The Kombuchan invasion fleet is on its way!

Inhabited like, we should prepare for invasion or inhabited in the same way that a kombucha or yogurt is inhabited? Asking for a pre-warp civilization.

I mean, at this point it'd be a mercy.

Should we make a list?

I'm referring of course to The University of Cambridge's announcement that the James Webb Telescope may have discovered life signs on the tediously named K2-18b. That's a planet, but the way. And exo-planet meaning that it's outside our solar system. Not only that, but at one hundred and twenty-five light years away, it's outside the range of our space probes, although I invite as many billionaires as would like to to try. If they head out now, they should make it by the mid twenty-third century.

For the record, Jeff Bezos's phallic
rocket maxes out at 321 kph.

And that's assuming that they'd be traveling at the speed of light which they definitely wouldn't. The fastest human made object, the Parker Solar Probe launched back in 2018. It made it to 635,266 kph, so if we're talking about something similar, the long disintegrated remains of our intrepid one-percenters might make it to K2-18b around the year 214,524 A.D. But what would they find there? Well, nothing, because again, two-hundred thousand years.

Ok, fine, a third of all sci-fi movies
released in the past fifty years...

But let's say they froze themselves in some kind of Encino Man situation. According to the--huh? Um, the 1992 Brendan Fraser/Pauly Shore comedy about a frozen caveman who is thawed out in the present? If you can think of a better cultural reference point, I'd love to hear it. Whatever, it doesn't matter, the billionaire astronauts are just hypothetical. They're far too busy cheating at Paths of Exile and strangling democracy in America to go to space anyway.

"I don't know, maybe aliens?"

-Some scientist

The important question is what's out there, and the answer is a qualified, "I don't know, maybe aliens?" The life signs I mentioned before are not like Star Trek life signs where they can spot a Ferengi from orbit, but instead signs of dimethyl sulfide, which on Earth is only produced by plankton. Which, cool, so humans have discovered pond water. This is a disappointing decade, isn't it? On the other hand, the Earth has pond water, but it also has a sophisticated, technological civilization.

Oh, and about seventy-seven million rubes who may ultimately lead us into and ignominious extinction, but other than them, we're pretty advanced, so who knows? Maybe someday we'll meet the K2-18b-ians. But I'm getting ahead of myself. This is science, and science requires evidence...contrary to whatever the aforementioned rubes might think. There are still a lot of maybe's here and the researchers hope others will independently verify their findings before they say anything definitive, but this is the most exciting thing to come out of space news in some time. And yes, I'm including Katy Perry in space.

I have nothing against her, but don't people--specifically 

astronauts--work their entire lives to get to go to space? 

Oh well, I guess anyone can do karaoke...