Life on Pluto?

EccentricAnomaly writes "The BBC is reporting that new models of icy moons in the outer solar system predict that oceans (as in liquid water oceans) may be much more common than previously thought. Even Pluto and Neptune's moon Triton now appear to be good candidates for a liquid ocean under their ice. This is exciting because life has been found on Earth in environments similar to these icy oceans at Antarctica's Lake Vostok."

Comments

Re:Not so methinks

[ender81b]

While I agree, in principle, with what you say the simple fact is we have no way of knowing how life on earth started. By all rights earth was a horribly inhospitable place 4 billion or so years ago. Using earth as an example we can say the following things are needed for life to start (here at least):

• Water, liquid
• Amino acids
• Some sort of energy supply - be it chemicals, sunlight, etc

And that is it. You say life on pluto would never had a chance.. how do we know? We can't go back in time 4 billion years or so ago. Perhaps conditions on pluto where mightly different back then. Also the possibility of life 'landing' on pluto must be considered - in the form of bacteria spores, etc. Right now all that is needed on pluto for life would be a geothermal vent system and some liquid water. Really that's it. Remember in the deep ocean vent communities where bacteria live in water that's above the boiling point? Life adapts and quickly, we have no way of knowing how life started on this planet and to blanket rule out hte possibility of life on pluto just because the conditions aren't exactly like earths is a bit shortsighted in my opinion.

Microbes would be ... depressing.

[pantropik]

Recently there's been a lot of talk about life on other bodies in the solar system. Yet even the most hopeful proponents of these theories don't truly expect to find anything much more advanced than algae. The upper reaches of Venus's atmosphere, Europa, Ganymede, Triton, maybe even somewhere in Jupiter's atmosphere where the pressures and temperatures are "just right", whatever that is.

I've read theories that of all places in the system outside Earth, Europa is the most promising. So, maybe there are "hot spots" in the Europan ocean and maybe there is life around those hot spots. Yet, look at Earth's version of those deep-ocean hotspots. The life there is interesting, to be sure, and spectacularly resilient in the face of extreme pressures and temperatures, but it's not spectacularly advanced and there's not a lot of room for evolution in such a system. Tubeworms have been tubeworms for geologic ages, after all.

So, what if we do move out into the solar system and find life is "everywhere"? Not literally everywhere, but everywhere in the sense that life, after a fashion, will generally show up pretty much anywhere it can. There are organisms (waterbears, for one) on Earth right now that could survive a trip through the vacuum of space. So we might even find that life on other bodies in the system is shockingly similar to life on Earth, perhaps even distant "cousins". Simple life, and abundant; clinging to existence in every nook and cranny where it's managed to take hold.

How depressing is that? We go to the planets with arms open to greet ... algae and paramecia. Maybe Fermi's Paradox isn't much of a paradox at all. "Where are they?" They're everywhere, maybe. "They" just won't be making any radios or FTL starships any time over the next few billion years.

Imagine a universe full of lichen and amoebas, riding their respective planets to whatever oblivion awaits in some far-distant future. Imagine humanity spreading, in some distant future, into the galaxy, ever searching for others like themselves. They find instead world after world where any of a hundred (thousand? million?) variables was off by just enough to doom the life there to brainless simplicity. What if we are the aberration? It seems silly, to think all that real estate out there is just a big petri dish, doesn't it? Silly that there isn't someone out there ... somewhere.

But the universe is big, time is broad, and we as a species are disheartingly tiny when viewed against such a scale. Maybe there were, or will be, beings much like us riding their little worlds round and round some other star ... But how far away in space and time? Long dead, not yet born? In some impossibly distant galaxy speeding away from us at a significant fraction of C? It would need to be only a tiny time differential in the grand scheme of things. The entire sum of human existence isn't even an eyeblink on such scales. It seems silly to think that in all the universe (even the galaxy) we are alone. But does it really matter? We may not in fact be alone, but those "others", if they exist, might well be forever out of reach, perhaps even unknowable. I think that's what we fear the most, that notion that we might pass, not forgotten but simply unknown, out of existence. Why do we really want to find others anyway? Maybe just to shout, "We exist!" at the universe and for the first time know that we are heard. Now that I think about it, it seems that the search for aliens isn't really all that different from humanity's never-ending quest for "god" ... maybe the two are merely differing expressions of the same inherent need -- to be known, acknowledged, and (dare we hope it!) validated.