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Saturn Moon Could Be Hospitable To Life
shmG writes to share that recent imagery from Saturn's moon Enceladus indicate that it may be hospitable to life. "NASA said on Tuesday that a flyby of planet's Enceladus moon showed small jets of water spewing from the southern hemisphere, while infrared mapping of the surface revealed temperatures warmer than previously expected. 'The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,' said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. 'Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system.'"
Seriously, NASA. Anybody who's ever eaten at a bad Mexican restaurant knows enchiladas are hospitable to all forms of microscopic life.
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.
Well, while it's easy to say that, it's harder to back it up with flight cash, with research funding for the folks on earth who will plan, research and study the results and oh yeah, you are competing with how many other great ideas to go learn stuff about stuff we don't know about?
There are only so many spaceships that can go up at one time, and while the number is proportional to the funding that the space programs get, it's never going to allow for us to do everything we want.
If you feel very strongly about getting more and more study done, why not petition your local congressmen, ministers and elected officials to spend more on scientific research. Why not look at getting involved and offering your time as a volunteer to do some of the work that could potentially be done by non paid staff. Why not look at getting involved with your local university campus and gather support for a bipartisan effort with other universities to fund a study of something you feel passionate about?
Programmer? Why not offer to write some of the algorithms for them? Scientist? Why not put forward a proposal of what you want to study and why? Businessman? Why not actually offer some level of funding yourself towards a specific research goal? Knuckle-dragger? Why not offer to make make coffees, organize meetings for the others, be a PA to the staff and help out in the cafeteria to bring down costs?
Oh yeah, it's easier to just jump on here and throw out another internet meme.
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If there happen to be biological fragments floating around in space, they might land on Enceladus and take advantage of the short-term conditions.
That was my second point. The surface is at 50 degrees K and is exposed to a lot of radiation. "Biological fragments floating around in space" would not find their way into the warm environment under ground.
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I've heard about this over a year ago, at a minimum.
Same goes with Jupiter's moon Europa ( http://www.solarviews.com/eng/europa.htm ). Signs are that it could have liquid water inside, as quoted from the site: "Since liquid water existed in the past, could life have formed and even exist today? The primary ingredients for life are water, heat, and organic compounds obtained from comets and meteorites. Europa has had all three. From the images and data collected by the Galileo spacecraft, scientists believe that a subsurface ocean existed in relative recent history and may still be present beneath the icy surface. Europa's water should have frozen long ago, but warming could be occurring due to the tidal tug of war with Jupiter and neighboring moons."
Same site mentions that the water has been spotted spewing forth from Enceladus in July 14, 2005, being also noted as a "dramatic warm spot centered on the pole that is probably a sign of internal heat leaking out of the icy moon" ( http://www.solarviews.com/eng/enceladus.htm )
Attention... all grammer nazi"s! Is they're anything; wrong with: my post,
There is indeed a family of microbes driving around the solar system in a car made out of an asteroid. The father microbe is wearing a stiff peaked cap and smoking a corn-cob pipe. They are going to settle on Enceladus for a brief spell. The daughter microbe is excited about the water, but the son would have preferred cable.
Sorry if that's difficult to understand at all, but that's the currently accepted theory.
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The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived. It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
And... you wouldn't be impressed by simple life forms?
Okay, well, that's cool, but why you were paying any attention at all is beyond me. We're pretty sure there's no complex life anywhere else in the solar system.
Personally I'd be gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and impressed to all hell if we found even the most primitive of prokaryote.
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Umm... Huh?
Something changed all right. Our knowledge of conditions on Enceledus went from basically zilch to what you're reading about today thanks to the Casini probe.
We weren't "sure" that it couldn't be hospitable to life because we didn't know very much about it, but for things that far away from the sun more or less the default estimation of habitability is "not likely".
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It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
The graphic on this wiki page suggests that life on earth arose 1.5 billion years after the earth was formed, nearly two billion years went by before multicellular life, and then another billion years before cnidarians, which developmentally are reasonably close to us and certainly what I would consider complex, were around. I don't know much about that, and I doubt anyone knows for sure what was going on in that time, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that a ~4 billion lag time from when your planet/moon is around to when complex life forms is a -universal- constant. There's nothing to say it couldn't happen much much faster on Enceladus, we only have one example of life arising, it would be a mistake to assume that is the constant or even typical rate of life arising. The cambrian explosion is certainly evidence that the rate changes wildly. Furthermore, we haven't even -seen- this environment, the only thing we know about it is that it's possible and it isn't like earth, so if we should expect anything, its that the timeline for life arising on Enceladus would be significantly different from Earth's.
If your spouse were inhabited by 6 billion balding apes making kalashnikovs, mud bricks, and bad sitcoms, you'd stray too...
WTF. This is a moon! Use it for huge stuff that aren't what they seem, but not for actual moons!
OK, I'm done. ;)
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Possibly 500 million years or more and Enceladus doesn't have that as well.
Possibly. But we've found prokaryote fossils from only 1 billion years after the earth's crust formed. So either life got busy evolving right away, or it doesn't necessarily take that long. Frankly I would avoid drawing strong conclusions either way based on the current state of abiogenesis theories.
Besides, in the larger picture of "how often to potentially habitable environments arise and what forms do they take?" I find this very exciting even under the most likely case that we find no evidence of life on this moon. We've gone from a model of the solar system where every rock that wasn't ours being right-out as far as life having a chance, to having a variety of environments that at least hypothetically could support it. Then I start thinking about our infant search for exoplanets and I get even more excited.
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That depends. Is the Moon under the age of 18?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
I'm unimpressed by your arguments and see no reason for your pessimisim. One of the best theories we have of abiogenisis is that it formed around undersea volcanic vents. Since the tidal forces of Staurn are heating the moon from the inside causing similar vents to appear on the surface it safe to say that Earth like vents are occuring in the rocky core of the moon. Abiogenisis in 10 minutes - "No rediculous improbability, no supernatural forces, no lightening striking a mud puddle. Just Chemistry!"
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I believe that current work suggests evidence of life arising withing the first few hundred million years of Earth's existence, not long after life could exist at all. (Prior to a certain point, sterilizing impacts were too frequent to let anything get far.) Probably half a billion years to no more than 1 billion years after the Earth formed we've found evidence of life. (Evidence gets to be isotopic beyond a certain point, but still.)
Amen. The possibility of extraterrestrial life is easily the most interesting thing there is. We might get more energy from nuclear engineering or more food from genetic engineering or longer life from medical sciences, but this is like the gold of the scientific world: it is intrinsically valuable. Even if nothing useful comes out of it, answering the question of whether or not there is anything on those moons would be worth it. The simplest of life living on another world would be phenomenal (even if it turns out that life originated on Earth, although native would be much more fascinating), or even just fossil evidence that there once was something, and even if we come up with nothing, just knowing more about the surfaces of other worlds is simply wonderful. Why we're not funding projects to prepare for trips to Enceladus or Titan or Europa is beyond me.
Yeah, it's only showing up again because Cassini made another Enceladus flyby in late 09 and they're just releasing the pictures.
This JPL article gives a better idea of what was new this flyby.
So basically, higher resolution images have allowed them to isolate the heat that they detected earlier (from the 2005 flyby) as a "broad swath" to specifically the cracks in the surface from which water is spewing, confirming their previous hypothesis.
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I for one believe we already have enough hospitals. Building them on Saturn would bring no new inherent value.
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Yeah, because the likeliness of life on another planet evolving exactly like on ours, in practically zero.
It wouldn't have to be exactly like ours to be able to be roughly describes as prokaryotic. It's an obvious stage for any biological life to go through. But really I was just saying "prokaryote" as an example of simple life.
Despite certain (pseudo-)"scientists" (with arrogance and limited imagination) being unable to think otherwise.
Uh it's not that they're unable to think otherwise. It's that if you're going to look for life, it only makes sense to look for the kind of life that you know is possible and can identify. And the "kind" is simply self-organizing organic (meaning hydrocarbon based) molecules. Which chemistry strongly suggests requires liquid water. It's not really that specific, but based on what we know can work in broadest terms. It's pragmatism, not limited imagination.
You can say "It might not be organic, it could be like something we've never even imagined!" Which is hypothetically true, but useless on its own. So go ahead, Mr. Non-pseudo-non-quotes-scientist, actually propose something we can look for, some testable hypothesis.
Yeah.
I bet $100 that we won't even recognize the first extraterrestrial life we'll ever see.
I'm curious how you would be able to call that bet. :)
But you know you may be right. For all the good that statement does us.
Or, as xkcd said it: http://xkcd.com/638/
You get that the point of the comic is about prematurely assuming your search is over, which is completely the opposite of what we're doing, right? So take heart. The search goes on, and we're using every tool we know of to do so, and looking for new tools as well.
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"Biological fragments floating around in space" would not find their way into the warm environment under ground.
I don't think you have a grasp of the time scales we're talking about. We're talking about BILLIONS of years. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. While I don't know the age of Enceladus, I think it's safe to assume it's contemporaneous with the Earth. This means that's even incredibly improbable events may have indeed occurred.
Think about this: I don't think anyone knows for sure about where the initial organic compounds arrived on Earth, but organic compounds (i.e. molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen) are exceedingly common throughout the universe, so let's say for sake of argument that the compounds on Earth, initially came from some place else. (Which in a sense they have to since, atoms heavier than hydrogen only form in stars). In the ensuing 4.5 BILLION years. It's improbable that these compounds would come together and form more complex compounds, but yet they have. These compounds in turn, formed more complex compounds, and so and so, until eventually we're here. We're talking a thousand monkeys typing on a thousand typewriters writing the greatest novel known to man. ("'It was the best of times. It was the blurst of times.' 'The BLURST of times'? You stupid monkey!") Given enough time, it WILL happen.
Now has it happened? I don't know. You don't know. No one knows. None of us will know until we send a probe with sensitive enough instruments down into one of those fissures. My point is, that you're thinking to small. Humans don't have an intuitive idea of the scale of the universe, either in size or time. We think still think 100 years is a long time, even though people live that long. We think a 2000 years is the distant past We only recorded the last 5000 years. Let's go back further. As a species we're only 500,000 years old. That's .0000500 billion years. In other words, nothing. You're thinking too small.
Yeah how hard can it be, it's not rocket sc... oh wait.
Seriously, I'm all for a new Apollo program but we're talking about an area in which even the leading experts sometimes get it devastatingly wrong with catastrophic results. It's going to take more than a volunteer effort.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
You realize what you're saying? That even if we found life on another planet, we should... ignore it? Also, "at this time"? Is there EVER a good time for long-term public projects? Also, if you think the fact that life truly does exist on other planets would not affect society, you're mistaken. If life really was discovered, it could galvanize space exploration and benefit science enormously. So which would you prefer... an over-crowded Earth that has to implement draconian population control measures to save space, or an Earth that is the centre of space exploration and is starting colonies on other worlds?
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More likely that would cause evolution to happen faster there since there would be much more competition for resources. Survival is what drives evolution.
Except it doesn't work that way. The ocean is a far more hospitable environment for life than anywhere on land, and we see a much greater variety of aquatic life than terrestrial. On land, tropical rainforests are probably about the most hospitable environments for life there is -- and surprise, we see much more variety there than we do in cooler and drier areas.
Competition for resources happens everywhere; whatever the resources available, the creatures living there will reproduce until they reach the limit of a sustainable population. It's the availability of resources that drives species diversity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
you have me thinking of ways life could exist. and if we'd "see" it right away.
chemical life uses information storage in patterns of atoms, and has to assemble parts of itself. Not too many atoms can form chains: carbon, phosphorous, silicon, and sulphur. I think we would recognize any life made of any of those.
how about electronic life? we know electricity can effect certain types of crystal growth, how about an electro-chemical beast that is something like self-modifying circuitry with switching elements and substrate that can be grown or re-absorbed based on current ebb and flow. Detectable, but yeah could be standing on it before detecting it.
As expalianed in the video the source of heat is irrelevant, the convection currents that cycle the lipids through hot and cold are what counts. There is no evidence to suggest Enceladus is entirely made of pure water, it's likely to have a small rocky center where the friction of rocks moving under tidal forces produce enough heat to melt the interior ice and cause the observed eruptions on the surface.
Where ever we have looked for life living in "impossible" environments on earth we have found it. 2km into the earth's crust, sulphuric acid lakes, reactor cores, ect, ect. I'm not claiming there is life on Enceladus, simply that it's one of the best targets to look for it. I don't understand why you are going out of your way to rationalise your desire to ignore such an interesting target.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
In addition, even if Enceladus was all ice, I think the tidal forces in the ice would generate heat. Some would be high grade heat. Think about the scary noises you sometimes hear in frozen lakes - those are the ice heaving as it melts. The same thing would happen on Enceladus because of the gas giant's gravity (huge). If you were in the water, you would probably here some loud noises from the ice breaking down.
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It also takes time. Possibly 500 million years or more and Enceladus doesn't have that as well.
What are you talking about? Life here on Earth has only been around for 8000 years. Of course only non-intelligent life actually believes that.
Old meme is old.
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