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."
Hippy.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
... 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?
Do your arms get tired from hugging those trees that tightly?
I don't care if we mess up their planet, I hate those arrogant Europeans.
True story.
In all seriousness, why does it matter? This sounds like a lot of money to spend on a "maybe." I've wondered this for a while now, and I'd like to hear someone explain why this search for life is so crucial. I feel there might be better ways to spend the money, and better ways or opportunities to discover life on other planets/celestial bodies.
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
In the name of saving the bind sea turtle, all travel in the Arctic ahould be banned and any knowledge that was gained from past explorations should be forgotten.
Stay tuned for new sig...
2. What next? Drill Sedna for oil?"--There must have been life for there to be oil, you insensitive clod! Oh wait, maybe that is why they're so desparate to find evidence of life elsewhere!
Can I bum a sig?
on that rock to fill a space cruiser!
Save me Jeabus!
but it would be nothing compared to the hatred these radioactive, mutated, super alge would have.
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?
That would be some expensive exclusive bottled water.
Apparently some recent research has indicated that the ice on Europa may be quite a bit thicker than initially thought. I'd post a link if I had one (but I don't) The thickness of the ice sheet may well be such that getting to the ocean below (assuming there is one) could turn out to be impractical, even using heat.
Roving Web-Teleoperated Robot
Isn't Europa in Jupiter's radiation belts? In otherwords, a tiny amount of radiation released from a probe would probably be nothing compared to what the "ocean" experiences everyday? (I could be way off base, though)
Doh!
RTFM!
Now, a planet named after a miserable women who marries her father's dog is fair game...
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Lets get them before they evolve and get us...
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.
Along the same idea: Near my Dad's house they are currently doing a lot of logging, so a lot of protestors have been seen in the area, damaging equipment, sabotaging trucks, etc.
So now there are signs up everywhere stating:
"NO TRESPASSING!
And if you are an environmental activist, try wiping your butt with plastic toilet paper!"
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
What part of "All these worlds are yours, execpt Europa. Attempt no landings there." don't they understand?
This sig intentionally left blank.
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
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landings there."
/. 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.
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/Main/Features/2000/Fall/sp ace_pic1.html
Europa is already highly radioactive. It's around 19 Mrads thanks to this thing we call Jupiter. Saying that a radioactive probe could potentialy destroy any life already there is akin to saying that my bottle of water could kill off life in the pacific. Its people like the poster of this story that the website about "dihydrogen monoxide" is meant to catch.
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".
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
The same time it would take for a drill in your head to find a brain.
"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.
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.
I didn't agree. I've got a feeling this argument, while maybe not coming from a religious perspective, has a lot of the same concepts built in. 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.
--
RumorsDaily
Oil on Sedna? On a dirty, utterly cold rock on the very edge of the Solar system? On a rock that even NASA hesitate to call a planet? Let me guess, you are the product of the US high school system with intellectual skills honed to perfection by watching Fox News?
Before allowing troll articles, please modify slashcode so we can mod them accordingly.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
You could poison Europa's environment and possibly destroy any life down there!
...With DihydrogenMonoxide!
Think of all the DihydrogenMonoxide that would be released as a result of all this melting! It could be catastrophic!
-=Lothsahn=-
This is yet another example of why NASA should make more use of Ask Slashdot. We could have helped create a better rover AND saved Europa!
Adidas To Bring Back Sneakernet
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.
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.
Not that seriously. The first Apollo mission found the moon to be sterile, but later Apollo missions found strep bacteria from previous missions.
Bacterial contamination is a real danger to life and to accurate science on Europa and lake Vostok. It is extremely difficult to keep a robotic probe from carrying contamination since modern electronics can't take the extreme heat needed to kill resilient strains (which since they're so resilient would make them even more harmful). Scientists have been putting more effort into trying to figure out how to explore Europa without contamination, but are having a tough time coming up with a solution.
As a graduate student in astrophysics (not planetary geology, which this would fall under), I think this is an overall good idea. (Agreed, the poster sounds a tad biased.)
There are a few points which I would like clarified by someone who is perhaps knowledgeable. For one, landing a spacecraft on Europa, where we have little knowledge of its atmospheric conditions, will be a formidable challenge. (We've lost many Mars-intended missions due to that.) How can we plan for that?
Secondly, I don't think it's known how deep the ice goes? Is there a plan for if the ice is a foot thick? How about 10 feet? How about 1000?
Next, can we still transmit a signal back if we have to take a probe that far underwater?
Notwithstanding a Europan shark eating the probe, I think there are some serious scientific reasons to be concerned about the search for life on one of the solar system's most likely candidates -- and we should ask ourselves if we're taking the best approach for a multi-hundred-million dollar mission?
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.
Hey, I've got intelligence that shows that those microbes could evolve into sentient tool using creatures then develop and deploy weapons of mass destruction in a mere million years. If we wait to know for certain the first warning may be a mushroom cloud on Earth. Can we take that risk? We have to strike first!
Search 2010 Gen Con events
All These Worlds Are Yours Except Europa. Attempt No Landing There. Use Them Together. Use Them in Peace.
Help! Help! I'm covered in rediation! Get it off!.....
...What? What do you mean sunlight is radiation?
They'll always fear what they can't understand.
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.
From CNN:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/09/21/galileo.
Yup... We're going to be battling radioactive superbugs from Europa!
Since NAFTA has been such a smashing success, the government is looking for new places to send American jobs. A moon of Jupiter seems like a good place to start: not too far from home, no organized labor, no pesky Judeo-Christian holidays to hamper production. Outsourcing at its finest!
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
As many have pointed out, I don't think we have to worry about radiation since Europa is in Jupiter's radiation belts.
However, what we do have to worry about is the primitive fish-like people of Europa worshipping our probe like a god! Think of the cultural havok we could wreck on their primitive society!
And here I was thinking about how hard it would be to land a probe on ACID. I mean, you have to consider music selection, who's with you, how paranoid you should be, whether the bats with the glowing red eyes are real enough to worry about without looking like your insane by ducking randomly... I personally react badly with acid, so I'd have to say it would be pretty tough.
While it's true that some bacteria would be transported to Europa, how much? If Europa is cold enough to freeze water, then it's cold enough to keep bacteria GROWTH to a standstill, right? The bacteria would just lay dormant, wouldn't it?
Perhaps there's some biology nerds out there who can offer us some insight.
Stack overflow: pid 352258, proc httpd, addr 0x11f7ffff0, pc 0x12000195c Segmentation fault (core dumped)
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.
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)...
the real risk is that microbes could theoretically be transported to europa and corrupt the data they study..
I hear that Europa is full of dihydrogen monoxide
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Those signs are fucking idiotic.
Newsflash to morons: you don't need trees to make paper. Lots and lots of cheap, easy-to-grow plants are loaded with cellulose.
And yes, I grew up in a logging town, in a logging family, and I'm quite familiar with the logging industry. Chopping down trees to make toilet paper and diaper fill is utterly, utterly tragic.
Biogenic assumes that living things die, are deeply buried in the crust, rot, and in so doing create various hydrocarbons. Abiogenic assumes that primordial material from the creation of the planet are cooked and rise into the crust. This theory posits that biological microfossils found in petroleum are leeched from the crust by the flow, rather than being one of the byproducts of biogenic rot.
Kooks like J. F. Kenney grasp at old research by a few Soviet geologist to claim that abiogenic reserves are being constantly replenished more quickly than even our current rate of extraction(1).
The vast majority of geologists would say that while research confirms that abiogenic formation of gaseous alkanes can take place in the Earth's crust, a comparison with the isotopic signatures of economically important gas reservoirs around the world suggests that abiogenic production is not a globally significant source of hydrocarbons (2).
Luke, help me take this mask off
water (and so ice) can stop radiation quite effectively
Yeah, but that also means that a world like Europa that may be made up almost entirely of water, and has much more water than all the oceans of Earth put together, has to be extremely immune to radioactive damage.
I don't know why envrionmentalists aren't happer that NASA is removing radioactive material from this planet. I mean, a lot of people complain about it, but only NASA is actually doing something about it.
The remark about the radiation reminded me of the recent story about the Lunokhod vehicles (the Russian moon rovers). I found the use of Polonium-210 for heating the rovers very interesting.
Some intersting stuff about Polonium-210 on Wikipedia:
"half a gram quickly reaching a temperature above 750 K" (476.85C)
"This isotope is an alpha emitter that has a half-life of 138.39 days."
"...nearly all alpha radiation can be easily stopped by ordinary containers and upon hitting its surface releases its energy..."
BTW Did anyone else see the picture of Susi the "melting probe"? lmao I wonder where they got the idea for the design of that! Does it vibrate too?
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.
When Jane initially met Tarzan of the Jungle, she was immediately attracted to him, and during her questions about his life, she asked him how he had sex.
"Tarzan not know sex," he replied.
Jane explained to him what sex was.
Tarzan said, "Oh... Tarzan use hole in trunk of tree."
Horrified, she said, "Tarzan you have it all wrong, but I will show you how to do it properly." She took off her clothes and laid down on the ground. Here" she said, "you must put it in here!"
Tarzan removed his loincloth...stepped closer with his huge manhood and then gave her an almighty kick right in the crotch.
Jane rolled around in agony for what seemed like an eternity Eventually she managed to gasp for air and screamed, "What in the Hell did you do that for?!"
"Tarzan check for bees."
...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.
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?
Did you remember to put on your tinfoil hat before you posted that? Remember, they're always watching!
Marvin knew: "Think of a number, any number..."
Forgetting for a moment about trashing the poster's mentality or politics, and focusing instead on the actual STORY...
The idea of an ice-melting probe seems pretty interesting to me. I wonder how it would communicate with an orbiting mother ship or with a lander on the surface. Is it possible to use radio or something else through thousands of feet of ice? The article mentions the possibility of a spherical probe turning around and melting its way back up. It probably wouldn't have to be spherical -- they could turn it upside down by shifted ballast -- but anyway, does that imply that the probe would be incommunicado until it could return to the surface?
actually the effect of the Van Allen belt was one of the greatest concerns for the Apollo mission planners.
They were able to get around it by a) going through a part of the Van Allen belt that has less radiation - some parts WOULD turn you into fried chicken (protons with energy on the order of 50 - 150 MeV - bad) and b) they passed through it quickly (i believe it was 4 hours), and scheduled the launch specifically around that window.
even so, they received rads far beyond what most of us will ever encounter (yet not enough deemed "immediately life threatening"). probably something like what someone would get living on a nuke sub for the duration of their service.
in short, the specific amount of radiation they received is categorized as being not immediately threateneing, but likely to cause cancer later.
Man, the monolith is not going to like this.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
BZZZT! Wrong! Thanks for playing. If you had read the Guardian article you would have found out that:
"In November 1969, Apollo 12 landed just 170 yards from Surveyor 3, a robotic craft that had achieved the first soft lunar landing by an American probe two-and-a-half years before."
Parts of the craft were recovered in sterile conditions and were studied back on Earth. Scientists found "between 50 and 100 living micro-organisms were extracted from the polyurethane foam insulation that covered its interior circuit boards... The astronauts ferried back the contents of a sneeze by a worker assembling Surveyor 3."
These were organisms that had been brought to the moon by the Surveyor 3 probe, not the astronauts. Not only that but they survived for years on the surface of the moon. So no, it is not easy to keep a robotic probe from having bacteria.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
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.