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Enceladus's 101 Geysers Blast From Hidden Ocean
astroengine writes: New observations from NASA's Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft have revealed at least 101 individual geysers erupting from Enceladus' crust and, through careful analysis, planetary scientists have uncovered their origin. From the cracked ice in this region, fissures blast out water vapor mixed with organic compounds as huge geysers. Associated with these geysers are surface "hotspots" but until now there has been some ambiguity as to whether the hotspots are creating the geysers or whether the geysers are creating the hotspots. "Once we had these results in hand, we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," said Carolyn Porco, leader of the Cassini imaging team from the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo., and lead author of one of the research papers. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots." And those roots point to a large subsurface source of liquid water — adding Enceladus as one of the few tantalizing destinations for future astrobiology missions.
Alien bacteria would be an amazing reinforcement of cell theory. All life on earth is made of cells, but it's easy to dismiss that as saying that any other suddenly emergent kinds of life couldn't compete against the already evolving cells that happened to come first.
Finding truly alien bacteria would basically cement the idea that cells and life are synonymous.
What I'm trying to say, haphazardly, is that any kind of alien life would have tremendously informative side effects for biology in general.
And what if it was virus?
Viruses are considered by some to be a life form, because they carry genetic material, reproduce, and evolve through natural selection. However they lack key characteristics (such as cell structure) that are generally considered necessary to count as life. Because they possess some but not all such qualities, viruses have been described as "organisms at the edge of life" wikipedia
The thing about viruses is that they depend on cells to reproduce. They're life that's outsourced all the hard work of living: gathering energy, producing proteins, duplicating DNA.
Discovering viruses is functionally equivalent to discovering bacteria, since they need the bacteria to exist.
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
ENCELADUS
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
Well, let's hope if I add some lowercase that the filter will allow me to post. HAL 9000 communicated in capitals."
When the copyright term is "forever minus a day", live every day like it's the last.
Or, it would reinforce the idea that life spread uniformly through our solar system from some shared visitor in a wonderful accident of cosmic cross-contamination.
And what would you define something that didn't ingest, metabolize, excrete, reproduce and have some sort of system of heredity? Other chemical processes; like fire and crystallization, might hit some of these marks, but we don't call them living systems. So while the precise chemical processes, heck maybe even many of the chemical elements involved may be different (silicon-based life on Titan or something like that), I think at the end of the day if it going to be called life, it has to have the same basic features as terrestrial life.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What I'm saying is that "we don't know what we don't know." Nothing more. Nothing less.
Alien DNA would definitely screw with my Christian belief system.
Why?
You guys survived Earth being round, the heavens not including Heaven, Earth not being the centre of the solar system, then not being the centre of the universe, humans not being the majority of Earth's history and the bible not covering most of human history, and of course not having a single major biblical event (pre-7th century BC) appear in the fossil or archaeological record.
Why would two separate creations of life suddenly throw you?
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I predict it will be DNA and/or RNA similar to that on Earth. And I'm a Jesus freaky Christian, so I'm asserting God put it there and Jesus is Lord.
Of course, if nothing's found there, ignore me. Otherwise, if it's truly alien DNA, I will be very shocked. Alien DNA would definitely screw with my Christian belief system. Especially if we didn't even have the same nutrients in common.
Why? It didn't bother C. S. Lewis.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates