"There it is, in the third sentence of paragraph one!" cries Rupert Gumthorphe, crumpling a sheet of newsprint and tossing it away.
Gumthorpe, 37, is on a lonely quest, a quest that has taken him through countless kiosks, libraries, archives and reading rooms. It is a lonely quest, and perhaps a hopeless one, for Gumthorpe is searching for an article about astronomy that does not contain the words "water" or "life".
"I was going to toss out 'earth-sized' or 'anthropic principle' as well, but I had to draw the line somewhere," he remarks.
Unfortunately, even with a list of just two prohibited words, Gumthorpe has been unable to locate a single current article about astronomy that does not include at least one.
"It all started when they included that damn gold-plated greeting card on the Voyager," says Gumthorpe. "That's when I suspected that astronomy was no longer a science, but something more like writing our name in the sky, or looking everywhere for our own reflections. That's monkey science, though, and I couldn't believe that was all there was to it."
But after hours, and then days, of poring over articles about space telescopes, interplanetary probes, and rendezvoux with comets, he began to believe that astronomy had plunged willingly into a black hole of triviality.
"Here's a typical one," he said, "Three earth-sized planetoids found in stable orbit, could support life. Here's another, signs of ice on Mars - well we know there's ice on Mars."
"Here's one," he said, "frozen seas of Jupiter's moon may hide liquid oceans - that's a new one, since it's not oceans of water, but nitrogen! Still, I disqualify it for the same reasons."
The reporter stands in silent tribute for a time, but then, as yet more journal articles are crumpled, and television reports switched off, it is time to accept the inevitable and slip away.