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Cassini Spots Geysers On Saturn's Moon Enceladus
An anonymous reader writes "Huge geysers on Saturn's moon Enceladus may be fed by a salty sea below its surface, boosting the odds of extraterrestrial life in our own Solar System."
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The geysers are old news. The new news is that Cassini has detected SALTS in Saturn's rings, pointing to a possible salty ocean under the icy surface of Enceladus.
One simple rule for its versus it's
My understanding is that the major thing of interest is that there is _salt water_ on this moon. salt usually comes from rocks and to get it into water pretty much requires _liquid_ water, therefore the possibility of a life sustaining habitat. the geysers indicate is its possible that it has a liquid core, though i could be mistaken on that part.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
It means that if we find some kind of intelligent shrimp on Enceladus we will be able to eat them without adding salt.
that seems like a pretty dumb idea. if there is any life outside our earth, sending life forms into its habitat could be incredibly destructive. the idea isn't to kill everything we see (though humans are good at that, i'll admit) its to learn about what might be out there.
i wage a holy war against the apostrophe.
I like it.
Besides, the more I learn about the human body, the more convinced our real purpose is to move bacteria around, so this is a logic extension of out purpose.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Of course once we have verified it is devoid of life it's actually a good idea.
...that's where I get all my planetary science news! not. also. also. Why do people do this? This is the internet, not your local morning paper. You can go wherever you want to get this information. WHY NOT GO DIRECTLY TO THE SOURCE!?
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
hence the Solal System.
If you're going to try to be a pedantic know-it-all, you really should proofread your own posts.
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Good riddance.
Don't let the Van Allen Belt hit you in the ass on the way out.
NASA disagrees: http://spaceplace.nasa.gov/en/kids/spitzer/signs/sign_glossary.shtml#S
"solar system
A system of planets, moons, asteroids, comets, dust, gas, and any other objects that orbit a star, tied to it by the star's gravitational force. "
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
To what end? The same thing has occurred to me, but I can't fathom a useful end-product. If we want to study the behavior of exotic bacteria/whatever, we can replicate the conditions here on Earth much more cheaply than rocketing them off into space (not to mention they'd be much easier to watch/study). And if you've got some fantasy of them evolving into super-fish or whatever, you'd better be REALLY patient. (And, again, even if you're hoping for macro-evolution, we could replicate the environment more easily than visiting it.) If it's dead, I see no benefit of adding life.
My vote - It's much more interesting to just keep it pristine and see what's there (even if it's nothing.) And, if there is life, it would be far more interesting to see something (however primitive) that had a fresh start rather than something that started here.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"Maybe it's something we can transplant?"
Did anyone else read that as Moon Enchiladas?
Mmmm.. Moon enchiladas...
In my opinion giving life in general a chance to continue should something happen to the Earth is a worthy enough cause. I've often dreamt of designing autonomous starships that investigate stellar systems. If there is no life there they would seed the planets with hardy bacteria, mine some material to replicate itself, and sends a copy or two of itself on to the next star systems while it parks in orbit or on a moon somewhere to wait and greet anything intelligent that might evolve and tell them where they came from.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
That's easy: the fundamentalist religious groups will do their damnedest to ignore it or try to spin it away, the fundamentalist secular groups will do their damnedest to claim that the findings refute all religion, and everyone else will assimilate the information and get on with their lives.
Your brain is not a computer.
About 50 Martian meteors have been discovered so- mostly on Antarctica glaciers. Thats probably a tiny fraction of thousands upon thousands to have rained upon the Earth. Couple this with discoveries that bacteria apparently have lived inside of rock deep in the Earth for tens of millions of year and you have a mechanism of infecting the entire solar system over the eons. Gravity wells make some transport directions more likely than others. But over the vast amounts of time probably samples of every planet and moon have reached every other.
My prediction is some parts of Mars are hospitable to extremophile life and we will eventually discover it. It may be canyons where water-bearing layers appear to leak now and then. I further predict this life will very much look like Earth's. And the interesting follow-on question will be which planet did life start on first.
"You KNOW what she'll SAY..."
Seeding, mining, and replicating maybe, but waiting around for billions of years for intelligent life to evolve? Unlikely.
Forever is a long time. The Sun goes out eventually, and other catastophies could happen sooner.
You can always claim that making lives better for the future doesn't require technology, merely social reform (as if that weren't a technology), but everyhting that makes our lives better than our ancestors is directly or indirectly the result of technological improvments, so it's pretty hard to back that claim up. But, hey, maybe tomorrow human nature will change and we'll all just decide to be nice to one another!
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I wonder...
So we have this moon that possibly has life in its ocean. And geysers which put this water into known orbits. Together with the water they put salts. And life - if one exists there.
So..."orbital scoop" flying for few years has a big chance to catch some microbes for the ride. Unfortunatelly...it will be probably several more decades before the next mission to Saturn; several more decades before we can sent purpose built spacecraft.
However...we already have a spacecraft that was flying there for quite some time. Perhaps, once RTGs deplete to such a degree that the scientific package will have to be largery shut down, it is sensible to:
1) put Cassini into orbit which maximalises probabilities of catching something for the ride (and without too much risk of hitting some ice block)
2) after several more years - bring Cassini back (through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network for example). Put it into stable, high Earth orbit where it can wait for us to have means to investigate it (too bad we get rid of Shuttles, they would be usefull for that oe thing...)
It seems to me to be much better conclusion of the mission (even we won't find any signs of life on it) than sending it plunging towards Saturn...
One that hath name thou can not otter
They will just say "ahh, another glorious creation of gods". They've shown many times that inconsistent/false passages in "holy" texts can be ignored, new doctrines introduced.
It will get interesting only when we discover intelligent life that, during its evolution, didn't need the concept of gods. Though this is likely, IMHO, only in forms of intelligence that are NOT fragile, individual units (which feel the need to control the scary world, hence - gods, prayers, and so on), in case of hive-mind for example (I guess it will operate mostly in "me" and "that which does not exist" categories). But I suspect in this case religious folks will just dismiss its intelligence.
Oh well, in other cases it might be fun too - at least if "interstellar crusade" sounds fun to you.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I am a biologist. Any bacteria which had that much DNA would pretty much use most of it for fuel, as it would be much to costly to replicate when the cell divides. Bacteria are able to take on DNA from the external environment so a better idea would be to seed the planet with vesicles filled with random sections of DNA taken from other bacteria that utilise other energy sources. This may assist in speeding up evolution, IF the genes are stable enough to last long enough for them to be useful. However, the original researchers will be long dead by then, so it is a very long pilot study.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
one data point (Earth) isn't a very good sample. If it started in a similar fashion, we learn more about Earth, and if it started in a different way, we get a ton of new information we likely would never come across on Earth.
Exactly right. If we can find life on a moon around a gas giant that is not in the "Goldilocks Zone" then this vastly increases the chances of life existing elsewhere in the universe. Also, assuming for a moment that life DOES exist in places other than earth, if the life found on Enceladus it is from a different biological origin to us, then this would increase the chances of us being able to study other life forms that we discover, as earth-based biology is also only a single data point.
For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert. Arthur C. Clarke (1917 - 2008)
Brutus's Rule: Never correct an 800 pound guorilla in the use or spelling of words.
That's Brutus' Rule, and Gorilla, Brutus.
8-)
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Someone, I can't remember who, said that "life was water's way of moving itself around."
This ain't rocket surgery.