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Nearby Ocean Worlds Could Be Best Bet For Life Beyond Earth, Says NASA (cnn.com)
NASA has new evidence that the most likely places to find life beyond Earth are Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus. In terms of potential habitability, Enceladus particularly has almost all of the key ingredients for life as we know it, researchers said. From a report: New observations of these active ocean worlds in our solar system have been captured by two NASA missions and were presented in two separate studies in an announcement at NASA HQ in Washington today. Using a mass spectrometer, the Cassini spacecraft detected an abundance of hydrogen molecules in water plumes rising from the "tiger stripe" fractures in Enceladus' icy surface. Saturn's sixth-largest moon is an ice-encased world with an ocean beneath. The researchers believe that the hydrogen originated from a hydrothermal reaction between the moon's ocean and its rocky core. If that is the case, the crucial chemical methane could be forming in the ocean as well.
What do they mean by 'nearby'?
Finding alien life wouldn't even disprove God. You literally can't prove or disprove God because there is no testable hypothesis. Real scientists therefore don't waste any time even thinking about God.
How about Life Beyond L.A.?
How about at the beginning of your life?
Death to anyone who dare to disturb the Europan Water Devils with their venomous feed and their wet-sucking lips.
I'll take my chances, thanks. To imagine that infinite and all-powerful being would give a shit whether I believed in it or not beggars belief.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
You non-believers will regret not believing in Zeus. When you die and he shoves a lightning bolt up your dick you will not be able to deny Zeus.
Europa should be better hunting grounds than Enceladus because Europa has been similar to how it is now for probably most of its life. Enceladus's condition may merely be a coincidence in time: nobody really knows yet what heats Enceladus; its heat may be periodic or temporary.
But we know that tidal forces with Jupiter and its other big moons are what heats Europa. Its big neighboring moons have been around probably since the formation of the Jupiter system.
Europa's heat matches tidal models, meaning it probably had lots of time to evolve and nurture life. Saturn has only one big moon, Titan, and it's rather far from Enceladus, and thus not a notable tidal force.
Plus, Europa is much bigger than Enceladus, giving life more chances to form.
Table-ized A.I.
God is there, hell is a human creation because deep down we just can't love ourselves.
...that life here began out there, far across the Universe...with tribes of humans...who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians...or the Toltecs...or the Mayans...that they may have been the architects of the Great Pyramids...or the lost civilizations of Lemuria...or Atlantis.
But not white guys. White guys are descended from the albino mountain ape.
an "infinite and all-powerful being" can still be petty and vengeful...
do not underestimate the power of the darkside.
oh yeah I believe in the force too.
My underpants are earthed foil. Faraday:1, Zeus: 0.
Blank until
Indeed. I don't see any relationship between finding life on a moon and (traditional) deities. Scriptures say almost nothing concrete about outer space either way.
I have to disagree. If a giant bearded guy showed up in all of Earth's telescopes and appeared to be at an infinite size at an infinite distance (no parallax detected with galaxy profiles visible in-between), and he turned Jupiter and Uranus plaid after promising to do so, that would be pretty good evidence of God, or at least "a god".
One could argue it's merely advanced alien technology, but the boundary between "supernatural" and advanced tech is rather blurry. If the Universe is a computer simulation/emulation, for example, the server owner is "God" for all intent and purposes from our perspective, fitting the traditional idea of "God". "Supernatural" could be relative.
"Are we an emulation?" is a valid scientific question and is potentially testable, or at least can potentially leave scientific clues.
Table-ized A.I.
It's not the proximity of another moon that produces tidal forces. Just going around Saturn is enough to produce the stresses that induce heat.
Only if the orbit is eccentric. If there aren't other moons, viscoeleastic damping circularizes the orbit until the tidal heating disappears-- it's the other moons that perturb Europa's orbit to make it slightly eccentric, giving it the tidal forces that heat it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
TFA is a CNN story? Here is a better source.
I love the idea of a mission to Europa or Enceladus. The best support for life existing there is right here on earth, on geothermal vents deep in the ocean. Life already exists in total darkness and feeds on hydrogen sulfide, under extreme pressure in water that's hotter than its boiling point on the surface.
Finding alien life wouldn't even disprove God.
Of course not. Several religions, including Mormonism, have an affirmative belief in extraterrestrial life. They would see any discovery as a confirmation of their faith, rather than a refutation.
Among the people I know, the more religious people are the most likely to believe in alien abductions, etc. The discovery of some microbes on one of Saturn's moons is not going to cause them to question their beliefs.
You literally can't prove or disprove God
You can't prove that God doesn't exist, because you can't prove a negative. But you could "prove" (in the sense of overwhelming evidence) that God DOES exist. For instance, if we found some functional DNA in the human genome that spelled out "Copyright Jehovah, 4004 BC, All Rights Reserved", that would be enough to convince me.
This coming from a person who is already going to hell because you do not believe in god.
You and I are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer gods than you do.
When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why we dismiss yours.
Now that they know an ocean world is the best bet for finding life, they can limit their searches to those sorts of places - plus they can use an AI to do automated image matches against known pictures of Kevin Costner.
#DeleteChrome
Because its orbit is not particularly eccentric, that's too small a force to account for most the heat under the current models.
We have other moons and planets in the solar system to study heat and test our models on frictional tidal heating, internal nuclear decay, and mineral composition. Enceladus doesn't fit that data. Yes, it's possible there's something really different or odd about its composition, but nobody has identified such a configuration. It's still a puzzle.
Most heat theories seem to revolve around close encounters with nearby smaller moons caused by unstable orbits, perhaps related to the walnut shape of Iapetus, suggesting debris stress or "slow" collisions. The same force may even refresh the rings of Saturn. Seems there's a Dark Agitator near Saturn (cue spooky space music).
Table-ized A.I.
If they're all-powerful, are they able to create a boulder too heavy for themselves to lift?
If the answer is 'no', they obviously aren't all-powerful, since there's something they can't do (creating that boulder)
If the answer is 'yes', they obviously aren't all-powerful, since there's something they can't do (lifting that boulder)
It follows that the concept 'all-powerful' is impossible.
What it could do is make creationism require even more mental contortions. It's hard to explain why a god who creates each species separately fully-developed would create microbes for Europa or Enceladus.
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Being petty and vengeful toward your own creation generally only happens when you lose control of it. If you're fully in control of your creation and can change whatever you want, getting mad at it would have to be purely for fun... but if he's also omniscient, that instantly takes all the fun out of it.
My theory is that God committed suicide as soon as he realized how tortuously pointless being an omni-being necessarily is.
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My theory is that the Judeao-Christian notion of a creator deity is completely self-contradictory, and while some of the Church's finest minds like St. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas did an admirable job of creating a word salad to paper over the problems of omnipotence and omniscience on the one hand and free will on the other, at the end of the day it's just metaphysical mumbo jumbo.
I'm of the "weak atheist" variety, in that I see no reason for Prime Mover, but don't preclude the possibility, providing someone can produce some evidence. But even if I were to accept that necessity, I can't imagine why I would believe that the Hebraic Yahweh, or his Jewish, Christian or Islamic variants, was the actual nature and identity of such an entity.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Earth has all the ingredients for an interstellar transportation system. However, in the time covering 4.8 Billion years one has not grown natively and humans will probably never figure out how to make one.
Just DC Federal Budget madness season before the 23:59, 30 April Deadline, i.e. another continuing spending resolution will be pass to get us through to 30 September.
Jajajajajajajajaj
"They will not be able to deny" .. they will be dust. Dust is not able to deny... So technically you are correct.. but a bit slow.
the problem is that create&lift is not an atomic operation. even I can create some weight I cannot currently lift, then go to gym, exercise and after some time be able to do it. solved?
What it could do is make creationism require even more mental contortions. It's hard to explain why a god who creates each species separately fully-developed would create microbes for Europa or Enceladus.
Creationism is a house of cards held together by masking tape. Even the last few Catholic popes have been getting more stern about denouncing it. Honestly, if they want to so BADLY believe the universe was created in 7 days they should just say it was created in 7 days but made to look as if it was much older to trick us. We've all been duped, you see! At least it would solve their mental contortions problem.
lets suggest that instead of committing suicide, Entity allowed for freeish thought/action. and then disabled the preview button. then instead of re-enabling the preview button just decided to force by torture the commandments.
kinda like the old sim city games where you can enable or disable cheats but the game is more fun for longer if you try to make things work without cheats.
idk.
"Copyright Jehovah, 4004 BC, All Rights Reserved"
Well that would have the side benefit of solving the issue of patenting genes quite nicely.