Where the extrasolar planets are concerned, it’s easy to be cynical. And where the extrasolar planets orbiting Barnard’s Star are concerned, it’s even easier.

Nonetheless, the accumulating Doppler measurements seem to be making the case that there is a pod full of peas accompanying the charismatic M-dwarf as it streaks through our night-time skies.

It’s been quite a while since this blog featured actual radial velocity curves. Flower-shift-4’ing from the above-linked ApJ Letter, we have:

Most convincingly, there’s something of an offhand confirmation implicit in the way that this latest incarnation of the Barnardian system sort of fits with the emerging M-dwarf planetary consensus. Again, from the paper:

And the best part? It’s too hot for any of those Barnard planets to be overrun by an algae bloom.

Discussion with the alien intelligence embodied in the o3 model’s trillion-odd transformer weights suggests that a terrestrial genesis story really is the best bet for emergence of life on Earth. That fits with the bedrock principle that the cool hypothesis is the wrong hypothesis, and it does seem like it’d be somehow cooler if we were all descended from Venusians.

Nevertheless, conversation with the AI also indicates that there’s a window of responsibility that permits one to at least seriously humor the life-started-on Venus story. The fact that the latest universal common ancestor seems to have been a relatively capable organism points to a serious bottleneck in the history of life on Earth, and it’s plausible that bottleneck was the limited availability of impact-generated tickets for passage from Venus to Earth.

One of the figures from the Cabot-Laughlin paper shows just how painless the trip can be if you depart Venus in the early A.M. at a velocity appropriate to give you a (relatively) leisurely v_inf= 2.7 km/sec at the Hill Sphere radius. It’s a comfy three year trip to the Earth-Moon system. A no-brainer for a brainless thermophilic archean prokaryote.