Melting Europa 698
amigoro writes "After having contaminated Earth's Oceans, it seems that there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice sheet and explore the purported ocean below the crust. The plan seems to be to find Life there. But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out."
Sedna, Sedna, Sedna ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Biased Poster? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like to see the leaky probe that could rival Jupiter itself [space.com] in bombarding Europa with radiation.
Awww, don't look so down. I'm sure there are plenty of other snide quips to be made about our foolish, short-sighted engineers wiping out Life As We Don't Know It.
Consider the possibility of a dihydrogen monoxide leak, for example...
Scared? (Score:3, Insightful)
There is risk inherent in every action and inaction.
This isn't news.
Talk about a weird week. (Score:2, Insightful)
What's next, is Spain going to elect a socialist/communist leader as head of the country. Oh yeah that already happened.
I really feel the end is near anybody else with me on this?
Too funny. (Score:1, Insightful)
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I call -5 on the story itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, I wish we could mod stories. This one deserives at least:
- -1 Overrated,
- -1 Troll,
- -1 Redundant,
- -2 Flamebait
-- MarkusQand
Can we moderate the submission itself (Score:5, Insightful)
How about instead, we have a decent discussion on the relative merits and costs of going to Europa and drilling in it to find Life.
Paranoia Check... (Score:5, Insightful)
You're chaining yourself to a Tree because we're considering sending 5kg of 'radioactive' isotypes to a watery grave inside a frozen planet's 60 mile think liquid shell whose volume is greater than all the earths oceans combined.
Hello bucket? This is water drop, make some room i'm coming in...
christ do you people sit around all day _LOOKING_ for ways to complain and be outraged?
Editorial bias anyone? (Score:5, Insightful)
I was under the impression this was a discussion board for tech news.
How about we just post stories and then have a discussion about the story instead of pushing some agenda. Or maybe that is too complicated.
Reader's digest condensed version of the post (Score:5, Insightful)
After we remove the irrelevant ("after having contaminated..."), the admission of insufficient research ("the plan seems to be"), the speculative and hysterical ("a leak in the radioactive heater wiping out all [ life ]"), and the lame attempt at humor ("drill Sedna"?), we're left with the following condensed version of the post:
there are plans to send a probe drilling through Europa's ice
to which I respond:
"yes, that's old news".
Seriously, why the all the whining? (Score:1, Insightful)
Why bother pretending this story post is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
"After having contaminated Earth's Oceans"
"But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out. What next? Drill Sedna for oil?"
I wish the Slashdot editors could maintain at least the pretense of objectivity in which stories they post. I'm sure someone else submitted the story without the loaded commentary. I mean, even the sexing-up BBC managed to write a decent article about this.
If not that, perhaps it would be helpful for less frequent readers if editors disclosed their obvious biases: Green Party member, voting for ABB, never tires of SCO stories, Microsoft-hater, whatever.
Another option would be sub-sites for News for [insert political bent]-leaning nerds, stuff that confirms your beliefs.
Let's just stick to the facts. (Score:5, Insightful)
Note to slashdot editors... (Score:3, Insightful)
Wiping out life on Europa (Score:5, Insightful)
But I wonder how long the time lag will be between the probe finding life, and a leak in the radioactive heater wiping all of it out.
That would be close to never. Europa isn't exactly like a small city like Nagasaki for instance. Even when we intentionally unleashed 2 radioactive devices at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we failed to wipe out all life on the local chain of Japanese islands.
Even around Chernobyl 18 years later [slashdot.org] life seems to be going on as usual.
The reactors for spacecraft just aren't large enough to cause any large scale catastrophic wipe-outs.
Re:Question... (Score:5, Insightful)
It may be a lot of money, and there may be more important ways to spend it (for some definitions of 'important', anyway), but to not seek the answer is to deny an important part of our humanness.
Not everyone buys this, or ever has. But not everyone has to, just like not everyone has to buy great art.
J.
Re:You've got to be kidding. (Score:1, Insightful)
There's nothing wrong with being concerned...but come on already. Do you really think the rest of the world lacks the morality which you like to whip around like a baseball bat? It's seeing posts like yours that makes me lose faith in mankind. How anyone can be so stupidly omnipotent and then crank off about it is beyond all sense.
Consider flying off to Europa and hugging a big icicle while having a good cry. You could also consider accepting that you aren't well rounded with your thinking and anything but unique. Introspection time!!
Previous attempt to avoid contamination (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget about radation for a minute, and just think about the microbes that may still be on the probe from earth? Any chance these to be introduced onto Europa? Perhaps if there wasn't life before, we would introduce it.
In either case I find it odd that previous missions would go to extreme measure to avoid contaminating Europa and this mission plans to flat out do it on purpose.
Re:Cripes (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm very interested in discovering life elsewhere. But I cringe when someone suggests sending billions of dollars to damn near every planet or moon in the solar system just because it seems like it might have had life at some point.
If there's some evidence pointing at Europa as a good candidate (more than the article describes), I'm unaware of it. Hence, the concern.
Explore Our Deep Sea First (Score:1, Insightful)
Wonder no more, it will not wipe out life. (Score:5, Insightful)
Typical anti-science (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Can we moderate the submission itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Polluting other planets (Score:5, Insightful)
Guess what, humans don't own jack. We share a planet with millions of other species. That fact that we are able to influence the planet more than most other species gives us a responsibility to act as caretakers. The question of exploiting other celestial bodies is moot until it becomes economically feasible to do so anyhow.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:4, Insightful)
The real threat of contamination is that unless the probe is absolutely, completely sterilized we'll never be sure whether life we find on Europa was "native" or came from Earth. Any other contamination of radiation, heavy metals, etc etc etc is irrelevant... it's not like one probe is going to contaminate the entire moon.
Re:Polluting other planets (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but did you see her naked? That's all that matters.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:3, Insightful)
Between 30,000 and 100,000 Germans were killed in the Dresden firestorm in WWII.
I guess we should give up fire, too?
Kee-rist.
Re:It goes deeper than that (Score:3, Insightful)
Ah, the sorry state of education in this country. I'm gonna start sounding like one of those bitter old men always talking about how the world's going to hell in a handbasket. Oh. Wait. I *am* a bitter old man, always talking about how the world's going to hell in a handbasket.
For your edification, Werner Heisenberg stated that "the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa" (when observing particles). This, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, is an English translation of a German rephrasing of an equasion, originating in Quantum physics.
In any case, it is often applied more generally to observation having an effect on the thing being observed, but is not a general rule outside of the Quantum realm. For example, I don't materially alter a building by taking its picture. There are passive sensors that, macroscopically, at least, have no significant effect.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:5, Insightful)
Suppose we look at the worst-case scenario. There's life on Europa to endanger. Probe melts through. Probe lands on sea floor. Probe just happens to land near a vent with a population of living organisms, where it fails catastrophically and spews its deadly cargo.
Folks, Europa's oceans are big and deep. We're talking about a volume of water that exceeds all the water on Earth by an order of magnitude. If the Europan ecosystem is fragile enough to be destroyed by anything humans can put in a package small enough to send to the seafloor, life on Europa would either be undetectable -- because there's so little of it that the odds of landing on it are nearly zero, or life on Europa would already be extinct.
Look at Earth. We detonated atomic bombs both above and below the ocean surface, spraying tons of transuranics into our seas and atmosphere. It may have sucked to have been a coral at Bikini Atoll in the 50s, but the ecosystem didn't even blink, and in fact, the Atoll is one of the planet's greatest recreational diving sites.
If life doesn't exist on Europa, who cares - there's nothing to contaminate.
If life does exist on Europa, and there's so little of it that we can't find it, odds are our probe isn't going to harm it, because we're going to be thousands of miles and trillions of gallons of water away from it. No harm.
If life exists on Europa and it's sufficiently omnipresent in the Europan biosphere that our probe lands on enough of lifeforms to detect them, then it won't matter if the probe is made out of tofu from sustainably-grown soy fields, or if it contains a nuclear bomb that detonates and vaporizes everything within 10 miles -- a Europan biosphere, like the Terran one, is big enough to take anything we're capable of throwing at it.
water off the planet is a big deal (Score:1, Insightful)
a very big deal. Aside from the "is there life" question
(that the press just loves) is the more important issue of
use by human colonists. When you do the math on
off-planet colonies, by far the biggest cost is supplying
water. If we can find a usable supply that is already outside
our atmosphere, then we are a big leg up.
Um, organism migration is normal behavior (Score:2, Insightful)
Migration is something organisms do. Plain and simple.
Truthfully, I'd be more concerned about ET organisms messing up our environment more than the other way around.
Re:Polluting other planets (Score:4, Insightful)
Guess what
Perhaps I'm reading too far between the lines of your post, but I'd prefer to say that humanity has the potential to utilize other planets, in this system or another. Whether we ever fulfill that potential is another matter.
Furthermore, your post implies (to me) a lack of concern for other environments. I'm not one to suggest that we should not visit or utilize these other worlds, but we need to take responsibility for our actions, and the ramifications they cause. Consider the research we may be denied the opportunity for, if we were to rampantly spread and 'contaminate' other environments. We've done it over and over again on this planet, usually before we knew any better. Lets try not to do it in the future, ok ?
BTW = This is a practical concern, not some sort of fluffy feel-good 'lets not harm the martians' kind of thing.
Re:Europa is already highly radioactive! (Score:3, Insightful)
so the submiter statement could be true nonetheless ...
Yea, and I could be a 391 pound snail. It's not freakin' likely.
The damn thing could spread 100% of its radioactive material directly into the ocean itself and it wouldn't a be a big deal. Any life that happened to be in the localized area when it happened may not be so happy, but overall there's not going to be anything even remotely approaching a disaster. Barely a concern, in fact, unless out of that entire moon the probe just happened to explode in the only tiny, tiny spot that could support life. And the unbelievably bad odds of that are what now?
The concern about "contamination" that people who aren't just submitting trolls to the Slashdot editors talk about comes from biological sources, not radioactive ones.
Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
They "know" that it's there because the crack/stress patterns visible in the ice could "only" have been produced if the ice was floating.
(Yes yes, they don't really know it - they are guessing, but they are well informed guesses).
Liquid water means that there is a good chance for life - the temperature is reasonable, there's oxygen, etc etc.
The article doesn't describe it because it's a very well accepted/established conjecture that liquid water means a high probability of life (go google for "water is life")
And when it comes down to it, no there is no other way of examining the question before sending a probe. That is the nature of a "conjecture". Scientific evidence suggests that there is a high probability of life there, but we're never going to know for sure if we never go look.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:3, Insightful)
People have so little sense of perspective.
The sort of people worried about contaminating a planet-sized body with a meters-long probe are the same sort of people who argue evolution can't possibly take place (in our universe of trillions of stars) because it's statistacally "one in a million".
TW
Oh, grow up! (Score:3, Insightful)
And that is "anti-science". Exactly. It is anti-thought, anti-rationality and just plain stupid. Your opinion is clearly the result of thick, foggy ideology.
The Big Evil Corporations also make the tools to help your body beat cancer, fight infections, help the crippled become mobile once again, and so on. Should we not trust those as well. Big Evil Corporation made it possible to post your message to the world. Will you be leaving the Internet?
I see no reason for it given that organic food tastes just great and has worked fine for thousands of years
All you've done here is demonstrate your total and complete ignorance on the topic. Maybe you should educate yourself on the issue with something other than political manifestos. And next time you hop and skip down to the local grocery store, realize that a lot of the world can't do that, and would love to have some crops engineered to gorw in their own backyards and resist the local threats.
Did you post this to the wrong site? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please whine over there about ecological disasters, and how bad we are as a species, etc...
Re:But the point is...? (Score:5, Insightful)
hydrostatic pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
what is stopping all of that water firing the probe out of its hole at some massive velocity (anybody for a game of golf)...
Dammit (Score:1, Insightful)
such a willful ignorance when it comes to
nuclear power?
Yo, Buckwheat. Listen up!
YOU ARE BATHED IN RADIATION AT THIS VERY MOMENT.
Somehow you seem to survive that indignity. Odd,
isn't it?
One nuclear powered probe going awry on Europa
would not have the REMOTEST CHANCE of killing
all the hypothetical life there.
The Cassini probe now about to enter Saturn's
orbit would not have "poisoned everyone on the
planet!" if it had exploded on launch.
Deal with it. And FGS grow up.
Radioactive contamination is not the issue.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too funny. (Score:4, Insightful)
Newsflash to morons: you don't need trees to make paper. Lots and lots of cheap, easy-to-grow plants are loaded with cellulose.
And yes, I grew up in a logging town, in a logging family, and I'm quite familiar with the logging industry. Chopping down trees to make toilet paper and diaper fill is utterly, utterly tragic.
Re:It's Open Mic Night at the Astrophysics Lounge! (Score:2, Insightful)
This does not include the fact that the nuclear heating of the probe will be insignificant to the levels of radiation penetrating the surface of Europa from Jupiter. Yes the ice is thick, but radiation, especially at that level, gets through and most likely at higher quantities than we could introduce. Contaminating with microbes of our own planet will be far worse.
And one more thing. Its not like radioactive isotopes are this rare species of element that is not found anywhere but where humans put it. Its everywhere. Hell your body is full of the stuff (carbon dating HELLO!!). Problems arise when given LONG TERM exposure or high doses (bombs). The heaters will not effect things significantly (besides those heaters are designed to survive exploding on launch...not going to happen)
Re:hydrostatic pressure (Score:2, Insightful)
Microbes (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the points I make, when people bring up the topic of alien organisms contaminating Earth, is that Earth really has pretty advanced microbes. Microbes on Earth have had 4.5 billion years to practice infesting each other and the various high-level organisms. Likewise, our immune systems have had slightly less time to practice fighting off such microbes. All this evolution makes them pretty advanced.
Granted, Europa has had the same time to work as we have, but it hasn't had as large a playground, and most likely none of the organisms there have gone up against a mammalian immune system anytime during their evolutionary development. Nor have they gotten the chance to try to survive in as many different environments.
How is this on topic? Any organisms we send over there will wipe the floor with any Europan microbes they find. This may be a giant leap for Earthling microbes, but it's probably bad for science.
Same thing goes for Mars and elsewhere.
Well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Kjella
Re:Oh, grow up! (Score:3, Insightful)
Those same Big Evil Corporations also brought us a plethora of things which cause the cancers and illnesses they are also developing the drugs to treat at a profit, i.e. asbestos, cigarettes, PCB's, Dioxin's, dumping Chromium 6 in the ground water, etc. What is somewhat worse is that, even after they figured out these materials were dangerous they often strove to conceal this fact to insure continued profitibility and to avoid liability.
I guess my point being is both posters are taking an extreme position that is somewhat wrong. Blind trust of corporations to do the right thing is fundementally naive. They are fundementally driven by greed and the desire to make money. They will often do wonderful things in pursuit of that goal but they will just as often things that are horrible.
When it comes to geneticly modified food if its done very carefully it can yield wonderful results, food that is drought or pest resistance, food that will grow in famine ravaged areas where traditional crops are not. In some respects it is not very different from selective breeding, its just a much more powerful tool and with that power comes a much higher risk.
The key problem is mankind simple lacks the knowledge to fully understand or appreciate the potential unintended consequences of tampering with DNA. The scientist involved do have the knowledge to accomplish the task they set out to accomplish. They can change a DNA dequence to alter a protein to make the protein do what they want. But they dont have and may never have the knowledge to do this safely becaus e they wont understand the unintended and unexpected consequences this new protein will have when it encounters the immensely complex human body.
The biggest and most dangerous risk you hear about GM food is that it will trigger unexpected allergic reactions, often times very dangerous reactions, in some people who are not allergic to the un GM'ed food. Unfortunately there is a great deal of genetic diversity in humans and animals. When you introduce a food with new and different proteins in it you run a risk some percentage of the human population wont be able to eat it just like some people can't eat natures own peanuts.
It is also a source of deep concern about GM foods that they were supposed to be completely isolated from their un GM counterparts and it appears that those walls are collapsing for things like corn and soybeans. Once you start widely distributing wonder crops its an unfortunate fact of life farmers will get their hands on the new wonder seed and rapidly disregard the rules for raising GM crops. They are also striving to avoid paying the royalties to companies like Monsanto so strive to avoid advertising the fact they are using bootleg seed.
Bottomline is I wouldn't completely shun GM food since it may become essential to feeding an increasingly crowded planet, but I sure as HELL wouldn't blindly trust the corporations developing it to not make mistakes that could be potentially catastrophic. It is a deep concern that the companies engaged in this research are under great pressure to turn a profit with the fruits of their labor so they are very likely to cut corners that shouldn't be cut.
Re:Killing life... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Polluting other planets (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to be that the parent poster was saying (albeit in an inflammatory way) that since there is apparently no life in the solar system that can tell us otherwise, there's nothing stopping us from exploring and utilizing the resources of these planets. I mean, it's not like the rock itself will rise up against us and tell us off for disturbing it.
The only logical reason I can see for us to avoid fumbling around the solar system and messing with things is to preserve it for future (and perhaps smarter) humans. But that would mean that we would eventually go out into the solar system anyway, which would require more technology, likely gained by our current attempts at space travel.
Anyway, what it gets down to is that we have to do stupid things for a while to get smart. We wouldn't have environmentalism if we hadn't wasted our resources, we wouldn't have atheism if nobody saw faults with religion, and we won't be able to appreciate the wonder of space if we don't muck it up a bit first.
Creationists Don't Understand Science (Score:2, Insightful)
Second: Evolution is a process, not a hypothesis. It has been applied in Computer Science, postulated in astrophysics and biology, etc. Natural Selection is a scientific hypothesis.
Third: Hypotheses are not directly verifiable. You don't go out and look for gravity to try and figure out whether Newton was right. Hypotheses are used to generate verifiable predictions, and the more predictions that are verified to be correct, the more correct the hypothesis that generated them is take to be.
Natural Selection generates predictions about disease resistance, fossil records, etc. So far, all of the significant predictions have been verified to be correct. How many of Creationism's have been? Oh right, it's a historical claim, not a hypothesis.
Got Anything Better To Do? (Score:3, Insightful)
NASA's managers seem to have decided that their arbitrary goals will mostly have to do with putting people in random places. The ESA has decided to look for life in random places. Both will yield different technological paybacks and it's pretty hard to make a value judgement between the two, don't you think?
Re:But the point is...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Polluting other planets (Score:1, Insightful)
Then why does my dog keep pissing in the same places around my yard???
Re:Forget them (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:But the point is...? (Score:2, Insightful)
This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, because submarines typically only transmit at high frequencies via satellite. These frequencies won't go through water, let alone kilometers of ice.
Now, if they mean very-low-frequency (VLF) transmissions, which are used to talk to submarines (but not back the other way) while they are underwater, then there is another problem. Europa is immersed in Jupiter's powerful magnetic field, and those VLF frequencies will not be able to escape that field to make it back to Earth.
So I wonder just how well-thought-out this proposed mission really is.
Re:Question... (Score:3, Insightful)
You can help save intelligent life here on Earth by donating to the World Food Programme [wfp.org]. The World Food Programme's donation page is here [wfp.org].
Incidentally, the U.S. Government is the largest donor [wfp.org]:
Oh well, I'm sure we can get the money from the defence piggy-bank... right, guys?
The Department of Health and Human Services received about 501 billion dollars in 2003 compared with the 388 billion that the Department of Defense received. Look here [gpoaccess.gov].
If you're in the U.S. and want to do more to help locally right now, try here [unitedway.org]. Remember, there are people in your local community that are suffering just as much as other people around the world. If we all help locally, we all help globally.
Re:Microbes (Score:4, Insightful)
If there is life on Europa anywhere near as old as Earth life (or possibly even older), then it will probably be 'pretty advanced' in its own way.
it hasn't had as large a playground
Actually it would have have a much LARGER playground. Europa's oceans are an order of magnitude larger than the Earth's oceans. The 3-dimentional playground of the entire insides of Europa is a vastly larger habitat for life in than the vanishingly thin layer (pretty much 2-dimentional) on the skin of the Earth. On that basis it would be more reasonable to expect Europan life to probably wipe out all life on Earth.
most likely none of the organisms there have gone up against a mammalian immune system
Of course they haven't gone against a mammalian immune system any more than they've gone against a reptilian or marsupial immune system.
On the other hand:
(A) Assuming there is life there, we have absolutely no idea what sort of immune systems they have had to contend with.
and (B) If they haven't had to contend with any immune systems then they never had to WASTE EFFORT on silly kludges to deal with them. Any energy and mechanisms expended on something that doesn't exist there will be a drain on efficency and success.
Nor have they gotten the chance to try to survive in as many different environments.
Ha. On Earth life lives on the puny skin of the Earth. On Europa it could live on the skin of the moon and in within the icy crust and on the underside of that ice layer facing the ocean and in the castly different depths of the ocean probably a thousand kilometers deep and on the surface of the rocky core facing the ocean.
rganisms we send over there will wipe the floor with any Europan microbes
Human/Earth superiority, pure bigotry (chuckle).
Believing that is no more valid than believing the universe revolves around the Earth or beleiving that humans are (biologically) different or superior to any other animal on Earth.
All that said, yes, any probe should be sterilized before being sent. (A) We don't want to (at least not yet) contaminate Europa with Earth like if it is currently sterile. (B) We don't want to risk contaminating/disrupting the Europan ecology if an Earth-microbes somehow manages survive in some niche at the fringe of that biosphere, and (C) because there is a remote but catastrophic risk that Earth-microbes manages to overwhlem and displace Europan life.
And while such precautions are wise, they are mostly likely moot anyway. It is known that impactors can blast material from one body in teh solarsystem into space and that that material can and does land on other bodies in the solar system. We have found meteorites from Mars, and there is no doubt that meteorites from Earth have landed on Mars and probably ever other body in the solar system. Earth life has already "contaminated" every body in the solar system. It's quite possible that all life on Earth is actually "contamination", that our life originated Europa (or Mars).
But until we are sure, we need to sterilize any probes.
-
It unreel's the tether behind it. (Score:3, Insightful)
Think of a wire-guided missile or torpedo, the spool of control wire is on the projectile, not the launching station.