![]() She and her colleagues completed an analysis, uploaded as a preprint in September, showing that SPECULOOS-2c’s water could be in the process of steaming away like sauna vapor, as any seas of Venus did long ago and as Earth’s own oceans will begin to do in half a billion years. Telescope observations should be able to tell within a few years if that’s happening, which will help reveal our own planet’s future and further demarcate the knife’s-edge distinction between hostile and habitable worlds across the galaxy. In simulating ersatz Earths and more speculative visions of living planets, Kaltenegger leverages the bizarre life and geology found on Earth to develop a more systematic set of expectations about what might be possible elsewhere. ![]() “I’m trying to do the fundamentals,” she told me during a recent visit to Cornell University, where she leads an institute named for Carl Sagan, another charismatic Ithaca-based astronomer with big ideas about ending humanity’s lonely sojourn in the cosmos. Her overarching quest - the search for alien life - is entering an unprecedented phase. Barring the bolt-from-the-blue arrival of something like an extraterrestrial radio broadcast, most astronomers believe that our best near-term chance of encountering other life in the cosmos is to detect biosignature gases - gases that could only have come from life - floating in exoplanets’ atmospheres. ![]()
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