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Earth Ejecta Could Seed Life On Europa
KentuckyFC writes "Various astronomers have studied how far rocks can travel through space after being ejected from Earth. Their conclusion is that it's relatively easy for bits of Earth to end up on the Moon or Venus, but very little would get to Mars because it would have to overcome gravity from both the Sun and the Earth. Now, the biggest ever simulation of Earth ejecta confirms this result — with a twist. The simulation shows that Jupiter is a much more likely destination than Mars. So bits of Earth could have ended up on Jovian satellites such as Europa. Astrobiologists estimate that Earth's hardiest organisms can survive up to 30,000 years in space, which means that if conditions are just right, Earth ejecta could seed life there."
It already reached Europa, thrived, and is attempting to stop anything else from landing. Why else do you think it spoke english?
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I'm too tired. I read that as "as evidenced by LRH (L. Ron Hubbard), it is implausible life evolved." And, i agree with that. Course, the counter argument is he was a highly evolved gibbon (no offense towards gibbons).
Atlas Shrugged : Thematic Story
Without some basis for seeing it arrive elsewhere, it's pretty hard to proclaim any timeframe as "implausible". Until we get good date from other examples there's just no way to get an estimate on the normal time it would take for life to evolve from scratch to know whether it was accelerated or not in our case.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
it is my opinion that the theory of comets seeding life on earth, or earth seeding life on europa or mars or elsewhere is completely besides the point:
the seeds of life are simply everywhere, inside and outside the solar system, and life is simply always lying dormant, everywhere in the galaxy, as bits of flotsam and jetsam of space debris, ready to seed something somewhere, at any time, in the distant future, and the distant past
this whole argument of where life came from is moot. the potential is simply always there, everywhere, ready to seed
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How about "The Earth's Life Giving Goo could land on Europa's Face"
I'm no expert on such things, so feel free to ignore these musings.
I've often wondered if life really originated on another planet in our solar system, then came to Earth, why would it never have developed into something like we have here.
If it happened elsewhere first, then would they not have been more advanced, or did they never get past a certain phase? Or would the life form there be so different that we'd never have anything common enough to be able to identify the other as a life form.
Obviously, if people were subscribing to the idea of seeding life from one rock to another, then you can't expect to have one carbon based model vs silicone based. So things would have to be close enough so that they develop along some common thread. This would mean that the environment never got to a stage on Europa so that the algae decided to become fish, or fish to become mammals.
But then considering the timelines involved, with animal life spanning millions of years, what are the odds that we'll have some form of sentient life capable of detecting eachother within the same 300 year period.
If life could have originated on Europa, then is it still behind Earth developmentally, or is it so far advanced that it's extinct, or moved on. The idea that it's more advanced, and has not contacted us seems unlikely. So it would mean that either we seeded it, or it developed life independently (if there's life there at all) and has not (or cannot) develop to a level equal to us.
So, to sum up:
If life began on Europa and seeded Earth, what happened to stop further development on Europa?
Surely any event that could eject material from earth with sufficient energy to escape Earth's gravity well would tend to melt the ejecta at the same time, so the bacteria would have to be seriously hardy...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
To save anyone else the bother of googling it to be reminded.
the seeds of life are simply everywhere, inside and outside the solar system, and life is simply always lying dormant, everywhere in the galaxy
I'd say the elements of life are everywhere, but not the seeds. Having the material but not the proper information is not enough. Life is composed by amino acids, but those are merely the bricks used to make proteins. One must have a suitable floor plan to build a house.
What makes conditions on early earth so special is not the existence of organic chemistry, but the special circumstances, so far not known to us, that brought the formation of complex self-reproducing chains of amino acids.
Mars rocks have been found on Earth, and it has been a standard assumption in planetary science for some time now that Earth rocks have also been going to Mars by the same mechanism. You wouldn't know it from the summary, but the actual paper also predicts a significant rate of mass exchange Earth -> Mars -
Gladman et al. (2005) estimated the collision rate with Mars to be about 2 orders of magnitude lower that found on the basis of our simulations. However, as also noted in their paper, our results for Mars are within the known typical errors of such probability estimations. ... Both results, definite collisions with Mars and Jupiter, are of astrobiological significance,...
I think an unspoken assumption you are making is that the evolution of life "advances" toward intelligence linearly at a common rate. This isn't really accurate. Advanced life does not necessarily mean intelligent life.
Life may well exist on Europa, and may well have existed for just as long as life on earth. We can look for examples in the communities surviving around deep ocean thermal vents (which are likely the best analog we have for the environment in Europa's oceans). Those environments are teaming with life in a fairly small area. That life isn't intelligent, and may never face the evolutionary pressures that will lead to the development of intelligence, but is very very highly adapted to an extremely harsh environment. That level of evolution can be considered every bit as "advanced" as our intelligence.
The problem with Europa is that the interesting bits we want to get at are under (at least) 20 kilometers of ice. Whoever figures out how to breach that without destroying the environment beneath is going to be a winner in the big NASA lottery, and enable a lot of exciting exploration. Callisto probably has a similar subsurface ocean, for instance -
If I understand what I've read about Europa, we may not need to get through the ice at all. Due to tidal tugging, Europa is full of cracks. When those cracks form, it is believed that liquid water cycles to the surface and freezes again. It's Europa's version of plate tectonics. We should be able to get an excellent idea of what is below the surface by taking a sample of the surface ice on the surface near these cracks or even within the cracks themselves. As a bonus, whatever we find will be pre-frozen. Kinda like the frozen veggie aisle at your local grocer.
Why we have not sent a probe to land on Europa by now is beyond me.
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I've previously heard this quote of organisms surviving for up to 30,000 years in space, but does anyone happen to have a real scientific reference for it? I'm really wondering what can survive that long with no fuel at all, unless the argument is that the whatever rock the organism sits on during its travels through space happens to have some nutrients on it. Even the waterbear still needs some energy after it goes into a cryptobiotic state, right?
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Send a note with it, will you? I hate the thought of bringing up a whole planet of lifeforms just so they can bang their heads and kill one another over the confusion of where they came from and why. ;)
Naysaying aside, you're likely correct. The composition of the ice shell around Europa is full of materials that could make for easy farming of hyrodgen for energy and oxygen for breathing. Depending on what ends up being underneath that ice shell (is it all ocean, or is there land mass?) it seems at least borderline plausible to terraform the entire moon, generating a considerable atmosphere and making the place comfortably livable by humans. One concern is if there is enough spare oxygen available to form an atmosphere thick enough to trap enough heat from the Sun to raise the ambient temperature to a comfortable point for humans, given the distance from the Sun. Another is dealing with the extreme cold that would be experienced in an eclipse from Jupiter.
I'm quite certain there are people smarter than I that could weigh in on the topic with more merit, but casual observation seems to point in the direction of 'possible'.
Cool post bro, highfive \o