We Come in Peace! (With a side of bratwurst)

When humanity first crawled out of the primordial ooze and looked to the stars, we wondered if we are alone in this universe. We keep looking but we still haven’t seen any evidence to suggest that we are not the only ones.

Still, everyone from professional to amateur astronomers have taken on the task and the James Webb Space Telescope seems to have maybe picked up some evidence suggesting that we may not be alone. Over the years, scientists have “discovered” more than 85 exoplanets that reside in the Goldilocks zone of star systems. The Goldilocks zone – of which Earth is located in a prime example – is an area in a star system that is not so close that a planet is too hot or too far in which things are too cold.

One such discovered planet is K2-18b, which is not a real poetic name but you have to call planets and such something. Using spectrometry on the Webb telescope, it might be that there is a potential biosignature. That evidence is possibly dimethyl sulfide, “a smelly substance that on Earth is produced by living organisms,” according to a story on the Futurist website.

The folks at NASA are hesitant to come out and say that we’ve found alien life on a planet about 120 light years away, claiming that a bunch more research needs to be done. That has not stopped the chattering online about this potential discovery.

The big question is what do we do about it? Especially if it turns out that there really is life on K2-18b?

Naturally, we’d want to check this out, maybe even go say hello. Distance, though, makes that difficult. If we could send a message at the speed of light – I suppose we could use a laser or something to do this – it would take 120 years to get to K2-18b and another 120 years for a return message to get back to us, but only is someone gets the message. If we wanted to send a ship of some sort, it would take even longer.

It is kind of cool to think that we have advanced our technology to the point where we may be seeing an alien planet. That’s like science fiction stuff, but if we use our science fiction stories as a starting point, we should maybe be worried what these aliens would be like. Is K2-18b a planet of apes? Or Klingons? Or Wookies?

The clues provided so far indicate something not many would consider. Not be a chemist or a person who memorizes such thing, I looked up dimethyl sulfide. My initial ignorance suggested that “a smelly substance that on Earth is produced by living organisms” would mean farts. Is K2-18b is a fart planet?

That would change the old kids joke, “What planet is brown and stinky?” The answer, of course, is “Uranus.”

Unfortunately, K2-18b is not a planet of farts, denying all of us who enjoy a good fart joke. No such luck with the stench coming off K2-18b. Dimethyl sulfide is the cause of the smell that comes from cooked cabbage. It also comes from cooking seafood and from brewing beer going bad. That gave me a chill up my spine, because in that instant, I knew what these aliens are like. I have met them and they are Polish time travelers, here from 1986 to acclimate us to the stench of cooking cabbage so when they conquer the Earth, we had better be able to deal with the smell.

Let me explain.

We all have a story about our first apartment, and I am no exception. I will be brief, I promise. Years ago, my first apartment was in West Germany during the waning days of the Cold War. The apartment was in what I suspected was an old stable on an anonymous street in an anonymous neighborhood in a small, post war suburb that was a short train ride into Frankfurt. Maybe I shouldn’t brag about it, but it was pretty cool that the first place I ever lived on my own was in a country in which I was the foreigner.

Furthermore, my landlord was a proctologist who, as a boy, had escaped from Prussia as WWII was ending. Years later I had read up on what had happened to the Polish when the Germans pulled out and the Soviets came marching in. It’s a gruesome history not many Americans even think about, let alone even heard about. Klaus’s life’s mission was to help those who had escaped from communism because of the people who had helped him. To do this, he acted as a liaison for refugees from the East so that they could navigate the paperwork and such to integrate themselves into the West. He also liked Americans, so in his little apartment building, he would rent to American service members and Eastern Europeans. Although I didn’t know it at the time, it was a wonderful experience to interact with someone whose life was completely different than mine.

That is how I ended up sharing a bathroom with six Polish guys. That isn’t some anti-Polish joke, they were actual Polish dudes. They didn’t speak English and they had little interest in talking with me, which was just a-okay as far as I was concerned. I thought they were on the take, and Klaus would usually confirm my suspicions. Each weekend they would load up an old Volkswagen Passat with durable goods like car tires, blue jeans, boom boxes and kitchen appliances and drive to the Czechoslovakian border and throw the goods over a fence to awaiting friends who would sell the stuff on the black market.

The rest of the week they would cook cabbage and drink vodka, both of which my landlord claimed was made in a bathtub somewhere. “If they offer you a drink, do not take it,” he would warn me in the only way a middle-aged German proctologist could. He was suspiciously kind and usually shitfaced by 4 in the afternoon.

It wasn’t too long after the Polish guys moved in that I realized that I would probably have to move. I’m not sure what all they were up to, but I know they cooked a lot of cabbage, drank a lot of vodka and constantly argued. Not all the time, but it didn’t really matter, the whole building smelled like cabbage and the bathroom across the hall from my bedroom smelled as you would expect it to smell. I was living in Shrek’s swamp, so I had to find another place.

If you have not got the idea yet, I do not care for cabbage in most of its forms. Furthermore, I cannot understand people who like cooked cabbage. I accept them for who they are but will never understand. There only a few hardcore rules in my house, one is that cabbage shall not be cooked in my home. In addition, anyone who cooks that shit at work in the microwave will get a stern talking to. To cook cabbage in my presence is to feel my wrath.

I know there is the slight possibility that I’m “weird” because of my feelings toward cooked cabbage, as well as a couple dozen other things. I try to avoid confrontation on such things, but have you ever noticed that it’s the people who like the weird foods insist that you try a sample and judge you if you beg off? Especially vegans. I mean, why must I get shit every time I refuse a tomato on my burger or a cup of coffee. “What kind of animal are you?” these friends ask.

If I’m thinking of the Top 5 things that smell bad to me, cooking cabbage would come in at about No. 3 or 4. Have I driven home the point that I hate the smell of cooking cabbage? And now we’ve possibly found a planet that might have life on it. That’s something many people dream of finding. As a youth, I would read pulp science fiction novels left over from the 50s and 60s. There always were stories about first contacts with aliens; most of the time human beings didn’t come out looking good.

It’s still enough to spark my imagination. It would be awesome to be the first human to publicly shake hands with someone from another planet. (We all know they have already been here, but the government keeps that secret, right?) Of course, there are concerns as to their intentions. If we are being honest, we should also concern ourselves with what they have in mind. Humans aren’t especially peaceful and have a habit of jumping to conclusions. In the end, we could all end up either in a zoo or a circus. If I had my choice, I’d rather be a pet.

Stil, I’m a little less enthusiastic about going to a planet that smells like the fourth day of a three-day polka festival. Using the pseudo-scientific method, it is obvious that K2-18bians are Polish refugees with questionable hygiene.

Let me just say, I’ll take myself out of the running to visit such a planet. However, if we happen to run across a planet that smells like cinnamon and apples, sign me up.