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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."
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?
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Check out this temperature comparison site.
Basically it says that the coldest spot on earth is -128 F (-89 C, 184 K), while Pluto's surface temperature is -378 to -396 F (-228 to -238 C, 35 to 45 K), air actually turns liquid at this point.
So this makes it quite different for any practical purposes.
The article itself also mentions that the water (if any) is probably under 100 miles of ice, which makes Antarctica infinitely more hospitable and accessible.
When men used to be men
Aren't they coming out with one of these stories every week or so? Pretty soon they're going to just throw their arms in the air and say there's bacteria everywhere. (Isn't there, anyway?)
Please wake me up and let me know when 1. Someone discovers some exotic alien species of fish, and 2. When I can buy said fish as an entrée at Red Lobster. (Mmm...cheese biscuits...)
My Webcomic: Asylum on 5th Street
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.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
Yeah, just wait until we wake up one of the Elder Gods imprisoned in a block of ice on Pluto. I bet those stupid scientists won't be so happy to find life on Pluto when they're being eaten alive by Cthulhu.
Radar images of Antarctica, including Vostok.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
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.
... 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.
... somewhere.
... 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.
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
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
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
Why? Is there oil on Pluto?
Yeah. We saw how that Evolution thing fared when it went up against Creationism.
> "What we need is a mad scientist with a gi-ant 'la-ser' cannon!"
Do you have any idea how hard it is for mad scientists to get funding today?
With uncertainty over the economy many mad R&D labs are slicing budgets and indefinitely delaying all but the most mundane of projects. Just how do these people think they're going to conquer the world with an ebola vaccine?
The situation in government funded labs is little better, as public opinion of all science, and particularly mad science, is at an all-time low. This of course is due primarily to scares over GM foods, cloning and climatic catastrophe: all areas in which mad scientists typically excel.
In addition studies suggest the intake of mad PhD students is in decline as gifted sociopaths are incresingly drawn towards fields with more immediate financial rewards, most notably, law.
So please don't point to the mad scientists for the lack of planet destroying lasers. It's the people holding the purse strings who are holding us all back.