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Cassini 'Tastes' Organic Material at Enceladus
Riding with Robots writes "As previously reported, the robotic spacecraft Cassini recently flew through the mysterious geyser plumes at Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. Today, NASA released the preliminary results of the flyby, including some intriguing findings, such as organic materials 20 times denser than expected and relatively high temperatures along the fissures where the geysers emanate. 'These spectacular new data will really help us understand what powers the geysers. The surprisingly high temperatures make it more likely that there's liquid water not far below the surface,' said one mission scientist."
> "Enceladus' brew is like carbonated water with an essence of natural gas," said Waite.
Gawd, i knew it. The primordial hell-brew of the universe is Mountain Dew.
That which does not kill us makes us... st
Whether they find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet
if they spin it the right way, that they literally found moons made of petrochemicals in the outer solar system their budget would triple overnight ;)
chicken.
They were produced without synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, or unnatural additives of any kind.
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...but they don't contain real girl scouts
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
No, what they mean is that no man made pesticides have been used on the moon.
Nope. You need both carbon and hydrogen, and CO2 has no H. I believe the simplest organic molecule is methane, CH4. It's also hydrocarbon, which means it contains only carbon and hydrogen. Alternatively formaldehyde, CH2O, could be considered simplest, depending on how you define "simple". Then you get more complex stuff by adding more carbon (and hydrogen as much as that new carbon needs), and by adding other elements, like replacing an H in a hydrocarbon with an OH gives alcohols, most importantly from C2H6 to C2H5OH.
And now we get to the real problem with extraterrestial organic molecules. There's usually so much methanol (CH3OH), that drinking the stuff would be rather lethal. So you still need to do distillation to get pure enough ethanol. So there's no point sending people out there, because it's as easy to just make the ethanol here on earth using traditional methods. That's why it's better to send robots.
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20080316&mode=classic
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.