musk have destroyed American science, potentially for a generation or more, as the very essence of research at vital government agencies like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is in the midst of being shut down by a bunch of pig-headed doofuses who on a relative basis to the rest of mankind, are the dumbest people that humanity has ever produced.
But I might be able to expand that insult to beings throughout the greater universe, because the New York Times published a pretty astonishing article yesterday titled “Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet.”
This is the headline the Fox Mulder “I want to believe” part of my brain has been waiting for my entire life, with an important “possible” qualifier. This is not confirmed, and a lot more study on planet K2-18b needs to be done to get anywhere in the zip code of the confirmation of life, but the core discovery is very compelling. A study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters by astronomers at the University of Cambridge details measurements made around this planet that suggest it has an abundance of dimethyl sulfide. As far as we understand on this planet, the only source of that molecule is life.
K2-18b seemingly has more dimethyl sulfide than earth does, suggesting that this is not some faint signature, but a planet potentially teeming with life. ‘Are we alone’ is one of the core questions surrounding mankind in a universe that only gets bigger and older every time we look out at it, and short of someone else answering that question for us, science is the only way we will find out. And we might be on the road to answering one of life’s great mysteries, all thanks to the magic of science. Again, it needs to be stressed that this is not conclusive, and other researchers have argued that K2-18b could be a huge rock with a vast magma ocean and a thick hydrogen atmosphere producing these supposed lifelike results, and that dynamic is hardly conducive to any kind of life that we know of.
But this is the fun of discovery, the thing that gets scientists out of bed in the morning, to find data that answers life’s most pressing questions. Everything around us is built through the magic of science, and this article detailing the crossover between science and one of man’s most existential questions is a nice reprieve from the daily horrors of the Trump admin…hold on…I’m getting word that there is still more of the article left. I am being told to fast-forward to the kicker.
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to cut NASA’s science budget in half, eliminating future space telescope and other astrobiology projects. If that happens, Dr. Krissansen-Totton said, “the search for life elsewhere would basically stop.”
Oh come the fuck on, man. Is there no momentary reprieve from this hell? I can’t take a five-minute break to read the newest scientific advancement on the search for life without this guy wiping his ass on the carpet in front of me? Of course, just as we get our best lead yet, Trump has to ruin it. Why wouldn’t he? He ruins everything, that’s the ethos of Trumpism. There’s no real ideology at the base of it, just a bunch of people permanently stuck in stasis as a 14-year-old boy. Something as awe-inspiring as the scientific advancement of all mankind’s knowledge of the universe doesn’t even register to these people because they have their heads so far up their own asses that they can’t experience the world any other way than inhaling their own colon.
Maybe K2-18b is teeming with life. Maybe it’s just some kind of small organism sitting on what is theorized to be vast oceans on this Neptune-like Hycean planet. Or maybe the striking dimethyl sulfide signatures are leading us to discover a diversity of life on K2-18b similar to, or exceeding that of our planet. Or maybe it’s not a Hycean planet and it is just a big giant rock filled with magma, but that discovery would still help this broader search for life out in the cosmos by ruling out something that registers a signature so compelling that the New York Times prints it. Regardless of what this mystery is, it’s a genuine mystery, but entirely because of Trump, we may never solve it.
Trump take egg. Trump take economy. Trump take science. Trump take aliens. The Trump take meme has taken off because it’s true, right down to its literal core. He’s just taking things without giving anything back. You can mathematically measure this damage through the economic gyrations right now where investors around the globe are doing the unthinkable and selling America. The bond market genuinely was screaming “crisis ahead” entirely on the back of his tariff announcement and nothing else. Trump is cutting cancer research and weather forecasting and all sorts of other fundamental scientific infrastructure built into people’s lives with no plan on how to save lives going forward, because Trumpism isn’t about improving people’s lives or even building a society. Trumpism is a childish temper tantrum that values destruction for destruction’s sake because owning the libs is its only animating principle. If there are aliens out there, it seems far likelier that they will pop in to say hi than be discovered by Donald Trump, but if aliens only want to connect with intelligent life in the cosmos, I’m not sure they’ll be stopping by our planet any time soon.
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