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."

Comments

Biased Poster?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jeez, can you get any more bias worked into your message?

It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!

[American AC in Paris]

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.

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...

Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge!

[Tackhead]

> The real threat of any contamination from a probe is not so much from radiation as from heavy metals leaching into the environment, but then if the floor of the Europan ocean is anything like the black smokers of Earth's oceans any life should be used to heavy metals.

Suppose we look at the worst-case scenario. There's life on Europa to endanger. Probe melts through. Probe lands on sea floor. Probe just happens to land near a vent with a population of living organisms, where it fails catastrophically and spews its deadly cargo.

Folks, Europa's oceans are big and deep. We're talking about a volume of water that exceeds all the water on Earth by an order of magnitude. If the Europan ecosystem is fragile enough to be destroyed by anything humans can put in a package small enough to send to the seafloor, life on Europa would either be undetectable -- because there's so little of it that the odds of landing on it are nearly zero, or life on Europa would already be extinct.

Look at Earth. We detonated atomic bombs both above and below the ocean surface, spraying tons of transuranics into our seas and atmosphere. It may have sucked to have been a coral at Bikini Atoll in the 50s, but the ecosystem didn't even blink, and in fact, the Atoll is one of the planet's greatest recreational diving sites.

If life doesn't exist on Europa, who cares - there's nothing to contaminate.

If life does exist on Europa, and there's so little of it that we can't find it, odds are our probe isn't going to harm it, because we're going to be thousands of miles and trillions of gallons of water away from it. No harm.

If life exists on Europa and it's sufficiently omnipresent in the Europan biosphere that our probe lands on enough of lifeforms to detect them, then it won't matter if the probe is made out of tofu from sustainably-grown soy fields, or if it contains a nuclear bomb that detonates and vaporizes everything within 10 miles -- a Europan biosphere, like the Terran one, is big enough to take anything we're capable of throwing at it.

Nonsense

[Peter_Pork]

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...

I call -5 on the story itself

[MarkusQ]

Man, I wish we could mod stories. This one deserives at least:

• -1 Overrated,
• -1 Troll,
• -1 Redundant,

  and

• -2 Flamebait

-- MarkusQ

Can we moderate the submission itself

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Can we moderate the submission itself

[bob dobalina]

Amen to that. The comments sections get moderated and meta-moderated, all in the name of intelligent discussion and democracy, yet only the slashdot elite get to publish their stories, however biased they may be.

Paranoia Check...

[malakai]

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?

Editorial bias anyone?

[0ddity]

/. 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.

Reader's digest condensed version of the post

[tjic]

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 next? Drill Sedna for oil?"

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".

Why bother pretending this story post is news?

[Daniel Quinlan]

"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.

Let's just stick to the facts.

[GSpot]

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.

Wiping out life on Europa

[zoneball]

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.

Re:Question...

[Bucko]

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.

Re:Polluting other planets

[Mullen]

I once dated someone who was fully against the exploration, or colonization, of Mars because she feared that we were given this planet and we've made a mess of it. She argued that we had no right to go to another planet that didn't belong to us and alter it in any substantial way. After a few somewhat lenghty discussions trying to pin down exactly what her issue was about, I discovered that the she felt that GOD had given us this planet and not Mars, hence we shouldn't mess up God's plans with Mars by stomping all over it with our oversized space boots.

Yes, but did you see her naked? That's all that matters.

Microbes

[ReciprocityProject]

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.