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.
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.
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
but it would be nothing compared to the hatred these radioactive, mutated, super alge would have.
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)
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.
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
I think we should start spending more money on the search for intelligent life on earth, because this article poster contributes to the notion that their is none.
/. 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
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=-
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.
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?
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.