Saturn Moon Could Be Hospitable To Life 153
shmG writes to share that recent imagery from Saturn's moon Enceladus indicate that it may be hospitable to life. "NASA said on Tuesday that a flyby of planet's Enceladus moon showed small jets of water spewing from the southern hemisphere, while infrared mapping of the surface revealed temperatures warmer than previously expected. 'The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,' said John Spencer, a composite infrared spectrometer team member based at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. 'Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we've found in the solar system.'"
Re:alright (Score:5, Insightful)
There are only so many spaceships that can go up at one time, and while the number is proportional to the funding that the space programs get, it's never going to allow for us to do everything we want.
If you feel very strongly about getting more and more study done, why not petition your local congressmen, ministers and elected officials to spend more on scientific research. Why not look at getting involved and offering your time as a volunteer to do some of the work that could potentially be done by non paid staff. Why not look at getting involved with your local university campus and gather support for a bipartisan effort with other universities to fund a study of something you feel passionate about?
Programmer? Why not offer to write some of the algorithms for them? Scientist? Why not put forward a proposal of what you want to study and why? Businessman? Why not actually offer some level of funding yourself towards a specific research goal? Knuckle-dragger? Why not offer to make make coffees, organize meetings for the others, be a PA to the staff and help out in the cafeteria to bring down costs?
Oh yeah, it's easier to just jump on here and throw out another internet meme.
Re:Not impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
If there happen to be biological fragments floating around in space, they might land on Enceladus and take advantage of the short-term conditions.
That was my second point. The surface is at 50 degrees K and is exposed to a lot of radiation. "Biological fragments floating around in space" would not find their way into the warm environment under ground.
Re:Not impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived. It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
And... you wouldn't be impressed by simple life forms?
Okay, well, that's cool, but why you were paying any attention at all is beyond me. We're pretty sure there's no complex life anywhere else in the solar system.
Personally I'd be gobsmacked, flabbergasted, and impressed to all hell if we found even the most primitive of prokaryote.
Re:Obligatory 2010 Quote (Score:5, Insightful)
The warning was sent out because once Lucifer/Jupiter calmed down into semi-stability, Europa would very obviously have an atmosphere, and the first things humans (which in Clarke's universe, actually travel further than orbit) would do is land there.
Re:well.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Umm... Huh?
Something changed all right. Our knowledge of conditions on Enceledus went from basically zilch to what you're reading about today thanks to the Casini probe.
We weren't "sure" that it couldn't be hospitable to life because we didn't know very much about it, but for things that far away from the sun more or less the default estimation of habitability is "not likely".
Re:Not impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
It hasn't been going on for billions of years so complex life forms can not have had time to evolve.
The graphic on this wiki page [wikipedia.org] suggests that life on earth arose 1.5 billion years after the earth was formed, nearly two billion years went by before multicellular life, and then another billion years before cnidarians, which developmentally are reasonably close to us and certainly what I would consider complex, were around. I don't know much about that, and I doubt anyone knows for sure what was going on in that time, but I don't see any evidence to suggest that a ~4 billion lag time from when your planet/moon is around to when complex life forms is a -universal- constant. There's nothing to say it couldn't happen much much faster on Enceladus, we only have one example of life arising, it would be a mistake to assume that is the constant or even typical rate of life arising. The cambrian explosion is certainly evidence that the rate changes wildly. Furthermore, we haven't even -seen- this environment, the only thing we know about it is that it's possible and it isn't like earth, so if we should expect anything, its that the timeline for life arising on Enceladus would be significantly different from Earth's.
Stop misusing that thatsnomoon tag! (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF. This is a moon! Use it for huge stuff that aren't what they seem, but not for actual moons!
OK, I'm done. ;)
Re:alright (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Obligatory 2010 Quote (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently, slashdot feels like telling the omnipotent mysterious monolith what to do. Bad idea...
(spoilers for 3001, although its been a while and I have a bad memory so maybe not...)
Not really, the monoliths were destroyed by a computer virus in 3001 if I recall, so I'm sure slashdot could come up with enough goatse trolls, rickrolls, kdawson stories, overrated moderations etc to annoy the monoliths into leaving, if not blowing up.
I'll get things started
I, for one, welcome our monolithic, slashdot browsing, beowulf cluster running overlords.
Re:Not impressed (Score:4, Insightful)
I believe that current work suggests evidence of life arising withing the first few hundred million years of Earth's existence, not long after life could exist at all. (Prior to a certain point, sterilizing impacts were too frequent to let anything get far.) Probably half a billion years to no more than 1 billion years after the Earth formed we've found evidence of life. (Evidence gets to be isotopic beyond a certain point, but still.)
Re:Not impressed (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, because the likeliness of life on another planet evolving exactly like on ours, in practically zero.
It wouldn't have to be exactly like ours to be able to be roughly describes as prokaryotic. [wikipedia.org] It's an obvious stage for any biological life to go through. But really I was just saying "prokaryote" as an example of simple life.
Despite certain (pseudo-)"scientists" (with arrogance and limited imagination) being unable to think otherwise.
Uh it's not that they're unable to think otherwise. It's that if you're going to look for life, it only makes sense to look for the kind of life that you know is possible and can identify. And the "kind" is simply self-organizing organic (meaning hydrocarbon based) molecules. Which chemistry strongly suggests requires liquid water. It's not really that specific, but based on what we know can work in broadest terms. It's pragmatism, not limited imagination.
You can say "It might not be organic, it could be like something we've never even imagined!" Which is hypothetically true, but useless on its own. So go ahead, Mr. Non-pseudo-non-quotes-scientist, actually propose something we can look for, some testable hypothesis.
Yeah.
I bet $100 that we won't even recognize the first extraterrestrial life we'll ever see.
I'm curious how you would be able to call that bet. :)
But you know you may be right. For all the good that statement does us.
Or, as xkcd said it: http://xkcd.com/638/ [xkcd.com]
You get that the point of the comic is about prematurely assuming your search is over, which is completely the opposite of what we're doing, right? So take heart. The search goes on, and we're using every tool we know of to do so, and looking for new tools as well.
Re:alright (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah how hard can it be, it's not rocket sc... oh wait.
Seriously, I'm all for a new Apollo program but we're talking about an area in which even the leading experts sometimes get it devastatingly wrong with catastrophic results. It's going to take more than a volunteer effort.
Re:Why not fund it yourself? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
More likely that would cause evolution to happen faster there since there would be much more competition for resources. Survival is what drives evolution.
Except it doesn't work that way. The ocean is a far more hospitable environment for life than anywhere on land, and we see a much greater variety of aquatic life than terrestrial. On land, tropical rainforests are probably about the most hospitable environments for life there is -- and surprise, we see much more variety there than we do in cooler and drier areas.
Competition for resources happens everywhere; whatever the resources available, the creatures living there will reproduce until they reach the limit of a sustainable population. It's the availability of resources that drives species diversity.
Re:Not impressed (Score:3, Insightful)
It also takes time. Possibly 500 million years or more and Enceladus doesn't have that as well.
What are you talking about? Life here on Earth has only been around for 8000 years. Of course only non-intelligent life actually believes that.
Old meme is old.