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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'?
They mean, in our solar system rather than in a solar system a hundred light years away.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
What do they mean by 'nearby'?
They mean in our star system, near enough that we've already sent space vehicles there, travel time measured in months instead of lifetimes, etc.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
light minutes instead of light years
"Space,is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..."
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
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.
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.
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
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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