Nearby Ocean Worlds Could Be Best Bet For Life Beyond Earth, Says NASA (cnn.com) 59
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.
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What do they mean by 'nearby'?
Look-out, there's one peaking over your shoulder right now!
They are referring to Icy moons that could have liquid water oceans under the Ice.
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Oh, I get it. Enceladus is nearby now. OK.
Yes it is. It is only 1.2B km away. The closest star is 30,000 times further.
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What do they mean by 'nearby'?
They mean, in our solar system rather than in a solar system a hundred light years away.
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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.
Re:Nearby? (Score:5, Funny)
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..."
Unrelated issue [Re: Life?] (Score:2)
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 turn
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That's a description of observers, not of "God". One group is more curious than the other.
Anyhow, this debate would probably get stuck in a never-ending exhibit of Laynes Law if continued.
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If we find someone who can consistently do magic, you'd better believe that there would be a swarm of physicists quantifying everything. Heck, if I could do magic, I'd be measuring things myself, making small changes to incantations to see what happens, etc. It might not be good for my life expectancy, but I couldn't resist it.
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Like "Dark Matter"
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Dark matter answers several different questions about the cosmos, including reasons unrelated to why it was first hypothesized, so it's a pretty well-established theory (although without much of an explanation other than matter that doesn't interact electromagnetically). Don't know what relation you're thinking to workable magic, though.
Re: Life? (Score:4, Funny)
Finding alien life wouldn't even disprove God.
Of course not. Several religions, including Mormonism [wikipedia.org], 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.
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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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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.
Creationism is a house of cards held together by masking tape. Even the last few Catholic popes have been getting more stern about denouncing it. Honestly, if they want to so BADLY believe the universe was created in 7 days they should just say it was created in 7 days but made to look as if it was much older to trick us. We've all been duped, you see! At least it would solve their mental contortions problem.
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I'll take my chances, thanks. To imagine that infinite and all-powerful being would give a shit whether I believed in it or not beggars belief.
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an "infinite and all-powerful being" can still be petty and vengeful...
do not underestimate the power of the darkside.
oh yeah I believe in the force too.
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Being petty and vengeful toward your own creation generally only happens when you lose control of it. If you're fully in control of your creation and can change whatever you want, getting mad at it would have to be purely for fun... but if he's also omniscient, that instantly takes all the fun out of it.
My theory is that God committed suicide as soon as he realized how tortuously pointless being an omni-being necessarily is.
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My theory is that the Judeao-Christian notion of a creator deity is completely self-contradictory, and while some of the Church's finest minds like St. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas did an admirable job of creating a word salad to paper over the problems of omnipotence and omniscience on the one hand and free will on the other, at the end of the day it's just metaphysical mumbo jumbo.
I'm of the "weak atheist" variety, in that I see no reason for Prime Mover, but don't preclude the possibility, provi
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lets suggest that instead of committing suicide, Entity allowed for freeish thought/action. and then disabled the preview button. then instead of re-enabling the preview button just decided to force by torture the commandments.
kinda like the old sim city games where you can enable or disable cheats but the game is more fun for longer if you try to make things work without cheats.
idk.
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My underpants are earthed foil. Faraday:1, Zeus: 0.
Re: Life? (Score:1)
Vote Europa (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Vote Europa (Score:5, Funny)
Europa should be better hunting grounds than Enceladus
Yeah, but we're not allowed to land there.
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Fortunately, all the other planets are available for our use.
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All these worlds are yours except Europa. And Mimas between 5 and 6 on Wednesday afternoons. You can have Triton on alternate Sundays, but hands off Margaret [wikipedia.org].
Re:Vote Europa (Score:5, Interesting)
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. We can't match the heat output in our models yet because we don't have enough data on the composition of Enceladus or the size of it's ocean(s). We can't even characterize how much heat comes from nuclear decay in our own core; we're just guessing about other planets and moons. Some of Europa's heat comes from the high radiation and strong magnetic fields in the Jupiter system, so the accuracy of your claim that it's heat matches only tidal stresses is doubtful.
How to heat a moon [Re:Vote Europa] (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus
"Its resonance with Dione excites its orbital eccentricity, which is damped by tidal forces, tidally heating its interior, and possibly driving the geological activity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#South_polar_region
"However, for Enceladus to still be active, part of the core must have also melted, forming magma chambers that would flex under the strain of Saturn's tides. Tidal heating, such as from the resonance with Dione or from libration, would then have
Dark Agitator [Re:Vote Europa] (Score:2)
Because its orbit is not particularly eccentric, that's too small a force to account for most the heat under the current models.
We have other moons and planets in the solar system to study heat and test our models on frictional tidal heating, internal nuclear decay, and mineral composition. Enceladus doesn't fit that data. Yes, it's possible there's something really different or odd about its composition, but nobody has identified s
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I remember a long time ago reading that Europa had fallen out of favor as the best place to look because they thought the ocean was too salty (based on magnetic field?).
Source (Score:2)
TFA is a CNN story? Here is a better source. [nasa.gov]
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. [extremescience.com] 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.
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In fact, it's theorized that those hydrothermal vents may be where life first originated on Earth. One could argue that they are thus the most habitable place on Earth.
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Maybe. An argument I'd use against geothermal vents being the origin of life on earth is that the environment in those conditions is too static and thus doesn't have the same evolutionary pressures. Its why the deeper you go in the ocean, the more living fossils you find.
I'm not a biochemist, but I would be interested to know if there was a particular quality of the deep sea hydrothermal vents that would have been more favorable for the formation of life in comparison to the rest of the young planet.
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If you're going to one, I wonder how much more difficult it is to go to both at the same time? A vessel that splits as it approaches sending similar payloads to both moons.
Narrowing parameters makes the search much easier (Score:3)
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.