NASAs "habitat words observatory" was ment to be the next major telescope after the Roman space telescope, and was meant to have its primary function be the search for extraterrestrial life which would help tremendously with these kinds of situations.

Was being the key word as apparently the shitbag GOP administration decided they want to axe ALL future telescope programs including the Hubble replacement Nany Roman... Scumbags.

This is just super fucking cool. It's so rad they can pick out chemical signatures from the light passing through a planet's atmosphere from a star 120 light years away. Absolutely gonzo bananas, the JWT is too cool. I will go on a personal mission to punch Donald Trump in the taint if they actually do cut the Roman telescope.

My theory is that the inhabitants of K2-18b are deliberately flooding their atmosphere with dimethyl sulfide to make it unappealing to humans.

I hope they're hostile, contagious, and almost here.

In the best case, the detection is at the 2.4 sigma confidence level (less than the usual 3 for reasonable confidence and will below the 5 required for strong confidence), and if previously suspected issues with the instrument are true, the detection could disappear completely.

I do not have a strong confidence in this result. (But at least they didn't publish it in Nature, in which case you would absolutely know it's wrong...)