Why Aliens and Volcanoes Go Together

The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia. It was a good fit: Lovelock believed that the living and inanimate parts of the Earth formed a single, interacting, and self-regulating system. Lovelock’s work grew, in part, out of research he had done for NASA, and published in a 1965 Nature paper, about the signs of life we might look for on other planets.

Forty-six years later, NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope discovered the planet Kepler-22b. It was one of the first planets outside of our solar system confirmed orbiting a sun-like star at a distance that would allow for liquid water to exist on its surface. The availability of liquid water, which is essential to every form of life that we know of, would raise the chances that the planet harbors life. Also, Kepler-22b’s estimated density suggests that it may be composed of rock, which means it might be able