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Salty Ocean On Europa Could Mean Life
Arctic Fox writes: "Based on data from the Galileo satellite, scientists have evidence for a salty ocean under the surface of Europa.
As reported in this article from the UK Times. Who cares about water? Now if they could only find a monolith." The underpinnings for life grow tantalizingly more evident as our vicarious observations grow in detail and scope. From the article: "The probe has also detected patterns in the moon's magnetic field that could be generated by a liquid ocean underneath its surface. Because salty water conducts electricity, its presence on Europa, which is within Jupiter's magnetic field, would lead an ocean to generate a field of its own."
As reported in this article from the UK Times. Who cares about water? Now if they could only find a monolith." The underpinnings for life grow tantalizingly more evident as our vicarious observations grow in detail and scope. From the article: "The probe has also detected patterns in the moon's magnetic field that could be generated by a liquid ocean underneath its surface. Because salty water conducts electricity, its presence on Europa, which is within Jupiter's magnetic field, would lead an ocean to generate a field of its own."
NASA PRESS RELEASE: We have sucessfully spent $30,000,000,000 to pump new life into the now stagnent frozen fish market.
"retro-fitting for the unwitting"
Place your bets now. Will there be life found elsewhere in our solar system? Secondary bets may be placed on the following, for those who prefer to wager on human nature rather than nature itself. Will the presence of life on other planets create significant doubt amongst creationists? Will the absence of life on planets which have all the supposed necessary ingredients create significant doubt amongst evolutionists?
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Really, you don't want to take the lack-of-inclusion-equals-false approach to using the Bible truth-o-meter. The bible never explicitly states that the square root of 9 is three, Bill Clinton smoked pot or my shirt is blue... but all those things are true.
there is really no way they can verify this without actually finding existing life
2 1337 4 u!
Finding life, of any sort, elsewhere, would give us a great deal more information. If it's similiar to ours it implies that there's similar processes going on elsewhere, or that we're related. If it's different then it gives us entirely new insights into how complexity evolves. Either way it's exciting stuff that could advance our understanding of biology, biochemestry, evolution, complexity, etc. immensely. It could even give us better numbers to plug into those formulas for figuring out how likely we are to have neighbors.
Nobody is expecting anything on Europa to pop up & greet us with a "Codex Universalis" - just there being anything lifelike* would be enough. Even there being nothing will tell us something
-- Michael
* We still don't know enough about life yet to come up with a really good definition anyone is particularly comfortable with.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
If I might paraphrase your avatar's words upon his reported ascension into space,Therefore fundamentalists and trolls should expect to find some sort of "sheep" elsewhere in the universe. Your ass is covered on that account.
But you might be in trouble in other regards:
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I was going to post this article from cnn.com about the future explorations of Saturn and Jupiter's moons, but didn't because I didn't think it was interesting enough.
It covers most of the "interesting" moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto and Titan. It's pretty interesting to hear how the scientists have changed their opinions of these moons as our technology has improved. This may be a case of improvement without any real benefit, but it still goes to show that they will freely admit they don't know everything and sometimes get things wrong.
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Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
(To the tune of My Sharona)
Ooo my little pretty moon, my pretty moon
When you gonna show me some life, Europa?
Ooo you make my mission run, my mission run
Gonna look in your brine, Europa
Never gonna stop
Gotta look
Such a purty brine
Always gotta look
For the sign of life
My my my my my
Woo!
Mm mm mm my Europa
Gonna look a little closer huh
Whatcha got?
Close enough to look in your brine, Europa
Keepin' it a mystery, gets to me
Running down the depth of your brine, Europa
Never gonna stop
Gotta look
Such a purty brine
Always gotta look
For the sign of life
My my my my my
Woo!
Mm mm mm my Europa
When you gonna show to me, show to me?
Is it just a matter of time, Europa?
Is it d-d-destiny? D-destiny?
Or is it just a game in my mind, Europa?
Vote Naked 2000
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I've given this a fair bit of thought, because one of the few hopes I have for our race is that we win the great game of civilization :), and get off the planet to establish a permanant, self-sustaining presence in space. Never before has a species that's evolved on this planet been able to leave the world that it was created from - and guarantee that it will not be easily extincted. It's too bad that alone isn't a noble enough cause.
People DO care about space, however, contrary to what you say - or at least, once upon a time, they did. The problem is that they were never given a reason to think that it in any way affects them - you don't even need people in space to sucessfully launch satellites. I once worked for a very smart man who was a astrophysicist on the apollo program (Even had a extremely cool certificate signed by all or most of the apollo astronauts). He left because he realized he would never see space himself - the will wasn't there. So, this generation of people becamed disallusioned with the greatest achivement of mankind - that flag on the moon. Those people were the parents of the 20-somethings here, and they didn't push their kids to chase something unobtainable.
Something else I wonder about is how many people that live in the cities have ever really been far enough away to truely apprecate the stars - when there's no light, on a clear night in winter, there's almost more white than black in the sky when you look up - it's amazing. (I live in Canada, YMMV).
On top of all that, it's pretty good for western peoples on earth right now, and they're the only ones that have the means and wealth to undertake a major space push - and they don't wanna. I'd love to have a box on my income tax where I could donate money to NASA tax free. Never happen. (hell, it's even foreign, the Canadian Space Agency is a national political joke located in buttf-ck nowhere Quebec. Great way to attract the best and brightest! ).
So, the way I see it, something has to happen to the current political climate on earth, and none of it is very pleasant (I, personally, will never see space first hand, nor will 99.9999% of the populace, and it's discouraging - where's our real-time feed of earth in HDTV that Clinton promised many years ago? Eh? Scared of people seeing the aliens? :)
So, let's talk about what might change attitudes:
Discovery of life in our solar system.
This is a biggie. However, it's hard to concretely prove life is somewhere without sending someone there first hand to test on the spot. So, we've got a catch 22 here, assuming that Europa has, or mars had, life on it.
Earth getting to be a nasty place to live in a hurry
A couple things could happen here. The most likely is that a medium-sized asteroid hits earth and kills millions of people, but doesn't distrupt civilization - this would wake people up in a hurry. Of course, it would suck to be unfortunate enough to be a martyr. Just hope it hits land, and it's not too big (this definately will happen eventually, but nobody knows when). A side effect of this is that it might trigger a small war accidentally, but NORAD and I assume the Warsaw Pact nations still track asteroid entries into the atmosphere for this very reason!
Another possibility is a small / medium sized nuclear war that ends up seriously shortening lifespans (40 years in developed nations due to cancer). The need to leave would be pressing, then.
Huge leaps in technology that enable easy lift capacity and/or near FTL speeds, or some warp technology
There are calculations that prove warping space is possible - there's been a few postings to /. in the past few years - the energies required are not practical. This, or a breakthrough along the lines of a unified theory that related electromagnetism and gravity and allowed us to develop gravity-based technologies (That's why a unified theory is such a big deal in physics, but nobody will say that, since they would sound crazy). These are unlikely because any technology that allowed this would COMPLETELY destabilize the economic structures of the west (we run on oil, and on capitalism - unlimited free energy ends capitalism), and as such, would be repressed under severe penalties and/or disinformation. Who knows what mysteries the hydrogen bomb researchers might have found? We'll never know. That of course is the other problem - unlimited energy or a unified theory might make weapons of mass destruction much easier to obtain. There was a good outer limits on this one, and might explain why we haven't detected an advanced civilization yet - they all go boom.
Contact with intelligent aliens
This, of course, would change things overnight, and unify humanity. I'm a skeptic of most UFO sightings, but there is a LOT of evidence out there, and the one that stands out in my mind is the footage and radar information that the Beligan Air Force shot - it's completely fucking unexplainable, even the Beligan government says so. It's a great watch, it's on TLC every now and again. This would also change the political power structures as humans would see their might be other things they should be worried about, and would funnel resources into thinking about how we can advance technology quickly.
Arrgh, I can't believe I wrote all that. Just some rants..
..don't panic