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Enceladus "Sea" Mystery Deepens
Smivs writes "The BBC reports that an ocean may not be the source of the jets emanating from Saturn's moon Enceladus. Controversial research questions the moon's promise as a target in the search for life beyond Earth. A chemical analysis of Enceladus, led by University of Colorado planetary scientist Nick Schneider, failed to detect sodium, an element scientists say should be present in any body of water that has been in contact with rock for billions of years. Spectral analysis with the Keck Telescope found no sodium in the plumes or in the vapor in orbit around the moon. At stake is whether Saturn's moon could support alien life and is thus a worthy target for a NASA exploratory mission to detect it. Such a mission to Enceladus is one of four currently under review for further development."
failed to detect sodium, an element scientists say should be present in any body of water that has been in contact with rock for billions of years.
I know people spend their entire lives studying these things, but how do you really know that ALL rock has sulfur in it? Isn't it possible that for whatever reason this rock doesn't?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
"If you have a long-lived ocean, it's going to have salt in it,"
Just like Lake Michigan?
Seriously though, why is it that life developing elsewhere MUST have sodium? The strictest definition of life doesn't require specific elements or chemicals to be present, only behaviors, or functions if you will. Ignoring something because it doesn't fit neatly with what WE need for life is absurd, ESPECIALLY when looking at something that far from the sun, and thus cold.
Maybe sodium it isnt so very soluable at such cold temps.
Maybe, but thats something you could test here on Earth.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
It's really not a total waste of government money, because once alien life is found it will be a great tool for controling the masses through fear. Just think - instead of fearing another country we could now fear life from other planets. That should keep us busy for a couple of generations...
By "Offtopic", I think they mean it's not their preferred cosmology.
There is a subtle guerrilla war going on within the discipline of astrophysics right now. Many of the conventional astrophysicists are refusing to consider the *possibility* that electricity in space does things of importance. Even when the evidence is compelling, they refuse to take part in any serious investigation that the conventional theories may be seriously wrong. The thing is, in the past, we used to evaluate ideas within the conclusions of studies. They're ruling the idea out within their assumptions. Even though reasonable arguments exist that space plasmas can become highly electrical, and even on huge scales at that, they stick to their guns that electricity in space cannot do anything of any importance -- and they consistently declare that the idea is so absurd that it does not even deserve consideration within the disciplines of astrophysics, the weather sciences, climatology or geology, among others. At the current rate, we're perhaps going to spin our wheels here for a couple of decades until public awareness of the role of electricity in space increases. Currently, the level of awareness of what's happening is quite low due to the complexity of the subject. But, over time, people will get better at explaining the situation, and more people will begin to wonder why we do not consider the *possibility* that electricity actually does things in space (other than just creating magnetic fields).
The truly sad thing is that, if the public actually knew about the evidence, they would certainly not agree that the idea does not deserve consideration. There is a huge disconnect right now between the more over-zealous astrophysicists and reasonable, objective people.
There's in fact a pretty good chance that somebody will actually chime in on this thread actually. They consider people like myself as spreading "misinformation".
"A man cannot begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows." --Epictetus, 1st Century A.D.
Yeah! And while we're on the subject, I think it's pretty crazy that the American public is being asked to pay for MRI machines in hospitals to study people's brains, and presumably to eventually study the effect of brain structure on thought, yet they so readily discout phrenology. I think that most Americans would appreciate hearing more than just one viewpoint on how their money is being spent. One can be forgiven for getting the impression that most conventional psychiatrists would prefer to die trying to prove that skull bumps are irrelevant to personality and intelligence than have to take part in studying an alternative psychiatry.
Remember, everyone: a handful of crackpots and a million I-Want-To-Believe-But-Have-No-Background-To-Understand-The-Topic followers must be treated as equals as the entire remainder of the scientific community.
We should start dealing in those black-market beagles.
It costs very little. The entire NASA funding is less than half of a percent of the government budget, it really is a pittance. Only a very small percentage of the NASA budget is used for space exploration.
One Iraq war for example costs (so far) about a thousand times as much as putting robots on mars.
Spending a very small amount of money on building a legacy isn't useless.
The earth is NOT flat because one can fly around it.
Now this is not an easy undertaking -- quite a bit of time, money and effort has to be expended to fly around the earth.
But after you've done it, after you've flown around the earth yourself, you do not have to give "equal time" to the notion of a flat earth anymore.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
The Enceladus flagship mission is one of four - along with those to Europa, Titan and Jupiter - competing for funding and currently under review by Nasa.
It's sad that not all four of them get funded. This kind of mission is much more important and interesting than the shuttle.
Really, more to the point, life is a tremendous waste of time if you're not learning about the world in which you live. As one of many people interested in the subject matter, I want the government to fund more science of all kinds, especially in space and biology. It's damaging to require science to have immediate payoffs. You're simply hitting nearby targets. Funding all science for the sake of knowledge EXPOSES more targets, letting us know the possibilities. THEN we can let the free market work on commercializing the discoveries. We'll get much farther that way.
Lets focus our space program on useful tasks such as orbital solar energy collection and leave the fruitless search for extraterrestrial life to the hobbiests.
How do you know what will be useful in the future? Many useful technologies we take for granted to day are the products of research into things that were not obviously going to be useful at the time. If you limit all your research to only things which are immediately useful you are seriously limiting the speed of advancement.
For the most part, commercial organisations don't spend money on blue-sky projects and hobbiests don't have the money to spend - this means it's either down to governments to fund the research or we can forget about such advancements altogether.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
There's also the sad fact that there are a number of scientists who have a stroke of what they assume is brilliance and ignore the inadequacies of their theory and any contradictory evidence. The momentum of scientific thought, as much as it hurts revolution, also protects science from a lot of inane BS.
That's not to say I think either side is right or wrong. But we shouldn't assume that the underdog is right *just because* he's fighting the establishment.
"To be a persecuted genius, you not only have to be persecuted; you also have to be right." (Asimov)
Much more difficult is to come up with a demonstration that you would regard as acceptable.
Why?
For starters, as our dialogue (if it can be called that) in various SD comment strings attests, you do not accept the standard (plasma physics, space science,
So what would work?
Well, if you'd be so kind as to tell me (and all others who would read your reply) what you regard as acceptable forms of judgment, assessment, testing, evaluation, and so on (of material such as that in 'the link I posted') are, then I could start to prepare such a demonstration.
Of course, it's entirely possible that no such demonstration, within your evaluation paradigm, is possible, even in principle. Saying this another way, it may be that, within your worldview, 'the link I posted' cannot be shown to be wrong, ever.
One of the disadvantages to operating outside this paradigm is that key terms lose their precision, communication becomes fuzzy, misunderstandings all too common, and so on.
If by the above you are referring to the solar wind, then of course you're right, and we can turn to any number of standard textbooks and scientific papers to explore the topic in as much depth as any reader wishes.
However, if by the above you mean something like Juergen's currents, or the idea that the Sun is powered (largely) by a giant inter-stellar current, then we are adrift without a paddle
However, the difficulty comes once you accept that *possibility*
a) you reject - out of hand - any testing done within the standard scientific paradigm of plasma physics or space science;
b) you offer no alternative means by which any such testing could be done. I'm just trying to have a conversation, really, because I honestly don't trust the establishment to admit that it is wrong on this issue. What they're going to do is work their way to the same conclusions the hard way, by fighting tooth and nail to avoid considering the possibility that electricity does things of importance in space, and people like you and I will probably be dead by the time it happens. Ah, the eternal excuse - I can't tell you anything about my electromachining (or whatever you call it) idea, nor can I suggest any way anyone could even *begin* to draft a programme to test it, because I honestly don't trust the establishment to admit that it is wrong on this issue!
Would you mind explaining the logic here please? The plume on Io, for god's sake, looks *exactly* like the output of a plasma gun. It does? '*exactly*'?
How did you come to that conclusion?
In what - quantitative - sense is it *exact*? Images from Kristian Birkeland's terrella experiments from 100 years go are so identical to eclipsed shots of Io (with its hot point sources) that the two images are literally impossible to distinguish. They are?
I thought Birkeland's 'images' are on photographic emulsion, and 'images' of 'eclipsed shots of Io (with its hot point sources)' are the result of an extremely complex chain of processing, using many, detailed, mathematical models (the spacecraft to ground station commslink alone is a marvel of modern technology). Am I mistaken? People who argue that we should not investigate these things are basically assuming their way to their own conclusions. Who so argues? Certainly not the dozens of PhDs who write papers on the landforms of Mars, etc! These ideas should not be judged within the assumptions of papers. Not even - Flying Spaghetti Monster forfend! - within the assumptions of 'EU Theory' papers (should any ever get written)? We should evaluate the concept of electrical terraforming instead within the conclusions. What does this mean? What 'conclusions'? Reached how? Using which parts of plasma (or related) physics?