Nearest planet with possible life

 Hayter for May 1, 2025

“Speaking of Wonderments…”

            Everyone buckle up, because you’re about to venture into the area of wonderment. The universe is full of those things. Example: Before falling asleep last night, I heard a thud somewhere inside the house or at the front door. Over the years, I’ve managed to pass along some of my responsibilities to Kay. Unfortunately, things that go bump in the night are a responsibility she has not learned to accept. 

So, I got my rear out of bed, looked for my rifle, but had to settle on a plunger in the bathroom. I gave the house a quick once-over and noticed nothing that would’ve caused a loud thump. I didn’t go outside because all I had was a plunger. I feared a burglar might attack a guy who was carrying a toilet implement. When I climbed back in bed, I told Kay that the house was secure. She asked if I had seen anything outside. I assured her that I hadn’t. Fortunately, she had no follow-up.

 Bottom line: There was no explanation for the sound, thus making it a wonderment. Somewhat like the UFO, my friend Johnny and I saw while camping on the beach southwest of Galveston. I wrote about that several years back. 

But forget that… if you can. Today, I have chosen something weird about a recent discovery of the closest planet to Earth that shows evidence of life. It was named K2-18b after Elon Musk’s battery-powered dump truck. Just a guess.

K2-18b is 120 light years from Earth. Light travels 187,000 miles a second. It travels 5.88 trillion miles in a year. The fastest spaceship the U.S. has travels a little under 400,000 mph while in space. At that speed, it would take our fastest unmanned spacecraft 1700 years to make it to K2-18b. 

So the planet we see through our telescopes is what it looked like 1700 years ago. Were we willing to send men and women to K2, it would require a considerable number of men and women on the spaceship. The purpose being so they could reproduce on the way out there. By the time the ship reached its destination, there would’ve been 85 generations of astronauts who had been born and died on the trip. 

I tell you that, to tell you this: The only way we would be able to meet creatures from that distance, is if they were dumb enough to send a spaceship to Earth several centuries ago. Perhaps your great-grandchildren could welcome them. Unless the life expectancy of creatures from K2 is way longer than ours, whatever creatures arrived here would have no memory of their planet. None of them surviving the trip would have any memory of home… because they had known only the spaceship in which they’d been traveling. 

This wonderment has awakened me to movies about monsters from outer space. I think those movies are somewhat fabricated. For one thing, the monsters from the movies travel in spaceships that go faster than the speed of light. Even Spock and Captain Kirk were able to do that.  

Scientists have figured out that if we were able to travel beyond the speed of light, we would end up travelling back in time. Were we to land on a planet with humanoids, we wouldn’t know if they were older or younger, because we’d never seen them before. Work with me, here. 

Scientists say that it is impossible to travel faster than light. Depending on your post-light speed, once you reach your destination, you would be younger than when you left. That means the travelers would be able to live forever, but only if they chose to return to the spaceship before dying of old age. 

All of this begs the question: if you keep getting younger, will you lose the memories you had when you began your trip? I realize that several of you are thinking, “Who gives a rat’s rear about any of this?” -- Answer: Only a person who is big on wonderments. -- Or someone who is nuts. Pick one.

This leads us to my second wonderment. Last week, I read a couple of articles about the best places in the country to live. Here is one of them: “Conroe is officially on the map as one of the most sought-after towns in the country.” I began counting all of the towns in the country and found there to be more than I could count.

Our second and last wonderment has to do with the fact that Conroe was rated 19^th as the best town in the nation due to its  “family-friendly activities, a picturesque lake, a lower crime rate, and affordable housing.” On the day following the publication, there were numerous comments on Facebook, some liking the article and most tearing the daylight out of it. I think some of the comments were meant to keep people from moving here.

There was a third article about the best subdivisions in the country. The Woodlands was rated the second-best place in the country to raise your family. They used pretty much the same criteria with emphasis on the schools. The Woodlands rated high. Splunkston, Idaho, not so much.

The wonderment I found in my reading had to do with the thought that each article might’ve been paid for by commercial real-estate ads.  Both pieces rated several Texas towns and subdivisions high on the list. 

The first secondary school established in the Americas was Boston Latin School back in 1635. The wonderment of that comes from the speed at which I was able to find the information. When I was in college, if I could’ve gathered this much information in a matter of seconds, I could’ve easily gotten a PhD. I don’t know what I would’ve done with it, but Faris and Elsie Hayter would’ve been proud.

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