Slashdot Mirror
Radio Wave on Saturn's Moon Hints at Hidden Ocean
SleepyHappyDoc writes "The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave may indicate the existence of a hidden ocean underneath the surface of Titan. The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe, which entered Titan's atmosphere over two years ago, collected evidence and information which has led to this potential discovery. This technology may lead to entirely new ways of finding out information about other planets."
...Beach Boys tunes
Table-ized A.I.
"Bugs Bunny to Earth..Bugs Bunny to Earth...." "GET ME OUTTA HEEEEEEEEERE!!"
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
And there's no point in reading TFA in order to try to remove any of the mystery. Frequency? Duration? Periodicity/repeatability? Any characteristics whatsoever? Not a single useful property is mentioned in the article. In fact, apparently it's not even certain that it's not an artifact.
Actually, the whole thing is a rather weird: not only do they not give any details whatsoever, but I find it difficult to countenance that a scientist would talk about a "radio wave" rather than a "signal" or "emission" in this context. Speaking from my background as a co-investigator on the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment on Voyager, the word "wave" is usually reserved for theoretical treatments in published papers.
Anyway, I guess we just have to wait for the upcoming issue of "Planetary and Space Science" to see what the article is really talking about.
Actually, it looks like Paris Hilton.
and what does it do?
Shockingly enough, it pretty much does nothing, just like Paris Hilton.
No, not *that* genesis (but I made you look, didn't I). The answer to the question, "why haven't we found life yet" really lies in the fact that what actually gets life going is still quite a mystery. As you know, scientists can simulate the conditions of early Earth and they can produce amino acids, but they can't produce DNA or simple cellular life.
My point is, we may still be missing something important and fundamental. That's what makes science so interesting. There is always something else to discover.
In Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker, he makes reference to the work of another biologist whose name escapes me at the moment. But that guy's theory is that silicate crystals in soft clay are the necessary to get early life going. The theory goes like this: imagine a river with clay at the bottom. The clay forms microscopic crystals, which sometimes catch and constrain amino acids and other building blocks, like stuff getting stuck in the strainer in your sink.
As the crystals grow, they sometimes "empty the strainer" basically spitting out these now larger strands of amino acids. The strands and structures flow further down the river and inevitably get stuck in another crystal. There they grow larger and eventually get spit out. The process repeats all the way down the river.
At the mouth of the river, you've got billions of different pre-biotic experiments washing out into the sea. Just by chance, one of those experiments is able to reproduce itself. Life is unstoppable at that point.
So what I'm getting at is this: we keep finding *some* of the building blocks, but we aren't finding them arranged the correct way. A static sea (maybe even with hydrothermal vents) on Titan or Europa or Mars may be able to support current Earth life, but it may not be able to spark that all-important genesis event.
On the other hand, early Mars may have been perfect for this.
however if you're having sex with a weird methane breathing alien fish monster, getting a fart in the face is probably isn't going to bother you.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?