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Evidence of Bacterial Life on Europa
AaronW writes: "According to this article at newscientist.com, the rosy color of Europa may be caused by bacteria. Apparently the previously unexplained infra-red signature matches that of extremophile bacteria found here on Earth."
except Europa.
Method of processing duck feet
Preliminary results show that all three species, the ordinary gut bacteria Escherichia coli, and extremophiles Deinococcus radiodurans and Sulfolobus shibatae, are just as good at explaining Europa's IR spectrum as the salts.
Except that the salt theory doesn't rely on extraterrestrial life being created on one moon completely inhospitable to life in the middle of nowhere.
Glenn Teeter from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state says bacteria aren't the simplest explanation for Europa's spectrum.
Yet...
No one has managed to come up with the perfect mix of [mineral] salts to explain all of Europa's spectrum.
Okay boys, settle down and apply a little common sense here. If the experiment works, let's ask ourselves why. At the least, it proves Europa has all the right elements (pun intended, for sure) for life to form.
Of course we still would want to go and see for ourselves, just to be sure. But let's make sure the astronauts pack lots of penicillin, just in case. {grin}
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I'd like to believe that there's life on Europa, but since the bacteria couldn't survive surface conditions, I find it highly unlikely. Then again, there are subterranian life forms here on Earth, so I guess it's possible. It sounds like a better theory than the salts, at any rate.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm not an expert in this, but there's got to be some rules and explanations about life where there is no atmosphere.
I kinda thought that there had to be some atmosphere (perhaps at one point Europa had a higher one?) in order for any form of life to exist. I could be wrong, because this is just a guess, so if someone would like to enlighten me, please do.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
It's New Scientist. It sounds nice and could be a valid theory, but until we have more detail we won't know. This is what everyone wants to hear about Europa (because of it's oceans), but that doesn't mean that this is more than a guess.
See my previous rant. This seems to be yet another case where a writer for this news source has put their own sci-fi spin on what is otherwise a very unremarkable bit of information. Take five minutes to read and think about the points in this article, and you'll be sorry you did. It's chock full of conceptual holes, misunderstandings, and unfounded extrapolations into the news-bite realm of absurdity. Please stop posting this yellow journalism.
Steven N. Severinghaus
let's us not jump to early conclusions; i always tend to find these kind of articles very hope-giving while they are often very inconclusive. A while ago we could read about waterflows on mars (with pictures!) that later turned out to be carbon?dioxide? jets if i remember correctly. Those were some nice pictures, don't get me wrong and this article sure lightens up the discussion of extraterrestial life (not intelligence, life, note the difference please) that could possible be related to earth life (asteroids and all) which could give us some insight in the development of earth-life. :)
So, interesting, but don't get your hopes up too much
"We live in our minds, and existance is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality" Ayn Rand
One of the big reasons we're hearing more of this is that since the fossil bacteria mars meteor find there has been a lot more focus on Astrobiology. NASA Ames has a Astrobiology Academy that is sort of a Space Camp for the 18 to 25 year old crowd that grew up wanting to go to Space Camp (that's us).
There are also a lot of Collegiate program's like Penn State's and some new peer reviewed astrobiology journals.
Sort of a case of we find what we look for. Makes you wonder what the SETI people could do with more funding.
Not to mention NASA's Astrobiology institute (spread across, I think, 10 institutes). A few universities are starting of offer Astrobiology certificates (not as good as a major/PhD field, but still something to wave about).
Oddly, I was just having an argument with the head of CU's astrobiology institude about this point. Fits to surface spectra are seldom unique. It's a pain in the butt, be we can't even identify the minerals on Mars uniquely some of the time. Europa is worse. Not only do we not know the chemistry as well (rocks is rocks, and we have plenty of those on Earth), but the conditions are hard to reproduce. Temperatures of around 100 K, almost no surface pressure and a harsh radiation environment.
If you do a little digging (check back issues of Science magazine), you'll notice that there are already two theories about the mysterious absorber on Europa. There's McCord's salts theory and there's the sulfuric acid theory (put forward by Carlson). We can't distinguish between them right now. Adding another potential absorber to the fray doesn't really fundementally alter that we just can't tell right now what's down there.
...To me the likelyhood of life on Europa depends upon the availibility of [principaly] heat and minerals. In deep sea sulphur vents life positively teams [a recent BBC documentry with some rare footage revealed three layers of life sitting atop these vents, with the white crabs on top standing shoulder to shoulder].
Basically my question is whether an object of europa's size has sufficient internal heat to provide lifes principal energy. [its about the size of mercury??]. I presume that the ice layer will filter cosmic rays effectively, there will be minimal sunlight etc, so we need a primary energy source. If there is one then I have no doubt that something akin to life exists up there.
Don't forget Io - there's plenty of internal heat there!
Io's surface is molten rock with continuous active volcanos. There is so much geological activity on Io, it's almost impossible to spot craters from foreign bodies. Io's too small to have stored the heat itself, it gets it from the tidal pull of Jupiter's gravity continuously deforming its shape.
Europa is the next closest moon after Io (about 150% the distance from Jupiter), and has liess mass (roughly 50%) - so it should have less tidal disruption. However, observations from Gallileo have shown that the surface of Europa is changing quite rapidly (APOD pic of Europa changing), so there is almost certainly some internal heat there. Europa is almost certainly the best candidate for life in our solar system.
I've been posting on the net since 1994 and I still haven't come up with a good sig!
curiosity: If there is bacteria on europa, would it have familiar dna, or a completely different system?
Bah! Humanity is the supreme power of the universe. The 60's was the golden age of Space Travel! We fucking sent a man to the moon! We have cured every disease that exists and could ever exist, all social problems have disapeared, we have a Grand Unified Theory that works perfectly, and have proven, beyond any doubt that we must all worship The Diety. Humanity is in the prime of its maturity. I have to go now. I have to take care of my dad that has cancer, my aunt that is distrought over the terrorists, a friend that can't stand the failures of NASA, and a physics professor that is suicidal because his GUT was just disprooven.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I don't know, I kind of like the third planet.
BTW, if we do send astronauts and it turns out I do have a valid point (uh oh...), I think they're going to need more than penicillin! Imagine the report back to NASA: "Uh, Houston, we have a problem. Tell Michael Crichton he was right..."
:)
Considering the amount of croissants, Gitanes smoke and cappucino found in the atmosphere.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
We know how something about how improbable it is that life exists, at least as far as we can tell. As intelligent organisms, we cannot accurately calculate the probability of life being spontaneously created because we have never done it ourselves, EVER.
Conversely, we know how to make many different kinds of salts. Even though we don't know the precise chemical composition that could create this spectrum, we are much closer to causing that by randomly combining chemicals.
Occam's Razor therefore dictates that the most probable event is NOT life. Here's a similar hypothesis (another piece of data with a theory that has an incalculably low probability of occurance):
I don't know where my parents are, but I saw some strange, oddly organized patterns in the aurora borealis today. My parents must be on the sun, sending me a message.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I thought the article said Evidence of Bacterial Life in Europe.
I thought scientists finally discovered France.
I think (s)he meant to say "best candidate for *intelligent* life"..
I bet indians live there that we can fly there and take all their land from. Yes a new resource to add to our own. Wonderful. Joy. We'll teach them about big business and why we need their raw resources to stablize our fading economy.
Flame? of course! Troll, na.
Funny how we're so interested in other places we forget how mismanaged life here on earth is.
l8r
There are now plans to explore lakes under Earth's antartic ice sheets (see article below). Its possible that similar lakes exist on Europa, caused by pressure from overlaying ice and/or from a geothermal heat source. Given the presecne of liquid water it is possible that some form of life would develop. http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20011105201728dat a_trunc_sys.shtml
Honestly, we *have no clue.* Well, maybe a couple of little clues. But we have one point of reference for *all* our theories of life. And one point is not enough to draw general conclusions.
Life could exist everywhere. Our universe tends to self-forming complex structures (suns, planets, galaxies, black holes, nuetron stars, crystals (snowflakes and such, for instance), language, radiators, jam, etc). So there's no reason life couldn't exist on the surface of neutron stars ("Dragon's Egg," by Robert Forward), or in the heliosphere of our own sun ("Sundiver," by David Brin) or in the depths of space (the known space universe of Larry Niven, for instance).
Hell, it was only 20 years ago we were shocked to discover bacteria and worms in the "lifeless" regions of our own earth.
The fact is, we have some ideas about how life began on earth (many different, mutually-exlusive theories exist), but we don't know. And so how can we know all the various conditions under which life can begin? Or even *can't* begin?
We are ignorant savages that believe we know what we are about. Like a 16-year-old, we think we know everything we need to know; but in reality, we are naive and untutored. That will change, I have no doubt. But until that point, we have a body of knowlege we are sure about, and a body of knowlege we *think* we are sure about (but which is completely bogus), and a whole bunch of knowlege we don't even know we lack.
That's what's so cool about the universe.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Most likely DNA would not be used by a extra-terrestrial life form. The biochemical combinations are too infinite to suggest a similar chance evolution. ature is econommical and I do bet that many concepts / principlas will be similar ( acid/base potentials, carbon / water based, high energy chemical bonds for energy storage, etc). Of course this depends on the fact that the environmental conditions will allow for water to exist. An entirely new concept (non-water baed, etc) is likely - it's just too complex to guess....
..........FULL STOP.
There very well could be life on Europa. Now they are fairly sure the microfossils on that Mars meteorite were bacteria, due to chemical evidence. So that gives us at least two planets in the solar system in which life is thought to have developed.
Europa has a very good chance of having life, also. If it indeed does have a liquid ocean, archaebacteria-like organisms may be found around the warm and chemical-rich deep sea vents in it's ocean. I doubt the color is due to bacteria, though. Its probably just salt.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Danny.
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