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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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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
Speaking theoretically, I don't see why there would have to be an atmosphere. For example, to most of the sea-dwelling creatures on Earth, it just as soon not have an atmosphere.
Come on, give it up, that's
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.
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.
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.
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It's probably not completely crazy to suggest that biological material could have been carried from Earth to Europa or vice versa (though trying to work out a viable trajectory for volcanic ejecta, say, that takes less than 4 billion years, might be tricky!).
It seems to me less likely that life would have arisen completely independently in both environments. (If life could have arisen independently on two planets in the solar system I'd expect the universe to be teeming with life and we'd have received a message from them!)
-- SIGFPE
I don't know, I kind of like the third planet.
Considering the amount of croissants, Gitanes smoke and cappucino found in the atmosphere.
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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.
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I think (s)he meant to say "best candidate for *intelligent* life"..
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.
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Danny.
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