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

Um

[zapfie]

This is exciting because life has been found on Earth in environments similar to these icy oceans at Antarctica's Lake Vostok.

Who's to say ideal conditions for sustaining life are ideal conditions for creating it?

Not so methinks

[bravehamster]

The problem with using the life in Antarctica as justification for the possibility of life on Pluto is this: the life in Antarctica didn't begin there. It began in a more hospitable climate and adapted itself to those conditions over millions of years. Any possible life in Pluto's oceans would have never had that chance. Just because life can _survive_ someplace doesn't mean it can begin there.

I'm not saying life can't exist on Pluto, just that the example they used for comparison doesn't work. I think a better example would be the sea life that flourishes around deep sea volcanic vents.

Re:Not so methinks

[Tablizer]

The problem with using the life in Antarctica as justification for the possibility of life on Pluto is this: the life in Antarctica didn't begin there. It began in a more hospitable climate and adapted itself to those conditions over millions of years.

We don't know that. Life on Earth may have come from space. There is some evidence that bacteria spores can survive for many millions of years inside small meteriods. It only takes *one* working spore to kickstart a planet. Thus, a rock with a million spores may take a beating, but the chances that at least one spore will survive is fairly high.

Life may have formed billions of years before Earth and blasted this way by comet impacts, nova's, etc. Life may even form in certain types of nebula. Debri blasted from earth may have even seeded other planets.

We just don't know the true origin or reach of microbe life.

Re:Not so methinks

[Perdo]

Pluto is a binary planetoid. Its moon, Charon is almost as large as Pluto itself

Pluto is 2274 km in diameter, Charon is 1172 km in diameter. They orbit only 19,640 km from eachother around a central point between the planetoids.

The point is, the tidal forces that they exert on eachother must be tremendous. I think the internal friction caused by the tidal forces might be enough to create some liquid water somewhere, perhaps near the rocks that constitute 70% of it's mass (the balance is water ice and trace methane and nitrogen.)

I imagine an enviroment similar to the hostile space where a glacier grinds across the ground. Life is certainly abundent there, from worms and ants with antifreeze for blood to fungus, lichen, alge and of course bacteria.

Re:Yawn...

[Goonie]

Pretty soon they're going to just throw their arms in the air and say there's bacteria everywhere. (Isn't there, anyway?)

That is a possibility, but we don't know at this point. The only place we know there's life is Earth. We haven't found conclusive evidence of life on Mars, let alone Europa, Venus, or Pluto. This kind of study is useful, however, because it suggests new places we might consider looking for life.

To your implied question "is finding bacteria on other planets interesting" the answer has to be yes. If we did find bacteria (or something like them) on another planet, we'd either find that a) they're directly related to earthly bacteria, in which case we'd know panspermia works (at least on an interplanetary scale) and would then raise the question of whether the source was somewhere in the solar system or from elsewhere, or b) that life has developed independently more than once, indicating that if the conditions are right it is quite likely to appear. If b) were the case it would seem to raise the odds that extra-solar life (and thus possibly intelligence) is out there. Either way, the biologists, geneticists, biochemists, and so on would give several limbs for the opportunity to examine bacteria from Pluto.