Slashdot Mirror
Melting Europa
amigoro writes "After having contaminated Earth's Oceans, it seems that there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice sheet and explore the purported ocean below the crust. The plan seems to be to find Life there. But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out."
... what is it, 'lets all talk about Sedna' week in America, or something?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Jeez, can you get any more bias worked into your message?
I'd like to see the leaky probe that could rival Jupiter itself in bombarding Europa with radiation.
Awww, don't look so down. I'm sure there are plenty of other snide quips to be made about our foolish, short-sighted engineers wiping out Life As We Don't Know It.
Consider the possibility of a dihydrogen monoxide leak, for example...
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Of course, its possible that the heater won't leak and that good science will be done.
There is risk inherent in every action and inaction.
This isn't news.
What is happening today, first we have the CA government getting out witted by a 14 year old. Now we have some moron bitching about drilling on another planets moon because it might contaminate a sulfer filled ocean with what is probably a very mild case of raditation from a probe. In addition the moon probably gets way more raditation from Saturn and the sun than what it is going to get from the probe.
What's next, is Spain going to elect a socialist/communist leader as head of the country. Oh yeah that already happened.
I really feel the end is near anybody else with me on this?
The people who frequent slashdot and rail bitterly over drilling for oil or the like. Do you guys know how much oil (let alone the tons of water) to build a single computer? Hypocracy. But I bet you feel good about yourself as whine and complain about how awful oil drilling/bush/whatever, while posting it on the internet.
The amount of damage a single probe can make to an entire ecology is infinitesimal, it doesn't matter how radiactive it is. Come on, even a nuke will not destroy it! Biological contamination is a different matter, though...
Man, I wish we could mod stories. This one deserives at least:
- -1 Overrated,
- -1 Troll,
- -1 Redundant,
- -2 Flamebait
-- MarkusQand
As -1, Flamebait? Or how about -1, Begging the Question? Or -1, Troll even? Yeah thats a good one - michael, YHBT!
How about instead, we have a decent discussion on the relative merits and costs of going to Europa and drilling in it to find Life.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
So let me get this straight.
You're chaining yourself to a Tree because we're considering sending 5kg of 'radioactive' isotypes to a watery grave inside a frozen planet's 60 mile think liquid shell whose volume is greater than all the earths oceans combined.
Hello bucket? This is water drop, make some room i'm coming in...
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
-Malakai
A Dragon Lives in my Garage
/. is really starting to suck with all the editorial bias on these stories. I read the article and it didn't mention anything about raioactive leaks destroying the world or anything like that.
I was under the impression this was a discussion board for tech news.
How about we just post stories and then have a discussion about the story instead of pushing some agenda. Or maybe that is too complicated.
After we remove the irrelevant ("after having contaminated..."), the admission of insufficient research ("the plan seems to be"), the speculative and hysterical ("a leak in the radioactive heater wiping out all [ life ]"), and the lame attempt at humor ("drill Sedna"?), we're left with the following condensed version of the post:
there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice
to which I respond:
"yes, that's old news".
Aren't we supposed to debate the issue, not the poster? Or were they too afraid nobody would take notice of a cause they feel so passionately about... Can we just get a straight recitation of the facts and not all the whiny editorialism, please?
"After having contaminated Earth's Oceans"
"But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out. What next? Drill Sedna for oil?"
I wish the Slashdot editors could maintain at least the pretense of objectivity in which stories they post. I'm sure someone else submitted the story without the loaded commentary. I mean, even the sexing-up BBC managed to write a decent article about this.
If not that, perhaps it would be helpful for less frequent readers if editors disclosed their obvious biases: Green Party member, voting for ABB, never tires of SCO stories, Microsoft-hater, whatever.
Another option would be sub-sites for News for [insert political bent]-leaning nerds, stuff that confirms your beliefs.
And leave your personal politics out of this... Mr. Danson. Let us remeber that we are a product of the Largest ecological disaster are planet has ever seen. The mass extinction brought on by the Earth being hit by a medium size comet/asteroid/metor. She survived, I am sure Europa will survive a few 100 Kg metallic device soft landing on her surface.
Before allowing troll articles, please modify slashcode so we can mod them accordingly.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out.
That would be close to never. Europa isn't exactly like a small city like Nagasaki for instance. Even when we intentionally unleashed 2 radioactive devices at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we failed to wipe out all life on the local chain of Japanese islands.
Even around Chernobyl 18 years later life seems to be going on as usual.
The reactors for spacecraft just aren't large enough to cause any large scale catastrophic wipe-outs.
In all seriousness, the human animal has been wondering about his place in the universe ever since the human animal became the human animal, and the answer to "is there life other-where" is an important component, yes?
It may be a lot of money, and there may be more important ways to spend it (for some definitions of 'important', anyway), but to not seek the answer is to deny an important part of our humanness.
Not everyone buys this, or ever has. But not everyone has to, just like not everyone has to buy great art.
J.
Gag...
There's nothing wrong with being concerned...but come on already. Do you really think the rest of the world lacks the morality which you like to whip around like a baseball bat? It's seeing posts like yours that makes me lose faith in mankind. How anyone can be so stupidly omnipotent and then crank off about it is beyond all sense.
Consider flying off to Europa and hugging a big icicle while having a good cry. You could also consider accepting that you aren't well rounded with your thinking and anything but unique. Introspection time!!
I thought one of the arguments for crashing the Gallileo probe into Jupiter, was that they didn't want to leave it in orbit and risk having it crash into Europa, where there may be life. Deciding to drill a probe into Europa would seem to be just as risky with regard to contamination.
Forget about radation for a minute, and just think about the microbes that may still be on the probe from earth? Any chance these to be introduced onto Europa? Perhaps if there wasn't life before, we would introduce it.
In either case I find it odd that previous missions would go to extreme measure to avoid contaminating Europa and this mission plans to flat out do it on purpose.
It's more about science than anything else. If we contaminate something now, it means there is a risk we won't be able to have valid scientific data in the future. The chances are slim, but in a world where some people can win in a lottery, anything is possible. So let's think before doing something.
I guess my concern is that the article (biased though it may be) suggests that such efforts are aimed at Europa because it 'might' have life.
I'm very interested in discovering life elsewhere. But I cringe when someone suggests sending billions of dollars to damn near every planet or moon in the solar system just because it seems like it might have had life at some point.
If there's some evidence pointing at Europa as a good candidate (more than the article describes), I'm unaware of it. Hence, the concern.
Why aren't we using this same tech to explore our own oceans a bit more? With the locality of specific forms of life, we could easily miss a few microbes on a foreign planet if we only search in one spot. We still haven't explored our own oceans to discover the secrets and new life that may yet still be there... ...if we haven't killed them by radiation yet.
It is really frustrating to hear this kind of ignorant nonsense masquerading as legitimate concern. The natural sources for radioactivity on Europa vastly outweigh anything man could introduce with this probe plan. The last thing we need is junk science wielded by knee jerk eco-fanatics over other Solar System bodies without justification. Stick to torching SUVs pretending you're having a positive effect instead of a negative one & leave the brain trust to get on with the difficult process of rational thought and exploring the Solar Sysetem.
The news post is such a typical anti-science message that it'd be funny if it weren't so depressing that people can be so stupid. The message obviously shows somebody who is against things they don't understand. They're probably the kind of person who opposes GM food not because it is unsafe, but because it has the word "genetic" in it.
Guess what, humans don't own jack. We share a planet with millions of other species. That fact that we are able to influence the planet more than most other species gives us a responsibility to act as caretakers. The question of exploiting other celestial bodies is moot until it becomes economically feasible to do so anyhow.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Yes, but did you see her naked? That's all that matters.
Linux O Muerte!
It was someone.
Ah, the sorry state of education in this country. I'm gonna start sounding like one of those bitter old men always talking about how the world's going to hell in a handbasket. Oh. Wait. I *am* a bitter old man, always talking about how the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
For your edification, Werner Heisenberg stated that "the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa" (when observing particles). This, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, is an English translation of a German rephrasing of an equasion, originating in Quantum physics.
In any case, it is often applied more generally to observation having an effect on the thing being observed, but is not a general rule outside of the Quantum realm. For example, I don't materially alter a building by taking its picture. There are passive sensors that, macroscopically, at least, have no significant effect.
Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachtani?
www.fogbound.net
Finding a significant supply of water off the planet is
a very big deal. Aside from the "is there life" question
(that the press just loves) is the more important issue of
use by human colonists. When you do the math on
off-planet colonies, by far the biggest cost is supplying
water. If we can find a usable supply that is already outside
our atmosphere, then we are a big leg up.
If one steps back and looks at interplanetary exploration a bit more generically, it is actually quite similar to early man hopping from continent to continent populating (or should we say "infecting") each land mass along the way with humanity.
Migration is something organisms do. Plain and simple.
Truthfully, I'd be more concerned about ET organisms messing up our environment more than the other way around.
Guess what, we humans, as a race, own everything in the solar system. It is ours to do with as we see fit... other planets are being wasted until we make full use of them for humanity as a whole. Until and unless I'm shown proof of life on another planet, and it would probably have to be a somewhat substantially high order of life, I'm going to argue that it's our position to decide the destiny of every bit of metal, gas and rock that's floating in orbit around our sun.
... the concept of ownership is completely human. In reality, we can't lay claim to anything we can't hold on to.
Guess what
Perhaps I'm reading too far between the lines of your post, but I'd prefer to say that humanity has the potential to utilize other planets, in this system or another. Whether we ever fulfill that potential is another matter.
Furthermore, your post implies (to me) a lack of concern for other environments. I'm not one to suggest that we should not visit or utilize these other worlds, but we need to take responsibility for our actions, and the ramifications they cause. Consider the research we may be denied the opportunity for, if we were to rampantly spread and 'contaminate' other environments. We've done it over and over again on this planet, usually before we knew any better. Lets try not to do it in the future, ok ?
BTW = This is a practical concern, not some sort of fluffy feel-good 'lets not harm the martians' kind of thing.
so the submiter statement could be true nonetheless ...
Yea, and I could be a 391 pound snail. It's not freakin' likely.
The damn thing could spread 100% of its radioactive material directly into the ocean itself and it wouldn't a be a big deal. Any life that happened to be in the localized area when it happened may not be so happy, but overall there's not going to be anything even remotely approaching a disaster. Barely a concern, in fact, unless out of that entire moon the probe just happened to explode in the only tiny, tiny spot that could support life. And the unbelievably bad odds of that are what now?
The concern about "contamination" that people who aren't just submitting trolls to the Slashdot editors talk about comes from biological sources, not radioactive ones.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
The evidence: The liquid water under the ice.
They "know" that it's there because the crack/stress patterns visible in the ice could "only" have been produced if the ice was floating.
(Yes yes, they don't really know it - they are guessing, but they are well informed guesses).
Liquid water means that there is a good chance for life - the temperature is reasonable, there's oxygen, etc etc.
The article doesn't describe it because it's a very well accepted/established conjecture that liquid water means a high probability of life (go google for "water is life")
And when it comes down to it, no there is no other way of examining the question before sending a probe. That is the nature of a "conjecture". Scientific evidence suggests that there is a high probability of life there, but we're never going to know for sure if we never go look.
And that is "anti-science". Exactly. It is anti-thought, anti-rationality and just plain stupid. Your opinion is clearly the result of thick, foggy ideology.
The Big Evil Corporations also make the tools to help your body beat cancer, fight infections, help the crippled become mobile once again, and so on. Should we not trust those as well. Big Evil Corporation made it possible to post your message to the world. Will you be leaving the Internet?
I see no reason for it given that organic food tastes just great and has worked fine for thousands of years
All you've done here is demonstrate your total and complete ignorance on the topic. Maybe you should educate yourself on the issue with something other than political manifestos. And next time you hop and skip down to the local grocery store, realize that a lot of the world can't do that, and would love to have some crops engineered to gorw in their own backyards and resist the local threats.
--- Ban humanity.
Please whine over there about ecological disasters, and how bad we are as a species, etc...
what is stopping all of that water firing the probe out of its hole at some massive velocity (anybody for a game of golf)...
Why does the general public always seem to have
such a willful ignorance when it comes to
nuclear power?
Yo, Buckwheat. Listen up!
YOU ARE BATHED IN RADIATION AT THIS VERY MOMENT.
Somehow you seem to survive that indignity. Odd,
isn't it?
One nuclear powered probe going awry on Europa
would not have the REMOTEST CHANCE of killing
all the hypothetical life there.
The Cassini probe now about to enter Saturn's
orbit would not have "poisoned everyone on the
planet!" if it had exploded on launch.
Deal with it. And FGS grow up.
the real risk is that microbes could theoretically be transported to europa and corrupt the data they study..
As always, the real risk is that we'll contaminate Europe with microbes.
One of the points I make, when people bring up the topic of alien organisms contaminating Earth, is that Earth really has pretty advanced microbes. Microbes on Earth have had 4.5 billion years to practice infesting each other and the various high-level organisms. Likewise, our immune systems have had slightly less time to practice fighting off such microbes. All this evolution makes them pretty advanced.
Granted, Europa has had the same time to work as we have, but it hasn't had as large a playground, and most likely none of the organisms there have gone up against a mammalian immune system anytime during their evolutionary development. Nor have they gotten the chance to try to survive in as many different environments.
How is this on topic? Any organisms we send over there will wipe the floor with any Europan microbes they find. This may be a giant leap for Earthling microbes, but it's probably bad for science.
Same thing goes for Mars and elsewhere.
Upstairs Dog, Downstairs People.
...anything that survives being blasted into space, travel half the solar system, survive reentry and the drilling down to water, revive itself and take over the place, all of which without any intentional assistance to keep it alive on its journey, deserves it.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Unless you freeze them in liquid nitrogen, you won't keep bacterial growth to a standstill. The little suckers keep on growing, albeit verrrry slowly. So contamination is a problem, on a long timescale. Additionally, as soon as these bacteria get transported to spots supporting life, say, geothermal vents, they could very much start growing again, posing a serious threat to endogenous ecosystems. All this may not be very probable, but nevertheless a considerable risk when dealing with the possibility of a pristine unknown ecosphere.
This comment does not exist.
I don't really understand your argument. Well, I understand that people often do stupid things, but I don't get why the solar system would care.
It seems to be that the parent poster was saying (albeit in an inflammatory way) that since there is apparently no life in the solar system that can tell us otherwise, there's nothing stopping us from exploring and utilizing the resources of these planets. I mean, it's not like the rock itself will rise up against us and tell us off for disturbing it.
The only logical reason I can see for us to avoid fumbling around the solar system and messing with things is to preserve it for future (and perhaps smarter) humans. But that would mean that we would eventually go out into the solar system anyway, which would require more technology, likely gained by our current attempts at space travel.
Anyway, what it gets down to is that we have to do stupid things for a while to get smart. We wouldn't have environmentalism if we hadn't wasted our resources, we wouldn't have atheism if nobody saw faults with religion, and we won't be able to appreciate the wonder of space if we don't muck it up a bit first.
[insert witty quote here]
First: when people say "The Theory of Foo" what they properly mean is "The Hypothesis That Foo".
Second: Evolution is a process, not a hypothesis. It has been applied in Computer Science, postulated in astrophysics and biology, etc. Natural Selection is a scientific hypothesis.
Third: Hypotheses are not directly verifiable. You don't go out and look for gravity to try and figure out whether Newton was right. Hypotheses are used to generate verifiable predictions, and the more predictions that are verified to be correct, the more correct the hypothesis that generated them is take to be.
Natural Selection generates predictions about disease resistance, fossil records, etc. So far, all of the significant predictions have been verified to be correct. How many of Creationism's have been? Oh right, it's a historical claim, not a hypothesis.
Doing stuff in space is a high-return investment in technology. Unfortunately, you can't just tell people "do stuff in space", or they won't do anything interesting. So the managers come up with arbitrary goals, like getting to the Moon, or looking for life. That way the scienticians have real goals to work towards, they build technology, and we all win!
NASA's managers seem to have decided that their arbitrary goals will mostly have to do with putting people in random places. The ESA has decided to look for life in random places. Both will yield different technological paybacks and it's pretty hard to make a value judgement between the two, don't you think?
It's possible that signs of life may be found embeded in the ice near the surface. Perhaps we wouldn't have to drill far...
The Philosophy of Liberty | lewrockwell.com
"Guess what ... the concept of ownership is completely human."
Then why does my dog keep pissing in the same places around my yard???
Geez it's a joke. I don't hate (or even dislike) Europeans in general. In my mind, anyone who's willing to label all people from a continent and denounce them as inferior needs to meet a few people from outside his/her local community.
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because submarines typically only transmit at high frequencies via satellite. These frequencies won't go through water, let alone kilometers of ice.
Now, if they mean very-low-frequency (VLF) transmissions, which are used to talk to submarines (but not back the other way) while they are underwater, then there is another problem. Europa is immersed in Jupiter's powerful magnetic field, and those VLF frequencies will not be able to escape that field to make it back to Earth.
So I wonder just how well-thought-out this proposed mission really is.
You can help save intelligent life here on Earth by donating to the World Food Programme. The World Food Programme's donation page is here.
Incidentally, the U.S. Government is the largest donor:
Oh well, I'm sure we can get the money from the defence piggy-bank... right, guys?
The Department of Health and Human Services received about 501 billion dollars in 2003 compared with the 388 billion that the Department of Defense received. Look here.
If you're in the U.S. and want to do more to help locally right now, try here. Remember, there are people in your local community that are suffering just as much as other people around the world. If we all help locally, we all help globally.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
As it melts its way through the ice, it's unreeling from its tether (rather than dragging a tether which is unreeling from the lander)
Think of a wire-guided missile or torpedo, the spool of control wire is on the projectile, not the launching station.