Life-Bearing Lake Possible On Icy Jupiter Moon 112
astroengine writes "New research shows the jumbled ice blocks crowning the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa are signs of large liquid lakes below, a key finding in the search for places where life might exist beyond Earth. Drawing from studies of underground volcanoes in Iceland and Antarctica, scientists ran computer models to see if the chaotic formations on Europa's surface could be explained by the same geologic processes seen on Earth. It turns out that not only could this be further evidence for a sub-surface ocean, but also a mechanism that mixes ice and water, circulating nutrients and energy to get from the frozen surface to the ocean below."
ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS (Score:5, Funny)
slashdot filter doesn't get sci fi references... i am disappoint.
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you beat me to it, you insensitive clod!
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No wonder the Euro is about to crash.
Re:ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS (Score:4, Funny)
CmdrTaco took his monolith with him. That's why slashfilter had context recognition fail.
"My God, it's full of trolls!"
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If only we had a space program ... (Score:5, Insightful)
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
If only we had a space program that would warrant such a warning.
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Mod parent +5, depressing.
Re:If only we had a space program ... (Score:4, Funny)
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Why am I even bothering to answer an AC? Just be
Re:If only we had a space program ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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" Let's get this food, water and population thing sorted out first. Then we can go and explore space..."
~W.M.Hicks
Re:If only we had a space program ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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One reason to leave Earth and to continue to develop the technologies and competencies to do so: The long term survival of the human race. No matter how much of your "small" (though not unimportant) explorations take place, the fact remains that humanity and all of human history could be wiped out of existence at any time. The threat is incredibly small, but the consequences are enormous. Only the ability to live sustainably beyond Earth (no easy task, I admit) separates our fate from that of our planet. Th
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Space. Elbow room. Infinite amounts of it.
Not necessarily... there may exist natural elements in other environments that are not found anywhere in this solar system. All we know is that for the elements we've discovered so far, there are no gaps. There may also be previously undiscovered isotopes of elements that we do know about.
This
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All the elements of the periodic table are on Earth too, you know
Not necessarily... there may exist natural elements in other environments that are not found anywhere in this solar system. All we know is that for the elements we've discovered so far, there are no gaps. There may also be previously undiscovered isotopes of elements that we do know about.
I am all for space exploration, but we know about all isotopes from right here on earth. From right here on earth, we can study stable isotopes, isotopes so light that their half lives are fractionths of a second, and isotopes so heavy that their half lives are fractionths of a second. Isotopic abundances will vary by location, but the properties of the individual isotopes will be the same.
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Unless you possess omniscience, or or claiming that earth scientists do, I'd put money on you being wrong about that.
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This is not UFO: Enemy Unknown. There is no Elerium-115 or otherwise.
Re:If only we had a space program ... (Score:5, Informative)
Hows that laboratory study of dark matter going, then? There's so much we don't understand - like 80% of the mass of the universe!
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If you provided even the barest of sources to back up your assertions you probably wouldn't be. Anonymous posting is only looked down upon because it provides no guarantee that you have any interest in a discussion and it can be easily abused to harass people. It's not like /. asks for your social security number, just make an account with an anonymous email.
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You skepticism was justified 10 years ago. Today you're just wrong. The WCOBE/WMAP data shows this clearly - as the T-Shirt says, "Science. It Works. Bitches."
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I keep hearing that. And yet nobody seems to do the math: we have 7 billion people on this planet. How are we going to ship them off fast enough to create elbow room? It can't be done.
Of course, you might say 'elbow room' for those lucky enough to be able to migrate to space. In which case you're advocating elbow room for the privileged only. This might be practical, but hardly a view that most people would think d
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Actually, if we are talking colonization, it is far more likely that NON privileged people will go first.
Why?
Hazards. Space is a dangerous place to go, and off-world colonization almost as dangerous as space itself. Why would the powerful and privileged leave the relative comfort of their lives here when they could just pay lots of other people to risk their lives building up new worlds?
Yes, some space tourism and expensive luxury "space hotels" may be built to serve wealthy clients, but I really don't se
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Personally, if I wasn't 40 already and responsible for a family I would absolutely sign up. I'm not poor, but I'm as much an entrepreneuras the next guy and space holds lots of opportunity once our technology is up to snuff.
Yeah, let's ship a load of conmen, salesmen and bullshit artists into space, that will guarantee everything goes well.
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Wow. I spend quite a fair amount of time online, and it's been awhile since I've seen such a brazen display of complete ignorance about a fundamental characteristic of human nature. I mean, that was just breathtaking.
Frankly, I far more trust the future of humanity in space to your average guy that wants to stake a claim and start a business (IE: an entrepreneur) than I ever would to a gov
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You're not addressing the point. Maybe you missed it. If colonising space is not about getting elbow room on Earth, why in the name of all that is sacred would anyone pay money for someone else's elbow room in space?
Again: it's not practical to ship off enough folks to make a appreciable difference in elbow room on Earth, and who would be willing to pay through the nose to give someone else elbow room in space while remaining on earth themselves?
There are good reasons for space colonisation, but creating el
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I didn't miss the point. The point wasn't about "elbow room" per-se, it was about colonization.
And investment groups would ABSOLUTELY invest in a long-term colonization project if the return was an entirely new planet NOT under the jurisdiction of any Earth government where they could build their business. No need to go anywhere for that, just send lots of other people in your name, and then go yourself once things are ready and if you want.
A side effect of mass interplanetary colonization for the people
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So you're not actually replying to me or to the poster I originally replied to then. I guess we're talking at cross-purposes here.
Mart
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Prove that, please.
Or do you mean nowhere else that we know of?
Because those are two *VERY* different things.
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Let me introduce you to what can be called the "Garden World Imperative." Right now, and for a considerable future, the Earth is the only garden world, that may change, but at the moment, it is true. This means that resource extraction, the mineral resources you talk about, has to occur within the context of protecting the garden world, and having fall back in case of failure. Even today many resource extraction activities, including the burning of carbon, damage the very stability of the gar
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Life on an Icy world or not, if there are no tontons, I'm not interested.
Yeah, nothing like curling up inside a good, warm gutted tonton on a colde night.
It's life, Jim (Score:2)
But not as we know it.
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You're sure, huh? You know, we only have evidence of life happening one time and in one place. If there is indeed no life on Europa and it does indeed have the conditions thought necessary for life to form, we might have to ponder the possibility that life is incredibly rare. I suspect that life is, in fact, incredibly rare.
In other words, it's dead, Jim.
Well, there's the Goldilocks concept, effective for carbon and water based life, such as we have on Earth. The idea there could be protein molecules formed in different ways isn't quite new, so we'd really need a specimen to examine to see if anything looks like it might be an life form with an alternate chemistry. Speculation that threre could be life is far more interesting than confirming there isn't any life anywhere else.
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Don't all of those extremophiles (that we know of, on Earth), generally start out as more mundane organisms living in less extreme conditions? Then through process of evolution, some of them adapt to to the extreme conditions in which they eventually are thrust or spread to?
I have a hard time believing life can get started independently in those sorts of extreme environments without having someplace slightly more nurturing to get a foothold. Heck, look at humans, we can survive in space due to all the nea
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Don't all of those extremophiles (that we know of, on Earth), generally start out as more mundane organisms living in less extreme conditions? Then through process of evolution, some of them adapt to to the extreme conditions in which they eventually are thrust or spread to?
Perhaps, but not necessarily. When life first appeared on Earth, the planet was hotter, more volcanic, had more greenhouse gasses and no free oxygen. It would have been more or less completely toxic to almost all life that currently exists on Earth (except for a few of the extremophiles).
It's easy to think of modern day Earth as the "perfect" environment for life- but that's only because it's the environment we're evolved to thrive in. If we were built to thrive in another environment, our current environme
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The idea there could be protein molecules formed in different ways isn't quite new
We could come across life, even intelligent life, that's so strange that we won't even recognize it as being alive.
Re:It's life, Jim (Score:5, Insightful)
If but one in a billion planets has life, there is a LOT of life out there.
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Aye, if we happen to find two objects in this solar system that contain life then life is quite prolific everywhere.
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If but one in a billion planets has life, there is a LOT of life out there.
And that one in a billion figure comes from...out of your bottom..
Although I'm sure there is life elsewhere in the universe, you can't just make up an impressively small sounding percentage then apply it to the even more impressively big number that is the number of planets in the universe.
I might just as well say there are approximately a billion billion billion planets (or whateer the number is) but the probability of life on any one is one in a billion billion billion, therefore we are that one pl
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It's an exceedingly small number, picked because I bet most people would guess that life might be less rare than that.
But indeed, we really don't know the actual rarity. Personally, I bet it's more like one in a million or better. The chemistry of life is just not that complicated.
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Incorrect.
"In other words, I suspect that it's dead, Jim"
Fixed that for you.
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Assuming "1 out of 2" is synonymous with "incredibly rare".
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Well, you could equally well say we've found life on 1/9 (or 1/8, depending on Pluto) planets in the solar system with a few satellites as bonus chances. It's not exactly like we've studied all that many. If we say those planets are a random sampling - which is an approximation - there should be
more than a billion planets in the Milky Way alone that are closer to Earth than any non-Earth environment in this solar system. So even if we conclusively find there's no life here, that doesn't really say much for
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You're sure, huh? You know, we only have evidence of life happening one time and in one place. If there is indeed no life on Europa and it does indeed have the conditions thought necessary for life to form, we might have to ponder the possibility that life is incredibly rare. I suspect that life is, in fact, incredibly rare.
In other words, it's dead, Jim.
Can I disagree here? We have a sample size of 1 right now- no other planet has been investigated well enough to give a yes/no answer.
We know that life on the Earth formed *very* early in the planet's history- we have records back ~3.5 GYA, and it's quite possibly a lot older than that since the limiting factor is finding rocks that haven't been changed so much they would destroy any records. Given that water on Earth only dates to 4.3 GYA, we're probably talking a few hundred million years for life, start
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Can I disagree here?
Of course you can.
We have a sample size of 1 right now
Exactly. We just don't know. Actually I think the liklihood of Earth being the only place with life is incredibly low, but unless and until we find life elsewhere, it's pretty unscientific to be absolutely certain that ther is life elsewhere.
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Actually, I'd be very surprised if we didn't find life elsewhere. I think (and have for some time) that there's a good chance we might find life on Europa, or perhaps one of Saturn's moons (you might like this short sci-fi story [slashdot.org] about possible life on the moons of Saturn, Jupiter, or Neptune). But I won't take "there is life out there!" on faith like it seems everyone else is doing.
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When? (Score:5, Funny)
When can we go ice fishing there? I would love to see what we catch.... Wonder if it tastes good?
Re:When? (Score:5, Funny)
It tastes like burning.
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Cool (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's go have a look.
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You wouldn't happen to have a rocket that can get there on you would you? And a ship with a life support system that can support a crew for several years, and a drill that can drill through dozens of miles of ice? If so, we can leave tomorrow. My schedule's good.
Re:Cool (Score:5, Funny)
"Wanted: Someone to travel in home-made rocket ship with me. This is not a joke. P.O.Box 322, Oakview CA. You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. Safety not guaranteed. I have only done this once before."
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Steven Moffat, is that you [bleedingcool.com]?
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Ridiculous. Now if you'd offer a time machine ride, definitely, but space? cmon, we all know it's not possible to reach escape velocity...
Escape velocity my arse. Look, the higher up you go, the thinner the atmosphere and the lower the gravity, right? So it must get easierr to get higher the higher up you go. So as long as you've got enough fuel, if you just go at at car speed you'll soon be in space, the atmosphere's only like a hundred miles thick.
I really don't see what all the fuss is about.
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Actually it's all part of the joke.
The original joke I quoted used "time machine" in place of "home made rocket"
http://www.subzeroblue.com/images/classifiedadbacktofuture.jpg [subzeroblue.com]
(Or google image search for "Wanted someone to go back in time with me")
The post I was replying to, with the content and his sig combined, reminded me of that joke and how fitting it would be with the twist.
No scientific value what so ever ;}
Just a nod back at the original material I lifted.
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I know just the people [wikipedia.org] you should talk to.
send a probe! (Score:4, Interesting)
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Will we be asked to trust the Gorton's Space Man?
Re:send a probe! (Score:5, Insightful)
Most likely microbes
Even single celled organisms [discovermagazine.com] can be quite amazing right here on earth. These puppies were recently found in the depths of our oceans. I can't wait to see what life will come up with on another planet/moon with a totally different set of playing rules.
I only meddle in biology, but what I have learned is that for each time you think that life can't get any stranger, you soon enough discover something that proves you wrong yet again.
Oblig.... (Score:2)
You must be new here. :-)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
But I do agree with your comment, and have been bemused and befuddled by news of the very example you link to.
I can 'wrap my mind' around microscopic single-celled organisms, having viewed them through microscopes many times.
Macroscopic single-celled organisms just boggle my mind. I have many questions....
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Then evolution occurs.
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>marine biologists having to constantly correct people's statements
Technically, this would be marine exobiologists.
But that's not the point. If they did have complex organisms, I would hope they were squid-like.
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the movie 2010 is where the Chinese made a mad dash to this area before the Americans and Russians
I'd love to see this happen in real life. Us westerners often need competition to really spur us on.
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Good (Score:2)
Can't wait until we start searching Europa's depths instead of Mars' radiation-scorched deserts.
More accurate but less sensational headline: (Score:2)
"Liquid water possibly found on Jupiter Moon"
When will the editors understand that not all Slashdot readers are carbon-based life forms. The ridiculous bias on this site knows no bounds!
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Lethal radiation Bombardment (Score:1)
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One other thing that ACC predicted (Score:2)
The Chinese will get there first
(in the book anyway - the movie sucked)
It is funny (Score:1)