I have never had much patience for hearsay. Sightings, whispered military programs, grainy footage that somebody swears is real, none of it has ever moved me, because none of it is science. Even the show that first got me thinking seriously about the universe made that distinction for me before I knew I needed it. I loved the X-Files episodes built around actual human monsters, the ones about a genuine psychopath hiding in plain sight, serial killers and I could never get invested in the outer space mythology hanging over the rest of the series. That stuff always felt like theory dressed up as intrigue. I do not do theory. I do facts.
So it says something that the first time in my life outer space actually grabbed me by the collar, it was because of an exoplanet called K2-18b, and because for once, the story wasn’t hearsay. It was peer reviewed data, competing analyses, real scientists arguing with each other in public about what a set of numbers actually means. That argument itself is what did it. Not a UFO. A disagreement about chemistry.
A Planet That Might, or Might Not, Be Breathing. K2-18b sits about 124 light years away in the constellation Leo, orbiting a small, cool red dwarf star so tightly that a full year there lasts just under 33 days. It is nearly nine times the mass of Earth and more than two and a half times as wide, big enough that astronomers put it in its own category entirely, something between our own rocky planet and a gas giant like Neptune. Its atmosphere shows almost no ammonia at all, which in planetary science is close to a signature in itself, because a lack of ammonia paired with methane and carbon dioxide points toward a world with no solid land whatsoever. K2-18b, if the models hold, is an ocean from pole to pole, wrapped in a thick blanket of hydrogen, sitting in exactly the temperature range where that ocean could stay liquid instead of freezing or boiling away.
In 2023, and again in a more detailed pass in 2025, a team led by astronomer Nikku Madhusudhan at Cambridge used the James Webb Space Telescope to report something that made headlines everywhere, possible traces of dimethyl sulfide and a related compound called dimethyl disulfide in that atmosphere, gases that on Earth are produced almost exclusively by marine life like phytoplankton. If that held up, it would have been one of the most significant biosignature candidates ever found outside our own solar system.
Here is where I have to be honest with you, because I promised myself science and facts, and the facts have moved since that first headline. A wave of independent teams went back through the same Webb data using their own methods, and most of them did not find what the original paper found. Several 2025 studies concluded the signal was statistically indistinguishable from instrument noise, that the same spectral wobble could just as easily be explained by ordinary, non-biological molecules, and that there is currently no scientific consensus supporting a biological read of that atmosphere. NASA itself, notably, did not put out a press release when the more detailed 2025 paper came out, which in a field that loves a press release, tells you something about how contested the finding already was inside the room. So the honest, current answer is that nobody knows yet. The chemistry might be alive. It might just be strange. That uncertainty is not a letdown to me. It is the whole reason this is science and not a campfire story.
There is one more piece worth knowing. Earlier this year, astronomers pointed the Very Large Array and the MeerKAT radio telescope at the K2-18 system for the length of one full planetary year, 33 days, specifically hunting for technosignatures, meaning any artificial radio signal that would suggest a civilization rather than just microbes. They found nothing. No transmission, no candidate worth a second look. Whatever is or is not happening in that ocean, it is not sending us a message on purpose.
The Revelation, and Why It Took an Exoplanet to Get There. Here is what actually shifted in me reading through all of this, and it has nothing to do with whether K2-18b turns out to host life. It’s the shape of the story that got me. A planet, sitting in almost the same temperature band as Earth, built from the same basic ingredients, water, carbon, the right kind of star distance, quietly running the same opening moves our own planet ran four billion years ago. Nobody had to custom design that outcome for K2-18b specifically. Give the universe the same raw materials under the same conditions, and it appears to run the same starting sequence, wherever you point the telescope.
That is the closest I have ever come to something I’d be willing to call God, and it looks nothing like the version I grew up being taught to picture. I was raised Jewish, and I fell out of feeling anything for it embarrassingly early, not because of some crisis of faith but because the actual experience of it bored me half to death. Rabbis and teachers repeating the same material week after week, dressing up a handful of stories in grand language, while any kid who couldn’t sit still without doing something productive, which was me, sat there wanting to climb out of his own skin. What I could never get past, even as a kid, was the shape of the stories themselves, a God who reaches down specifically to bless the person who just won something.
Fox Mulder: “When you talk to God, it's called prayer, but when God talks to you, it's called schizophrenia.”
Look at how that instinct still plays out today. Athletes point skyward after a touchdown like it was arranged personally for them. A stadium gets built with an opening in the roof, practically inviting something above to watch the game. People stand in front of a camera thanking God for pulling them out of the exact disaster that, if you follow their own logic, this same God must have allowed to happen in the first place. That is not gratitude, that is a strange kind of one-sided contract where the higher power gets credit for the rescue and no accountability for the wreck. It is the same move, if you want an uncomfortable comparison, that a certain kind of politician makes when he creates a crisis and then wants applause for cleaning it up.
Meanwhile the people who talk least about divine intervention in their own success are often the capitalists, the ones building something from nothing, who tend to credit their own hustle rather than a hand from above, and somehow never seem to need to thank anyone for the money.
Dana Scully: “From Space, it seems an abstraction-- a magician’s trick on a darkened stage. And from this distance one might never imagine that it is alive. It first appeared in the sea almost four billion years ago in the form of single-celled life. In an explosion of life spanning millions of years, nature’s first multicellular organisms began to multiply... and then it stopped. 440 million years ago, a great mass extinction would kill off nearly every species on the planet leaving the vast oceans decimated and empty. Slowly, plants began to evolve, then insects, only to be wiped out in the second great mass extinction upon the Earth.
The cycle repeated again and again. Reptiles emerging, independent of the sea only to be killed off. Then dinosaurs, struggling to life along with the first birds, fish, and flowering plants - their decimations Earth’s fourth and fifth great extinctions. Only 100,000 years ago, Homo Sapiens appear-- man. From cave paintings to the bible to Columbus and Apollo 11, we have been a tireless force upon the earth and off cataloguing the natural world as it unfolds to us. Rising to a world population of over five billion people all descended from that original single cell, that first spark of life. But for all our knowledge, what no one can say for certain, is what or who ignited that original spark.
Is there a plan, a purpose or a reason to our existence? Will we pass, as those before us, into oblivion, into the sixth extinction that scientists warn is already in progress? Or will the mystery be revealed through a sign, a symbol, a revelation?”
I don’t say any of this to mock belief itself. I say it because somewhere in the middle of reading about a distant ocean world quietly running Earth’s oldest script without any instructions from anyone, it clicked for me that the God worth taking seriously isn’t the one who shows up personally for a touchdown.
Augustus Hill: “God knows he’s perfect and we’re not and we can never be but he expects us to be. And he punishes us if we’re not, you know what I’m saying? God is the ultimate gangster. The supremo boss, you know what I mean? Forgiveness, live by his code. Deadness, if we don’t. Yo, he never has to talk to us face to face and he never has to explain exactly why he does what he does. Know what I’m saying? Nigger sits up there in Heaven somewhere, drinking a cappuccino, chilling...
Augustus Hill [singing]: “Got the whole world in his hands.” He got the whole world by the balls. In excelsius deo and all that shit.”
There’s an old idea, going back to a line of dialogue that stuck with me for years, about the strange line between talking to God and having God talk back, and how society treats one of those directions as ordinary and the other as a symptom. That gap always struck me as the whole tell. If nothing on the other end is actually listening or answering, then what’s left standing is not a person up there keeping score. It’s a system. A very good one, running exactly the same on a planet 124 light years away as it did here, without anyone tuning it individually for either address.
The Clockmaker, Not the Coach. It turns out I am not the first person to land here, not even close, and once I saw the shape of the actual philosophy I recognized how old this idea really is.
Deism, the framework that people like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin quietly leaned on during the Enlightenment, describes almost exactly what I’m describing. Not a God who intervenes in your Tuesday, not a hand reaching down for a touchdown, but a Creator who wrote one flawless set of natural laws, set the whole thing running, and stepped back. The clockmaker builds the clock. The clock does not need him checking in on every tick.
There’s a modern cousin of that idea circulating in tech and theology circles now, sometimes called simulation theology, where the laws of physics get described as the operating system and biology as the application running on top of it. It’s not an accident that people who spend their lives building systems, whether in code or in business, are often the ones drawn to this framing. Even the language of DNA gets described that way by people who’ve spent their careers writing software, an instruction set, executing the same way whether it’s copying itself in a human cell or, evidently, in an ocean on the other side of the galaxy.
Then there’s the older, quieter tradition sitting even further back than Enlightenment deism, pantheism, most associated with the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, which does not even bother separating the Creator from the creation. On that view, the “script” isn’t something written once and left running from a distance. It is the thing itself, showing up in every growing cell and every expanding system as one continuous expression of the same underlying substance. You can find nearly the same idea further east, too, in the Tao of Chinese philosophy and the Dharma of Hindu and Buddhist thought, both of which describe an invisible order running underneath everything, one you don’t fight so much as align yourself with if you want anything, a life or a business, to actually work with the grain of the universe instead of against it.
Of every mainstream tradition I was actually raised inside, Judaism, oddly, comes closest to this whole framework, even though it was the version of it delivered to me as a kid that first put me off religion entirely. Not because of its theology of an active, intervening God, which it does hold, but because of its cultural bones. Judaism is built on the Torah and Talmud, colossal, hyper-detailed legal systems that generations of scholars have treated less like scripture to be memorized and more like a codebase to be interrogated, argued over, and stress tested for edge cases. It treats the relationship with God as a covenant, which is really just an old word for a contract, and unlike traditions that treat poverty as virtuous, it treats material success as a legitimate, even expected, outcome of holding up your end of that contract. Follow the rules of the system, and the system is supposed to produce prosperity. That’s a script, dressed in religious clothing, whether or not anyone teaching it to a bored ten year old ever framed it that way.
Calvinism took a version of that same idea somewhere colder. Full predestination, meaning the entire script was written before the universe even started running, with no room for a human being to edit the code partway through. The unsettling twist Calvinists added was that wealth and discipline became the only visible proof you’d been written into the good ending, which is a large part of why the Protestant work ethic ended up baked directly into the DNA of modern capitalism. And then, at the far, least serious end of that lineage, you get the modern prosperity gospel, the megachurch version, which flattens the whole framework into something closer to a vending machine, speak the right words, donate the right amount, and the algorithm is contractually obligated to return wealth and success to you. That one, I’ll be honest, is the version that makes God look most exploited of all, less a Creator than a slot machine everyone insists is rigged in their favor if they just feed it correctly.
The Same Script, Deployed Everywhere. Here’s where this connects back to why this newsletter is even named what it’s named. I’ve spent plenty of pages here arguing about corporations being handed the legal shell of personhood without any of the conscience that’s supposed to come attached to it. But there’s a different, more hopeful version of the corporation-as-organism metaphor sitting underneath all of that, and K2-18b is what finally made it click for me.
A founder who has to personally micromanage every employee at every one of his companies burns out fast and caps how big any of it can get. The founders who actually scale, the ones who end up running a dozen or more companies across completely unrelated markets, do it by building one clean, well-tested operating system, a culture, a playbook, a set of defaults, and then deploying that same system again and again into new environments, trusting it to adapt on its own without a hand on every dial. The system doesn’t need to be reinvented for each new company. It needs to be good enough, once, that it can run itself wherever you drop it.
That is, as far as I can tell, exactly what the universe appears to be doing with life. It didn’t need to write an entirely new set of instructions for K2-18b. Give it water, carbon, the right temperature band, and the same basic script that started running in Earth’s oceans four billion years ago appears to boot up again, on a planet with nearly nine times our mass, a year that lasts 33 days, and gravity heavy enough to flatten you if you tried to stand on it. Whatever is or isn’t alive in that ocean right now, and I’ll say again, honestly, we do not yet know, the deeper pattern underneath it is the part that got me. One scalable blueprint, executing consistently wherever the conditions match, with nobody standing over it flipping switches by hand.
That one organism that grew and evolved into another living organism, and then that grew into yet another organism, and so on, all the way up to animals and humans. I suppose this is close to what Darwinism is as well. It is daunting because it took millions of years to evolve, but at the same time, if there is an all-powerful God, that is where the beauty lies. It set up that course and allowed us to eventually figure it all out.
I still don’t know exactly where that leaves me on the question everybody eventually asks, which box to check, which label to claim. I’m not sure the label was ever the point. If gathering with other people, singing something together, and building a little bit of meaning out of a church and synagogue is what you actually get out of organized religion, I’m fully on board with that. I don’t think you need to call it religion to enjoy it or for it to be meaningful. What I am no longer interested in is a version of God who shows up personally for the touchdown and skips every phone call that actually matters. The clockmaker doesn’t need my applause, and honestly, that’s the version I finally trust. Not because it’s warmer. Because, for the first time, it’s the one actually backed by something other than someone else’s story.