(This is my inaugural shower thought, which truth be told happened in the ocean and not the shower. But irregardless, as they say in Miami, water was still involved.)

I think a lot about dimethyl sulfide.

I am by no means a chemist, but I do know that dimethyl sulfide gives the ocean its smell. This compound—its chemical formula is (CH3)2S—is produced by living organisms like marine algae.

Because I live in Miami Beach, I smell dimethyl sulfide everywhere. During my morning ocean dip. When I sit at the edge of the sea, watching blues and tans and oranges blur into indistinguishable darkness at day’s end. When I roll my windows down during afternoon commutes. On my balcony as I step into the humid night.  

For me, dimethyl sulfide has become an anchor. When I inhale, it anchors my easily distracted mind in a present moment, in a place, in a sensation.

Recently, scientific studies have drawn attention to dimethyl sulfide not because it anchors us to this world but because of the compound’s possible presence in far off, alien ones.

Last April, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, scientists detected “a tentative hint of” dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of K2-18 b (which certainly deserves a catchier name). Debate has ensued about the significance of this discovery. Is or is it not evidence of life, a possible biosignature, on an exoplanet located 124 light-years from Earth?

Affirmative or negative, the question does invite deliberation about habitability beyond our solar system, and it offers a perspective that only a god’s eye view can grant.