Superman

‘Bisexual Superman’: Here’s to the Original Justice Defender Coming Out

Queer representation has always been read into superhero comics. This may not be surprising: they are a genre composed of essentially-nude-figures-in-action, with same-sex sidekicks and sapphic suggestiveness.

Superman is bisexual.

Not the movie-starring, Lois Lane-loving , Klan-fighting, Muhammad Ali-boxing, returned-from-the-dead, mild-mannered man of steel Clark Kent (aka Kal-El, last son of Krypton). But rather his son, Jonathan Kent, named after Clark’s adoptive father and current bearer of the Superman moniker.

Issue #5 of Superman: Son of Kal-El (authored by Melbourne-based writer Tom Taylor) will be out this November, and will feature Jon sharing a kiss with friend and online journalist Jay Nakamura.

Apart from proving Superman has always had a thing for reporters, Jon expressing his sexuality is a watershed moment in the venerable franchise.

Queering the comics

German-American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham believed comics were a corrupting influence. His book, Seduction of the Innocent, argued Batman and Robin’s relationship was inherently sexual, which therefore made comics inappropriate for children.

His lobbying resulted in the creation of the Comics Code Authority, a censorship body that forbade any mention of homosexuality from 1954 until 1989.

This left secondary characters, like X-Men villains Mystique and Destiny, to be heavily coded as queer – even if their sexual preferences could never actually be stated.

When the code was relaxed in the 1990s, characters who came out as queer were invariably third-tier superheroes (like Alpha Flight’s Northstar), caricatures (like the insultingly effeminate Extraño) or characters in “mature-age” titles (like John Constantine or the Doom Patrol’s non-binary Rebis).

Only in recent years have “top-tier” characters like the X-Men’s Iceman, supervillain Loki, Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, the Kate Kane Batwoman and, in August of this year, the Tim Drake Robin have also come out.

I call these characters “top-tier” because they are known to audiences not only from their comic appearances, but also film, television and cartoon adaptations.

Superman is the most high-profile and visible superhero to express their sexuality in this way.

A social justice superhero

Superman is often assumed to be an unambiguously benign character, particularly in contrast with the more psychologically complex Batman.

But Superman began his career as a crusader for social justice.

In his first issue, he rescues a prisoner from a lynch mob (condemning capital punishment), takes on a wife beater (condemning domestic violence) and takes down a corrupt senator (speaking out against political corruption).

Superman was conceived as a Champion of the Oppressed that millions affected by the Great Depression were crying out for.

Many Superman writers and artists over the years have tried to remain true to these social justice roots.

Look magazine commissioned his creators to produce a two-page feature on “how Superman would end the war” on February 22, 1940, nearly two years before Pearl Harbor.

The frequently outlandish Superman comics of the 1950s regularly warned against unbridled scientific experimentation.

John Byrne’s 1980s reboot saw Superman tackle the corporate greed, the power of the mass media and gun violence of the Reagan era.

But in sharp distinction to these portrayals, Superman’s role as the first superhero – and therefore elder statesman of the comics world – frequently saw him presented as a tool of government, rather than a reformer.

In the 1960s’ Justice League of America, he was portrayed as a conservative voice in contrast to more liberal, socially-minded characters like Green Arrow.

In Darwyn Coke’s 1950s-set DC: The New Frontier (2004), it is Superman who acts as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s agent in the field, bringing in “rogue” superheroes who refuse to resign.

Perhaps most famously, in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Superman appears on behalf of the totalitarian Reaganite government of this parallel 1980s to bring in Batman.

This has created an identity crisis at the heart of Superman, as great as his dual identities of Kal-El and Clark Kent. Is Superman a social justice reformer or conservative government supporter?

Jon Kent helps to resolve these tensions. Suddenly, we have a Superman who can be truly representative of the 2021 audience, while insulating the elder Superman as a more conservative and paternal figure.

Comic books faced increased censorship after 1954, over concerns on what was appropriate for children. Photo: Library of Congress

Times of transition

With Superman’s coming out, queer representation has moved from the periphery to become just another component of a superhero’s identity.

Of course, for every reader that celebrates now being able to see themselves in Superman in a way they haven’t before, there will be another bemoaning “bisexual Superman”.

Perhaps it’s worth remembering comic book superheroes were born and enjoy their greatest popularity during times of transition and uncertainty: economic crisis, armed conflict or political precarity. There’s no reason why expressing one’s sexual identity cannot similarly be understood as one of these moments of transition and uncertainty.

In this way, Jon Kent expressing his bisexuality is just as true to the legacy of Superman as Clark Kent’s social justice crusade 82 years ago.

Jason Bainbridge, executive dean of the Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Toying With Gandhi: A Compilation of Moods, Mysteries and Meanings

In a series of fibreglass sculptures that look and feel like life-sized toys, artist Debanjan Roy has depicted Gandhi performing apparently mundane activities

French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss had coined the term floating signifier to denote an entity that represented “an undetermined quantity of signification, in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning”. Lévi-Strauss had used words like “mana” and “oomph” as examples of floating signifiers that can ostensibly incorporate a wide range of connotations.

Over the years, with the distortion of vocabulary and the decadence of culture, the idea of meaning itself has become elastic. Numerous words, emotions and ideas have started meaning different things to different people. From love to nationalism to practically the entire gamut of American slang, additions to the list of floating signifiers have steadily increased since Lévi-Strauss identified the first few.

In expanding the range of these signifiers, India has had a peculiar contribution. It provided the world its first floating signifier – one which is not a word, an emotion, or an idea, but a human being.

A human being called Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi.

Whenever India, or rather, its politicians, have required a stand-in for a slogan, a face for a campaign or scheme, or an embodiment of a supposedly Indian virtue, Gandhi has been ever available. Icons in other parts of the world generally live on through their messages or their missions, successful or otherwise. Gandhi has lived on through both, as well as his malleability.

“Gandhi has always been used as a tool by those that wield power to say whatever they want to say. Politicians in India have never shown any interest in Gandhi’s ideas. They have only been interested in appropriating his image, his quotes and his accessories,” says Debanjan Roy, a 48-year-old visual artist and sculptor based in Kolkata.

Photo courtesy: Akar Prakar and the artist Debanjan Roy

Roy, known for subtlety and cheekiness in his work, has been fascinated by Gandhi for as long as he can remember. His latest exhibition, hosted by Akar Prakar, Roy, an alumnus of Rabindra Bharati University, has captured Gandhi in ways few could have imagined.

In a series of fibreglass sculptures that look and feel like life-sized toys, Roy has depicted Gandhi performing apparently mundane activities – relaxing on a sofa, wearing headphones, steering a trolley stacked with groceries and riding a motorcycle, to name a few. The objective, in Roy’s words, is to “humanise someone who loved humanity”. But Roy’s dexterity achieves far more than that.

Roy makes Gandhi a figure of bathos, someone who has relinquished the responsibility of being the Father of the Nation and is interested merely in getting on with life. Unlike the political regimes that have helmed India, Roy does not see Gandhi as a vessel whose breadth can accommodate any worldview or ideology so as to serve narrow political interests. Instead, he visualises Gandhi as a toy, mostly devoid of promise and purpose, existing for his own sake and evoking some wry humour in the process. Mostly, but not entirely.

Some of the Gandhi likenesses conceived by Roy do have a purpose, if not necessarily a promise. The purpose is to critique the present political climate in India where the appropriation of Gandhi feels hollower than it has in the past.

Roy uses three figurines of Gandhi to reference the Swachh Bharat campaign (Gandhi is shown with a broom in hand), the chowkidar trope that gained traction during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections (Gandhi is shown with a stick in hand), and the politics of the cow (Gandhi is shown with a smart tablet in hand, possibly clicking a selfie with a cow). The brazenness with which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its underlings have repurposed Gandhi is clear without being spelt out.

Photo courtesy: Akar Prakar and the artist Debanjan Roy

“The BJP need Gandhi to project themselves in a noble light in front of the world. They don’t really have any other historical figure to count on,” quips Roy. In the same breath, Roy acknowledges that this “need” has made the Gandhian legacy more toxic since 2014, not least because of the “polarisation and jingoism that the BJP has provoked”.

This is not to say that Gandhi has now become a byword for majoritarian nationalism. It is to say that by resorting to Gandhi every now and then, the BJP have blurred the distinction between the India that Gandhi pictured and the India that is taking shape today. Gandhi’s Ram Rajya has not yet been invoked as the theoretical precursor to the Hindu rashtra, but the signs of an ontological allyship are certainly being manufactured.

Roy, who has wanted to be an artist since his childhood, is a natural carver. This is evident not only in the seamlessness with which he has designed Gandhi in so many avatars but also in the hints he has inserted into each of his carvings. A close look at the eyes (wherever present) and the mouths of the various sculptures betrays the nimbleness of Roy’s imagination.

Photo courtesy: Akar Prakar and the artist Debanjan Roy

Gandhi as Superman wears his cape like a burden, while Gandhi with the aforementioned stick in hand has a faintly menacing air about him. On the other hand, the Gandhi who is navigating his way around a supermarket while conversing on the phone is content and cheerful, perhaps converted at last by market forces and a free mobile connection to endorse the banal benefits of everyday capitalism.

The stretch marks on a few of Gandhi’s faces suggest resignation, a Frostian internal sighing that can stem, equally plausibly, from regret or relief at all the roads not taken. The decision to get rid of Gandhi’s eyes in a couple of models while retaining the famous spectacles is also characteristically open-ended from Roy. Is Roy trying to say that Gandhi’s vision has been hollowed out, and therefore, whoever controls his spectacles (and the spectacle around them) controls what Gandhi sees? Or is he insinuating that Gandhi’s spectacles have attained omniscience, so much so that his eyes have become redundant?

The answer proves elusive, even for Roy.

While talking about his exhibition, Roy has a tendency to digress, and spontaneously kickstart a parallel conversation, such as the time when he spends a good five minutes voicing his regard for The Mahabharata. But like all accomplished thinkers, Roy has a way of making his digressions count, of taking a thread or two from his detour and connecting it back to the main route.

“Do you know what is the greatest dharma?” Roy asks. “Well, Yudhishthir did. He knew it was non-violence. And so did one man aeons later.”

The fact that Roy thinks meditatively about the context and the characters that go into his creations introduces layers to his craft. At first glance, his art is deeply visceral, unpredictable, even outrageous. But on careful probing, it begins to seem cerebral, things begin to make sense.

Modern sculpture is often seen as a forked path: either one appeals to the heart like Pablo Picasso or appeals to the head like Marcel Duchamp. Roy, when faced with this dilemma, chose both.

“He has always got something new to say. He likes to be unconventional, to make others figure out what he is trying to do. It is such a pleasure to collaborate with him,” says Siddhi Shailendra from Akar Prakar. She goes on to add, “This particular exhibition on Gandhi has received an extremely positive response. Visitors have been hooked. I feel that something like this is extremely relevant given the times we live in, it has a lot to say about the India we inhabit right now. This is why we opted to start this exhibition a day before Independence Day.” The exhibition ends on September 15.

Speaking of the India we inhabit right now, Roy is concerned, maybe even cynical: “Everything is about big business nowadays, a few people pulling the strings. And the cleverest businessman of them all is Narendra Modi.”

Eventually, like all impactful artists, Roy sees himself as a catalyst, not as a changemaker. His sculptures of Gandhi are aimed at those who have lapsed into complacency, accepting every wrong as part of the natural order. “The reason why we have BJP in power is because educated Indians have chosen to be ignorant. We have forgotten that we have a right to ask questions, a right to participate in the democratic process over and above the act of voting,” explains Roy.

After championing open-endedness and the absence of binaries throughout the conversation, Roy ends with what can only be described as an artist’s ultimatum.

Having paused for a few seconds to collect his thoughts, Roy speaks, with the assumption that the whole of India is listening: “All this time we have shown that we do not understand what we need. But it’s time to choose… We have to decide whether, as a nation, we need another Mohandas Gandhi or another Narendra Modi.”

Priyam Marik is a post-graduate student of journalism at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom.

This article was first published on LiveWire.

Narendra Modi and the Pantheon of Superheroes

The world may be glutted with superheroes but what it desperately needs right now are real-life heroes.

The June sun beat down hard as I walked past a row of shops in the little local market. Chemist… stationer’s… grocery store… boutique… shoe shop… toy shop…

Toy shop!

I slowed down as I always do in front of toy shops, possibly because they always bring back happy childhood memories. This one even had comic book superhero figurines in the window display.

Superman… Batwoman… the Incredible Hulk… Wonder Woman… Narendra Modi…

Narendra Modi?

I stopped, backed up a bit and stared. Yep, it was him all right. Dressed in a saffron waistcoat and about half the height of Superman and Batwoman – Narendra Modi had finally taken his place amongst the pantheon of comic book super heroes.

I wondered what his superpower was. Winning elections? Creating alternative realities? Getting into the minds of the masses like Charles Xavier from X-Men?

I asked the genial old storeowner how much the figurine cost.

“Rs 700,” he said cheerfully. “The head moves if you tap it. Shall I pack it for you?”

Also read: Letter from a Teacher to the Parents of His Students in ‘New India’

I politely declined. Then, as an afterthought, I asked, “But if you have any figurines of Mahatma Gandhi or Nelson Mandela, I’ll take one.”

“No, we only have superheroes here,” he said, and as I went on my way, I realised the storeowner had just educated me about a very important distinction: Real heroes and superheroes are entirely different people.

The first and most obvious difference between the two is that superheroes are fictional, but real heroes are real. In every sense of the word.

Superheroes are manufactured. They are clever products of imagination. Real heroes are born out of flesh and blood and genuine struggle.

Superheroes are illusory characters who essentially denote an escape from reality; real heroes are men and women who have faced it at its worst.

Superheroes can do absolutely anything. They can repel alien invaders, defuse rogue nuclear devices in the nick of time, save entire civilisations, and routinely perform the impossible. Superhero hai toh mumkin hai.

Real heroes, on the other hand, are acutely aware of their own shortcomings and limitations and consciously work on overcoming them. They don’t try to hide who they really are. Their heroism lies in their ability to first and foremost win deep, personal victories of character in their own lives.

Another big difference between the two is that superheroes entertain, but real heroes inspire.

Also, it is interesting to note that superheroes invariably lead double lives. They are forever ducking into phone booths and donning different identities. Real heroes, on the other hand, are who they are all the time. They strive for integrity and oneness. They walk their talk and are who they say they are.

One is reminded of Gandhi’s speech to the House of Commons in England. Using no notes, he spoke extempore for two hours and brought an essentially hostile audience to a standing ovation. Following his speech, some reporters approached his secretary, Mahadev Desai, incredulous that Gandhi could hold his audience spellbound for such a long time with no notes.

Desai said, “What Gandhi thinks, what he feels, what he says, and what he does are all the same. He does not need notes… you and I, we think one thing, feel another, say a third, and do a fourth, so we need notes and files to keep track.”

Green Lantern, Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Ant Man, Wonder Woman, Thor, and now, Narendra Modi. The world is glutted with superheroes.

It doesn’t need any more. What it desperately needs right now are real-life heroes, those with deep, inner strength of character that those of the next generation can look up to and emulate.

Also read: India and The Cult of Stupidity

We need more heroes like Dr Kafeel Khan of Gorakhpur who saved the lives of 60 children suffering from encephalitis and ended up being incarcerated for his selflessness.

We need more genuinely concerned citizens like Afroz Shah who successfully pulled off one of the world’s biggest beach clean-up projects at Versova Beach in Mumbai. We need journalists like Gauri Lankesh who paid the ultimate price for her absolute commitment to truth and freedom, and we need more peacemakers like Harsh Mander, who actually took his Karawan-e-Mohabbat across India and grieved with the families of those who have gotten lynched in the name of religion.

Superheroes are products of the artist’s pen who live in comic books, TV serials and movies, and who ultimately go on to become merchandise.

Real heroes are the products of tough choices and hard decisions.

Perhaps it is now time for each of us who are seriously concerned about the future of our country to start making some of those choices and decisions.

Rohit Kumar is an educator with a background in positive psychology and psychometrics. He works with high school students on emotional intelligence and adolescent issues to help make schools bullying-free zones.

The Toxic Myth at the Heart of Female Movie Reboots

There are so many opportunities for women in Hollywood these days, as long as they play roles that were originally intended for men.

All-female reboots of classic all-male films have been coming thick and fast over the past few years, and there are more to come. At the same time, the comic mills of Marvel and D.C. have begun to translate some of the female superheroes that started life in the comic books into the mass-pop-cultural forms of film and television.

At their best, these films and shows offer a kind of revisionist thinking. They reclaim pop-cultural history for young female audiences. At their worst, they demonstrate the film and television industry’s cynical profiteering from contemporary feminist ideals.

The seemingly empowering message of these all-female remakes and superhero productions is that women can do anything men can do. However, just because the films and TV shows feature predominantly women, or a female lead protagonist, it does not mean that they are feminist.

Despite, or maybe because of, the misogynistic vitriol surrounding the run-up to the release of 2016’s all-female Ghostbusters remake, Hollywood is lining up a succession of women-led blockbusters that mostly take the form of reboots. Ocean’s 8, released in June 2018, brought a glittering array of stars (Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter and Rihanna) to the classic crime caper previously headed up by George Clooney and, before that, in 1960, by the Rat Pack.

Disney is planning to remake the 1991 action film The Rocketeer, based on a comic-book series, with a female lead. Talks are even underway about an all-female remake of William Golding’s classic novel The Lord of the Flies. The 1988 film Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, starring Michael Caine and Steve Martin, is being remade with Rebel Wilson in one of the lead roles. And Splash, the 1984 Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah mermaid romance, is in the process of being gender-swapped for a 2018 release with Channing Tatum playing the role of the merman.

Captain Marvel, a.k.a. Carol Danvers, is due for cinema release in 2019. Danvers, a US Air Force pilot, becomes superhero Captain Marvel when her DNA becomes fused with an alien’s during a crash. Jessica Jones, Marvel’s tough-nut private detective with super-human strength, has been captivating Netflix audiences and critics alike since 2015. Ms Marvel (a.k.a. Kamala Khan), who is Marvel’s first teenage Muslim superhero, is rumoured to be the next candidate for big-screen release. At the same time, D.C. comics successfully relaunched Wonder Woman to popular acclaim in 2017 and Superman’s cousin, Supergirl, has been heading up her own television series since 2015.

Every woman for herself?

These reboots and superheroes have been seen as a bold step towards equality in an attempt to feminise traditionally masculine roles. “See,” the trailers imply, “women can fight baddies/aliens/ghosts too!” In the case of Lord of the Flies and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, they will no doubt revel in the “novelty” of women being barbaric or roguish. In the case of Splash, won’t it be hilarious to see Jillian Bell sexually objectifying Channing Tatum?

Women’s visibility, it seems, comes at a cost. Instead of feminising masculinity, we’re seeing an attempt to masculinise femininity, apparently because male role-types are what studios think audiences want. These films pay lip service to feminism by featuring more women, while continuing to tell the same old lucrative stories with the same values.

Superhero films and all-female reboots are part of the myth-making machinery of contemporary neoliberal feminism. Gender inequality is acknowledged, but responsibility for addressing the problem lies with individual women. We turn a blind eye to the social structures that uphold inequalities.

Take, for example, the structural issue of how few women are writing, directing and producing our films and TV shows. Traditionally risk-averse studios shy away from new stories created by women. Among the top 100 grossing films of 2017, women represented only 8% of directors, 10% of writers, 2% of cinematographers, 24% of producers and 14% of editors. The female ghostbusters, scoundrels and superheroes urge young female audiences to self-empowerment, but, at the same time, they often mask the value systems underpinning the stories themselves, as well as the politics of their production.

The first set of values emerges in the remakes: women can be more visible in front of the camera, as long as they stick to stories written by men and originally played by men. They just have to be better at it – as the criticism around the new Ghostbusters film demonstrated. This is the type of neoliberal feminism expounded by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in her bestselling book Lean In.

The second set of values, underlying the superhero genre, in particular, pertains to individual exceptionalism. Superheroes represent our imagined best selves. Contemporary female superheroes dazzle us with their ability to do and be everything, and if we were only to fully optimise and empower ourselves, we might be like them. The radical individualism of the most popular superheroes – culminating in the moment in every film or show when the hero must stand alone to face the enemy – reflects the narrative that neoliberal feminism pushes every day: you are responsible for your own success, and, if you fail, you have nobody to blame but yourself.

The #MeToo movement shows that collective action and solidarity among women can still effect large-scale social change. Yet a great deal of our popular entertainment continues to promote individual self-reliance and strength as the only option for truly “super” women. Without the possibility of aspiration being a shared social and collective capacity, rather than an exclusively individual undertaking, terms like “empowerment” become meaningless. Let’s leave the remakes and superheroes behind and take seriously the opportunity to tell some new stories.

Emily Spiers, Lecturer in Creative Futures, Lancaster University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How Astronomers Could Find the ‘Real’ Planet Krypton

Despite the small probabilities involved, the vast number of red dwarfs out there mean that the existence of a Krypton-like planet is still a possibility.

Planets orbiting a red dwarf, much like Krypton’s star Rao. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The search for exoplanets, worlds orbiting stars other than our own, has become a major field of research in the last decade – with nearly 2,000 such planets discovered to date. So the release of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice got me thinking: does Superman’s home planet of Krypton actually exist? Or at least a planet very much like it?

We don’t know a huge amount about Krypton. Since the very earliest Superman comic strips, it has been depicted as a rocky planet similar to Earth, but much older. In the film Man of Steel, it was said to be about 8.7 billion years old with intelligent life, Kryptonians, having existed for hundreds of thousands of years – comparable to the amount of time humans have existed on Earth.

Map of the planet Krypton from the Superman comics. Credit: WP:NFCC#4/wikimedia

Start with the red stars

In order to find Krypton, the first thing we’d need to do is identify its star, or at least its type. For a long time, all we knew was that, unlike the sun, Krypton’s star Rao is red. There are three classes of stars which are red in colour: red dwarfs, red giants and red super giants. While they are very different in size, their red colour tells us that they are some of the coolest stars in existence, with surface temperatures of only just over 3,200°C, about half that of the Sun.

Batman v. Superman. Credit: Naruto full fighters/YouTube

Red dwarfs are by far the most common stars – around 75% of the stars in the vicinity of the solar system are of this type. As the name suggests, they are quite small compared to the sun, being between 7.5% and 50% of the sun’s mass.

Meanwhile, our sun will one day become a red giant, as it runs out of its hydrogen fuel – ballooning in size so that it consumes the orbit of the Earth. But that’s nothing compared to a red supergiant – stars which would extend all the way out to the orbit of Saturn.

While depictions of Krypton’s star have varied between these three types over the years, what we see of Rao in Man of Steel points towards it being a red dwarf.

Destination LHS 2520

In 2012, it seemed that the matter was settled when astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson was invited to choose Rao’s real location. He picked a star known as LHS 2520, a red dwarf star in the southern constellation of Corvus. Our searches for planets around this star have so far proved fruitless, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.

To find an Earth-like exoplanet around a red dwarf star, a good approach would be to use the radial velocity method or the doppler technique, measuring the small movement a star makes as it responds to the gravitational tug of an orbiting planet.

So far, we only have a handful of data from this star, taken by the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS). This means that currently we can only rule out any orbiting gas giants, as those would be the only ones big enough to produce easily noticeable changes in the star’s velocity. A more detailed investigation, however, could still reveal a Krypton-like, rocky ‘super Earth’.

But even if that isn’t the case, our understanding of how planetary systems form out of clouds of gas, dust and rocks clumping together under gravity seems to suggest that there should always be more than one planet orbiting a star. So if we find one of Krypton’s brothers and sisters, perhaps with more observations we would be able to infer its existence.

To infinity and beyond

But if we fail to find any planets around LHS 2520, we can always look elsewhere. Luckily, searching for planets around red dwarf stars is a major area of research right now.

For instance, Pale Red Dot is an international campaign being coordinated by researchers in the UK searching for Earth-like planets around our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. The discovery of such a world essentially on our doorstop would be momentous, raising hopes that (with advances in space technology) we could one day visit it. The CARMENES project also will be looking at some 300 red dwarf stars over the next three years in search of Earth-like worlds.

Whether any of the worlds we find harbour life, intelligent or otherwise, is another hurdle to tackle – the conditions are likely to be very different from those on our own world. But despite the small probabilities involved, the vast number of red dwarfs out there mean that the existence of a Krypton-like planet is still a possibility.

Martin Archer is Space Plasma Physicist, Queen Mary University of London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.