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Moon of Jupiter Prime Candidate For Alien Life After Water Blast Found (theguardian.com)
A NASA probe that explored Jupiter's moon Europa flew through a giant plume of water vapour that erupted from the icy surface and reached a hundred miles high, according to a fresh analysis of the spacecraft's data. An anonymous reader shares a The Guardian report: The discovery has cemented the view among some scientists that the Jovian moon, one of four first spotted by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei in 1610, is the most promising place in the solar system to hunt for alien life. If such geysers are common on Europa, NASA and European Space Agency (ESA) missions that are already in the pipeline could fly through and look for signs of life in the brine, which comes from a vast subsurface ocean containing twice as much water as all the oceans on Earth.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft spent eight years in orbit around Jupiter and made its closest pass over Europa, a moon about the size of our own, on 16 December 1997. As the probe dropped beneath an altitude of 250 miles, its sensors twitched with unexpected signals that scientists were unable to explain at the time. Now, in a new study, the researchers describe how they went back to the Galileo data after grainy images beamed home from the Hubble space telescope in 2016 showed what appeared to be plumes of water blasting from Europa's surface.
NASA's Galileo spacecraft spent eight years in orbit around Jupiter and made its closest pass over Europa, a moon about the size of our own, on 16 December 1997. As the probe dropped beneath an altitude of 250 miles, its sensors twitched with unexpected signals that scientists were unable to explain at the time. Now, in a new study, the researchers describe how they went back to the Galileo data after grainy images beamed home from the Hubble space telescope in 2016 showed what appeared to be plumes of water blasting from Europa's surface.
âoeAll these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.â
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Are you suggesting a photo taken in the black of space is more accurate than a sensor that analyses the contents of what it passes through? I highly doubt a photo would add anything to this. You could perhaps question the accuracy of the sensors, but the fact that they detected water (something we've long suspected on Europa), not ammonia, or liquid nitrogen or some other unexpected substance; helps me believe that the sensor accurately identified what it passed though.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I don't think you actually read the stories. The sensors did not "detect water". They sensed some anomalies in magnetic field and plasma density which defied any obvious explanation at the time (in 1997). These scientists did some modeling and showed that those signatures can be explained by the presence of a water plume. That is certainly interesting and supports the conclusion that Galileo may have passed through or very near a water plume, however it is very different from saying that "the sensors detected water".
Pictures don't have to be based on visible light. My main point is that they did not directly detect any plume of water... they detected some phenomena that could be plausibly explained by flying through such a plume, but they did not actually detect any plume of water that the craft flew through.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Hubble imaged a plume several years ago
From that article:
We do not claim to have proven the existence of plumes
Hubble imaged something which might have been a plume.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I understand the concern. That we'll lose vital information about a real-world real-time test environment lasting billions of years and the origins of life and abiogenesis are hella interesting and we want to study pristine environments prior to fucking shit up and making a mess.
But once a place is established as being sterile, can we please make an effort to establish an ecosystem off-world? We're one crazy motherfucker away from a civilization ending event, possibly a human-extinction event, and we might not get another chance to spread life across the solar system. And we ARE currently in another mass extinction event. We, collectively, as in all known life-forms. It's like banking a backup. Roaches on Earth might one day evolve another race that can launch rockets, but if there's TWO or more sets of roaches, the odds of building up a civilization are that much better. How about a dead man's switch? Send up a sealed box of dormant extreamophiles wrapped in thermite. If we don't send a signal or recover it in 100 years, it opens up.
And what is it going to take to convince people that a planet is sterile? There's no lush jungles around the canals on Mars and there's no moon-men eating cheese. At what point is it fair game to try and seed planets?
People rarely think about the long-term goals.
Imagine this: plume of water vapor erupts from deep within Europa, hundreds of miles high. Most of that never leaves the vicinity of Jupiter, but a little of it manages to escape, freezes, and floats around the solar system for a while.. eventually coming into the gravitational influence of a young Earth. It makes it through the atmosphere, eventually finding it's way into Earths' oceans, carrying the seeds of primitive life..
They did not assume that it was a water plume -- they hypothesized that it was a water plume and then tested that hypothesis. "We went back and looked at [the anomalous data] more carefully and found that they were just what you'd expect if we'd flown through a plume."
They also did not report that their data was conclusive, rather they literally wrote:
"We show that the location, duration and variations of the magnetic field and plasma wave measurements are consistent with the interaction of Jupiter's corotating plasma with Europa if a plume with characteristics inferred from Hubble images were erupting from the region of Europa's thermal anomalies. These results provide strong independent evidence of the presence of plumes at Europa."
It may have been caused by a giant space whale farting. Until you either demonstrate that their data is inconsistent with a water-ice plume or provide a testable hypothesis that is consistent with the Galileo and/or Hubble, however, your objection is mere hand-waving against claims that were not made.
As though it were talkinh about a moon of "Jupiter Prime".
Come to think of it, I guess it is. You could stick "Prime" after almost any proper noun in the news, and it'll mean the same thing, only it'll sound like it's happening in a sci-fi multiverse.
Give a boy a gun and you arm him for a day. Teach him how to make a gun, and the whole metaphor breaks down.
It's not exactly blind guesswork, we're not blind. We have sensors. I don't know which ones the probe carried, but I do know that they showed signals which the team in 1997 did not have an explanation for and they considered them anomalous. It now turns out that if we assume a certain water jet with certain properties, it explains the sensor measurements. That's not blind guesswork, it's educated guesswork.
Yes, we will never know what the Galileo probe flew through in 1997. But it's not exactly a stretch to say that we can see plumes shooting from the surface, we've long assumed that there is an ocean twice as large as all the oceans on Earth, so, therefore, maybe it flew through a water jet. Happens to fit the data we do have also. Yeah, it could have been a cloud of alien pee. But it was probably a water jet.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
it would take a major extermination event to 'destroy all humans'.
We ARE in the middle of a major extermination event. But I'm pretty sure we'll live through it as a species though.
To destroy all humans, it just needs one guy to launch an attack that causes retaliation. One of a very narrow group of guys, but they all seem to be batshit crazy to some extent.