A recent New York Times article was one of those pieces that make you think — not necessarily because its conclusions are profound but because its questions are. The author of “The Most Promising Worlds Beyond Our Solar System” writes about research documenting the existence of planets orbiting other stars and ponders whether any might be earthlike, i.e., conducive to supporting life.

Lots of factors influence that. Is the planet close enough to its star to allow liquid water to exist, but not too close to be irradiated by that star? Does the planet have an atmosphere, and is it a nontoxic one?

For right now, it’s something to make you think. “Astronomers will continue to search for the earthiest exoplanets they can find with modern-day telescopes. And they’re building ever-better instruments. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, planned for the 2040s, ought to be able to find Earthlike planets around nearby stars and will scrutinize their skies for gases linked to life.”

God made man in His image (Gen 1:27). But just as Genesis says that God created a universe without telling how He did it, while not saying God created life elsewhere neither does it say that God only created here.

Christianity does not locate man’s dignity in our physical size, our position in the cosmos, or even our technological accomplishments. It rests ultimately in the fact that God made man in His image — and that the eternal Son Himself took human nature.

That said, two things are brought to my mind by stories like this: man’s uniqueness and the meaning of life.

There have always been those who want (illegitimately) to draw philosophical conclusions from scientific data. Some pushed a heliocentric solar system simply because it was the truth; some pushed it because they thought they could thereby push man out of the center of things. One hears something similar when some speak of the “third rock from a second-rate star off on some peripheral arm of one galaxy.” Maybe. Or maybe — as one physicist noted — it’s a piece of galactic real estate that’s “just right,” one neither too near to the galactic center (and all that radiation) or too far away to prevent the coalescence of essential heavier elements.

Personally, I don’t think our special relationship to God is imperiled if we find out He created other rational beings. Man remains “‘the only creature on earth that God has willed for its own sake,’ and he alone is called to share, by knowledge and love, in God’s own life” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 356; see here).

Second, on the meaning of life: That point was brought home to me by a poster carried by a young person a couple years ago at the March for Life.

If we were to find a cell that reproduces by itself, multiplies and exists on, say, Mars, wouldn’t we immediately flash to the world “Life on Mars!” Wouldn’t we acknowledge we found a form of life… and whet our appetites to search for more? So, why is it that when we find a cell that reproduces by itself, multiplies and exists in, say (as it used to be described once upon a time), en ventre sa mère (in his mother’s womb), we suddenly act as if we have stumbled into the epistemological equivalent of a cosmic black hole, incapable of defining the life that is staring us in the face, pretending we do not know it is a “life” and acting as if we have encountered a je ne sais quoi? The unborn child is not merely “something alive”; it is a developing human organism, and the human individual exists from conception.

Before we start wondering about life elsewhere, perhaps we might first wonder about life right here?

[The Times story is here: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/15/science/exoplanets.html]