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Science

Liquid Ocean on Europa? 117

Posted by Roblimo from the where-there's-water-there-may-be-life dept.
Ryan Finnin Day writes "A team from University of Arizona proposes an explanation for the arcs visible on the surface of Europa: a liquid sea with 98 foot tidal swells cracking the frozen surface. Also in the story, plans for a NASA probe in 2008 to use a laser altimeter to detect tidal swells. Read all about it."
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Liquid Ocean on Europa? More

Liquid Ocean on Europa?

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  • When I was in college ( and then for some time after that ), I regularly read two newspapers known for their journalistic integrity; the two best on the opposite sides of the political spectrum. They were the Wall Street Journal, for the conservatives, and the Christian Science Monitor for the liberal side. Their paper is one of the best, and more reasonable, and they keep the editorials on the editorial page. And there's no religious proselytizing, either.

    As to Europa, I also saw the Discovery show on the probe. I guess I never realized how likely life was there ( I thought it was frozen solid ), and I didn't know that there's actually a plan to send a probe. With the geothermal vents, I think the likelihood of life there is high. To think that in thirty years or less, we could be there checking for life really got me excited. That would be one of the discoveries of the epoch. God, I get excited just thinking about it.

    Plus, just think if it's advanced past the microbial stage!

    Oops, gotta go to the bathroom now; just made a mess.

    Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Arthur C. Clarke
    (we could be gods!)
  • The Christian Science Monitor is a surprisingly unbiased news source -- more unbiased, in my opinion, than the big ones like ABC or CNN. The CSM news service has been around for a long time -- I want to say around a century now -- and has no resemblance to other Christian sources, like say the 700 Club, Rush Limbaugh, etc. Give them a chance.



  • If your objection is based primarily on radiation exposure, then no conclusion can be drawn. Most terrestrial life finds radiation lethal, of course. But in the land surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, organisms (up to and including mammals) have been found that suffer no ill effects from the radiation exposure. A study on voles (basically mice) from the area revealed that the animals had experienced extremely rapid evolutionary adaptation (within a generation even, with a litter exhibiting mutations unique from the mother and from each other).

    The point is that even though most organisms avoid such a conditon, others can thrive on it and many can learn to live with it. Life can carry on.

    What are the fundamentals of life, as we understand them to be? Water. Carbon. An energy source. That seems to be it. We don't know nearly enough to say what *can't* work -- if deep sea archea can breathe sulfur and Russian mice can learn to live with nuclear meltdown, anything might be possible.



  • Jupiter has a simply huge magnetic field that traps cosmic rays and energetic solar wind particles for very long periods of time. This is bad enough that our space hardware has an difficult time with it, and I have heard the speculation that human beings could never visit the region of Jupiter without taking a lethal dose.

    Could life evolve or take root (transported from Earth on tektites) in the leads of Europa given the extant conditions?

    As far as life developing there... we don't know what forms are possible for life. We know OUR form of life would have a problem with the radiation, but that doesn't mean that any life would have those same problems. Perhaps a different form of life could have developed that actually somehow harnessed the radiation for energy, in some sort of "radiosynthesis". Maybe far-fetched, but there are bacteria here on Earth that can survive just about any radiation you throw at them. And that's just a modification in our structure of life.

    I see way too much of that when people talk about life developing beyond Earth. They're too quick to project what is true about our life on any other possibilities.

    Personally, I'd love to see a form of life that thought a planet like Venus was paradise and that Earth was uninhabitable. :)
    ---
  • the thousands or perhaps millions of years the travel in space would take would surely kill any earth life form.

    Not true, some bacteria can enter a spore state, and remain in suspended animation indefinately. They've found some frozen in polar ice caps for 3 million years, that came back to a normal life cycle when put in liquid water.
    Cheers,

    Rick Kirkland
  • there are also things called i belive SLIMES its a bad acronym that i c/n remember right now. they are even farther removed from the photosynthosis life cycle. the disolve rocks to get energy, some scientists believe that if there is life on mars this would be what it, and it was some of the first life on earth still around.
  • Yes I have seen both the series and the movies. All the cats and dogs were killed off by a virus. Before they'd bring anything back to Earth, they'd send people there to study it. And then of course the lifeforms (both terran and europan) would be biologically isolated from each other, until it was safe for them to directly interact. (Afterall we wouldn't like a scene remincent of Homer's trip back to the dinosaur age on "The Simpsons" now would we? ("*AHHCHOOO!*" (Immediatly every dinosaur drops dead one by one) "This is going to cost me." *BZZZFFFT*)))
  • the christian science monitor is one of the most objective news sources i have ever read. i find it offensive that you automaticly assume a full third of the united states and a good chunch of the rest of the world are irrational fanatics who ignore the burden of scientific proof. the catholic church has since not long after darwin proposed evolution stated that it doesn't conflict with the teachings of the church, most protestant denominations that i know of (including the one i belong to) share this belief. You will in fact find if you do some reaserch that many scientists believe that there is some design in nature and in fact many are christians. the tolerances in the univese are SO strict to allow stars to form, produce super novas that make the elements that we need to be here that many people believe that there is no chance of them occuring naturaly, if the weight or charge of protons, electron or neutrons were off stars couldn't form the way they are, chemistry as we know it couldn't occur b/c bonds would either be to tight, to loose , or not occur at all. do your research or you are worse off than the fanatics that you defame
  • There's a wise old saying: "Where there's smoke, there's fire"
  • Your idiocy just proves KingBob's original point! You really need to research what we call "spelling" and "grammar" so that others may understand your flawed logic!

    Are you a member of the Flat-Earth Society?
  • In other words, complex life would be unlikely.
    The little beasties around the black spouters make incredibly efficient use of the heat energy they get. But as life goes, there just isn't a whole lot of room for variety.

    The latest SciAm article on the oceans of europa (which didn't mention this cool discovery) also talked about the limitations of chemosynthesis.


    Still, the life found on earth around these undersea vents is pretty impressive for what it's got to work with.


    http://www.amnho nline.org/expeditions/blacksmokers/life_forms.html [amnhonline.org]

    Page that talks about black smokers.

  • I didn't understand this at all, until I read the article and found out that they didn't talk about my part of the world, but rather an object in space with a very similar name.

    FYI, "Europe" is spelled "Europa" in Swedish (and a few other languages too).

  • At least, according to "2061: Odyssey Three", it was the Chinese spacecraft the Tsien. They landed on Europa to refill their propellant tanks with water, a strategy designed to get them to the Discovery faster than the other vessels by allowing them to carry a smaller payload. They were extracting water from an area where there was a warm upwelling that meant that there was only a relatively thin layer of insulating ice between the liquid water and the vacuum. Some sort of large, slow, kelp like creature emerged from the water, attracted by the bright light and started to crawl up the side of the ship. The ship toppled over and the hull ruptured. One astronaut was left, and he sent a signal explaining what happened in the general direction of the Leonov with his suit radio.
    Anyway, that's according to "2061" but, as has been observed, the details of previous odyssey books have not always been treated as canon by the sequels. Rather, each book exists in its own parallel, but not identical, universe.
  • How does the CSM cover medical issues? I would think that any discussion of medicine would violate tenets of the CS faith...
  • Oh, ok. I do remember that bit. I believe the crews of the ship that was hijacked to Europa (The Galaxy) had a fairly international crew with a large percent of them also being chinese. The ship that came to rescue them (The Universe) also had a large numnber of chinese in the crew, as well as a number of celebrities ( a movie star, the professor and Mary Anne... well, not really, actually a composor, a movie star, a bushy bearded science reporter type, a famous author...). Both ships were part of the private fleet of Sir Lawrence Tsung.
    I don't think the shark-like creature actually did any leaping until its death throes, but you're right about that. I've been working under the assumption that the corpse may have been fatal to the creature because of a handedness difference in the arrangement of its proteins. A number of the proteins that we use in our own bodies (I'm working under the assumption that ours are right handed, but I may have it backwards, IANAMB [I Am Not A Molecular Biologist]) are poison to us in their left-handed form. Or, it could have been a number of different things about the different biochemistries that killed it, right down to the oxygen in the air inside the bodies lungs (Europa didn't have much in the way of free oxygen, so all the life used some sort of anaerobic respiration, although it seemed to be a bit more efficient than the anaerobic processes used by earth life).

    PS, can you tell that I've got my copy open right in front of me? :)
  • Sorry, forgot to mention. The reason I mentioned the parallel universe thing is that there are just a few little details of history that differ between the books. To quote from the author's notes for "3001: The Final Odyssey":
    Obviously there is no way in which a series of four science-fiction novels, written over a periosf of more than thirty years of the most breathtaking developments in technology (especially in space exploration) and politics could be mutually consistent. As I wrote in the introduction to 2061, 'Just as 2010: Odyssey Two was not a direct sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, so this book is not a linear sequel to 2010. They must all be considered as variations on the same theme, involving many of the same characters and situations, but not necessarily happening in the same universe."

    So, that's all I meant by it.
  • Ah but the great thing is there's a prob already on it's way to Titan to investigate this. It the Cassini: Voyage to Saturn [nasa.gov] Project. Nice site scientifically speaking. You should check it out.
  • Really? Cool! I didn't know that little tidbit. I just assumed he wrote the book AFTER he saw the white oval.

    Jeez...
  • 98 foot waves would provide great surf, apart from the damn grazes you get from icy surface above

  • Re:Crunch-splash! (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There are several independent groups undergoing brainstorming/feasibility studies for such a Europa probe. I participated on one for awhile, called ICEPIC. There are many quandaries which require lots of engineering forethought, and which lack of knowledge about Europa, and technological limitations present real challenges.

    I think it is commonly accepted among most scientists that somewhere under the Europa ice caps is liquid water. How deep and how much water may be under dispute. The ice crust is very active, and breaking apart and moving about, which is really strong evidence for liquid H2O. Assuming there is an ocean, the probe must first get through this ice layer. Several ideas have been studied, such as drilling through, melting through (either electrically or with RTG), even slamming into the ice with high speed with intents to blast/melt through parts of it. It is not even known how thick the ice is, it could be hundreds of feet, or could be several km. That requires alot of energy to get past!

    Then comes the question of having the probe transmit data back to earth. Does a surface relay remain on the surface to beam info back to earth, while the 'hydrobot' goes under the water? if so, how does the bot communicate with the surface station? Does it keep a tether, or use sonic modem to echo sonar through the ice, or some other method? If a tether is used, it could be potentially several km long!

    Even if the probe magically makes it into the ocean, what instruments does it carry, and what measurements does it make? An underwater camera would require light, thus floodlights would be needed. Should sonar be used to map out the ocean bottom and/or the ice crust on top? All of these require power, which is a very limited resource on a space probe like this. Also, all of these require mass, which is a very limiting factor in both getting the payload into Earth and ultimately Europa orbit.

    An perhaps the most critical requirement for uch a probe is in line with Star Trek's Prime Directive. Scientists want to make very sure they don't do anything to contaminate or disturb any native biosphere Europa has. Thus, RTG's are questionable. Even drilling through the ice can be a problem.

    Scientists everywhere would love to send such a probe, however its plan of attack at Europa must be very meticuously (sp) thought out, because of the cost/time required just to get such a payload to Europa. There are plans for a preliminary Europa explorer, to provide much more detail than Galileo has. Most importantly, estimates of the surface ice thickness, to see if an ice penetrator is even possible.

    For more information, check out the following URL which has a wealth of Europa-related web sites. [klx.com]

  • Although there may be liquid oceans on Europa, it is a good possibility that they are not made of water. As you know, water freezes at a relatively high temperature, and vaporizes at a relatively cool temperature. "Relative" to temperatures normally found on other planets, that is.
  • As for Asimov, I really liked the way he chose to integrate the Robot novels with the Empire/Foundation series ("The Robots of Dawn" and "Robots and Empire" were great), although you're right that I wasn't totally thrilled with Foundation's Edge / F&E. But the Hari Seldon books (Prelude and Forward) were GREAT, probably his best real novels. Wish he was still around though...
  • I'd like giant fish. Giant whale-like fish. That would be ultra-cool. Of course bacteria would be cool. In fact damn cool, but nothing gets the heart racing like a macroscopic multicellular organism. Even something like a guppie. They'd HAVE to bring one back. If they did, and they could get it to live here, you know people would be rushing to Europa to bring Buffy and Tad Europan Guppies. It could actually be a new gold gold rush and herald in mythical interplanetary travel.
  • Read the book version of 2001. That part of the movie works better in print. Both because the special effects of the time were not up to the task of hyperspace travel, and because having that segment could have used a narrator explaining things. Beyond our comprehension as they may be.

    Of course, the movie version shows dancing spaceships better.

  • Why oh why can we not travel faster than the speed of light? I want my warp speed!!!

    Seriously, NASA (and other space agencies around the world facing serious budget restraints) are going to have to do some fancy dancing to keep "us" (in the lower common denomenator type sense) interested in their exploration projects. I notice that it won't be 7 or 8 years before the laser spectrometer can partially confirms this theory (and then probably another 7 or 8 years before the next craft to "study it further" could conceivably arrive).

    15 years. That's a long time to people becoming used to psuedo-instant gratification. The MTV generation can't keep focused on more than one thing for more than 10 seconds apparently (at least, that's what I assume based on those nauseating videos I happen see, anyone else feel seasick watching these music videos now?).

    Hopefully, a proliferation of stories like this will generate and expand peoples interest in innerspace exploration and travel. NASA's servers (and the other space agencies around the world of course, let's not be USA-centric here) have an incredible amount of cool info. Maybe someday American's will elect representatives who think agencies like NASA are more important than making sure everyone can have their own personal semi-automatic rifle and direct the extra funding and resources accordingly.

    Just a couple thoughts, probably offtopic, so moderate accordingly.

    --
  • I agree in principle that extraterrestrial life might take very different forms than it does here on earth. However, I think it's probably a safe bet that it requires some sort of relatively complex molecules. Strong radiation like you find in Jupiter's magnetosphere has a tendency to dissociate even fairly robust molecules. Consequently, such environments are likely to be unfriendly to most forms of life.


    -r

  • WE already know that the surface of Europa is covered in (frozen)water. We can also be pretty sure that the water covering the moon was liquid at one time in the past. Why is it so hard to believe that it might be liquid now? Sure, it may not be liquid anymore, but, on the other hand, it may be. I suppose we'll just have to wait and find out.
    You have a good point about the question of how planets form. Why did Europa get all the water anyway? Or, did the other moons get plenty of water as well, but it has since boiled off into space? Interesting questions.
  • You've posted only 3 comments on /., and all 3 are either trolls or flamebait. Such dedication is impressive.

    Daniel

  • timing! (Score:1)

    by mcc ( 14761 )
    has anyone else been thinking that it could have been timed better? i mean, right now it's getting there in 2007, but what if they had timed it so it left three years later and arrived in 2010? would that be f****n freaky or WHAT? too bad jupiter is a moving target and you don't get many choices as to when you launch the satelite.. oh well -_-
  • you just didn't read it closely enough. here, i'll quote the relevant sections for you:

    "The enigmatic, unknown extraterrestial forces which have apparently been cultivating sentient life throughout the galaxy for aeons abruptly reversed their stance on the Europa project yesterday and embraced the Open Source philosophy.

    Formerly Europa had been totally propeitary, and the only statement released by the extraterrestrial forces was "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE." However the extraterrestrials are now planning to release under the GNU public liscence the full genomes of all life that develops on Europa, and are inviting other sentient beings to help in the creation.

    There is no word yet as to whether they may be considering open-sourcing the DNA sequences used by life on earth. In the absense of publicly available source, some humans have turned to attempting to reverse-engineer the DNA sequences under the banner "WINE^H^H^H^HThe Human Genome Project".

    The extraterrestrial announcement may help to explain the incident last month in which Linus Tourevalds, RMS, and several other experienced programmers were inexplicably turned into radiation-based life forms by a large black monolith which mysteriously appeared at LinuxExpo in what appears to have been some kind of recruitment drive.

    [snip]

    Since the life on europa is still carbon-based, it is believed that porting of the Linux kernel will be relatively easy. Judging from a strange and slightly cryptic message (apparently from Linus) that mysteriously flashed across all of slashdot.org's monitors shortly after the extraterrestrial announcement as some strange force briefly seized control of all the computers in the building, work is preceeding very well; while right now they are concentrating on a port of GCC, it is possible there may be penguins on Europa as early as next year.

    God could not be reached for comment."

    -mcc-baka
    who is even more tired than you
  • Finnaly a place where I can raise my race of mutant whales with monkey tales attached to there left nipples! Damn PETA won't let me get away with any thing on Earth!


    Who's the Boss? Tony Danza, of course!
  • Having read them all several times (too much time on my hands? never!) i have to say that I felt they fit together awefully well...
    Also, he seems to be talking about something slightly different. While the Chinese ship Tsien did make the first landing on Europa in 2010, another team (including Chris Floyd) was hyjacked into landing on Europa in 2061. They threw the body of the hyjacker (dead) into the ocean, and a large fish like creature leaped out of the water, and ate the body. (subsequently dieing on account of the radically different biology). Anyways, the crew sent to rescue that team (which included Heywood Floyd) was made up primarilly of Russians, as I recall. (Having just completed a landing on Halley's comet)
    Well, i've had my fun for the evening! :)

  • I have just two things to add to this:

    • Common bacteria have been knwo to survive some incredibly exteme environments. During the Apollo program, a technician with a cold sneezed near the camera that went up on Apollo 11. During a later Apollo mission, the camera was retreived and the bacteria were still alive, surviving almost 3 years on the moon's surface.
    • There is a strain of bacteria here on earth, deinococcus radiodurans [ncgr.org] that is known to be able to survive megarad doses of ionizing radiation because it can repair it's own DNA.
  • That has always been the problem with the space science programs. People do not see an immediate benifit to going into space. There is no oil to drill for, no gold to mine, no resources to rape, no buck to be made. Or at least they think so. Pure science and abstract knowledge is all that is left, and that never sells very well to the unwashed masses.

    I'm not sure I agree. There's a lot of advantages to doing things in space, (think of how much you could overclock you celeron if it ran in the 0.3 kelvins (is that right?) environment of empty space. :)

    I think within a half a century or so, populations will be such that it will become more popular to look for other places to expand. China went through a hard time curbing their growth rate, but it's working. India, unfortunately, is going to be the site of a number of enormous human disasters for the next couple generations. So many people crowded like that are just too vulnerable to disaster.

    Any, this is seriously offtopic now. :)
    --

  • ahh, attack my point purely based on the fact i can't spell, and my grammar is incredibly informal unless it has to be formal. i've yet to see a challenge to my logic that is a. founded in any point that i make, b. not an attack on my religion or c. based in logic what so ever. HOW THE HELL DOES POOR SPELLING MAKE MY POINT INVALID? i would love to get into a good religious debate (i was a debator for 4 years, i love a good debate) email me if you to continue this, but not if you plan on just attacking my spelling as it seems to be the trend here. for supposably intelligent people many of you seem, ignorent (there is a difference between ignorance and stupidity), intolerent, and close minded people. and where the did the flat earth comment come from after i said i tend to belive the scientific literature, including evolution. what is with these personal attacks, why not attack my points?
  • > Maybe someday American's will elect
    > representatives who think agencies like NASA are
    > more important than making sure everyone can
    > have their own personal semi-automatic rifle and
    > direct the extra funding and resources
    > accordingly.

    The government spends more money trying to make people *NOT* own firearms than they do protecting that fundamental tenet of the Constitution.

    Now maybe if the government didn't have to spend millions of dollars looking into the abuses of power in the Executive branch, we could throw a couple tens of millions over at NASA. Not a lot, but every bit would help, eh?

    Of course, government agencies tremendously overspend and NASA is no exception. The ballooning cost of the International Space Station is a prime example. Only the recent Deep Space projects have tried to reverse this problem.

    Personally, I think life on Europa is kind of a geewhiz kind of thing. If there's life there, great. It doesn't do much for us though. We get the "we're not alone" thing settled or maybe not.

    Wouldn't we be better off directing our resources at the crusty sphere we look at every night? You know, the moon that we abandoned twentysome years ago? It seems like the perfect stepping stone to deeper exploration. Of course, the tidal effects on the Earth of repeated lunar gravity assisted launches could be bad. Mars should be our prime target after that. Let's get the terraforming process started so if the environmental naysayers are right we have a place to go.

    Hell, let's commercialize space as much as possible. It's the only way you or I are ever going to get the chance to go. Start mining some asteroids and setup a processing plant on the moon or something. Offer tours like you get at the Hoover Dam.

    Deep space exploration is pretty cool. I'm a big fan of all the news that comes from it. But beyond the science of it, how does it help me? Not a whole lot, I'm sorry to say. Let's focus on some projects with achievable goals in the relatively near term.

    Of course, if everyone voted Libertarian, we'd have a lot more resources to make this happen.
  • I am not attacking your points because you're such a loser that I just can't resist it!

    If you go back to high school and learn how to formulate an argument that doesn't have spelling mistakes, then I might consider attacking your points in an objective manner.
  • Go get 'em, KingBob!
  • if you wanna continue this debate, backchannel me, i freely post my email. how am i a loser b/c i am trying to be involved in an intelligent conversation? at what point does an argument become invalid when there are spelling mistakes in it. the formulation of an argument is based on ideas, not spelling, granted my spelling sucks, i admit that, your points lack content, whose points are less valid? i've had numerous oppertunities to attack you on logic such as bad spelling=invalid argument but i kept it away from that b/c it gets us no where so there is no point to these personal attacks. if you want to continue this email me.
  • So you're saying that simply because nature is so intricate that it all couldn't happen? The fact that there are squillions of stars in the Universe is enough evidence for me to accept that they form naturally.

    There's no need to bring an imaginary ethereal being into the discussion to justify that which simpletons have difficulty understanding!

    All to often religious people fall back on the same old argument: "God designed it that way" - well I've yet to see any of your gods, and until such time that I do, we can only assume these are natural occurrences.

    No one can prove the existence of any god. Stars are there and form naturally until otherwise proven - so deal with it!
  • See my post to your original argument - I'll just have to overlook your poor spelling/grammar and deal with your original claims.

    How can you claim to be involved in an intelligent discussion when a primary-school child could spell better than you?

    Haven't you heard of spell checkers?
  • 1. email me if you want to continue this
    2. intelligence and spelling are not the same
    3. if i can't spell a word i try to spell it phonetically (i had to look that one up) and a person of average intelligence SHOULD be able to decipher what i'm saying my sounding it out, you know that skill you learned in grade school.
    4. please make a substantial argument, not a whine about my style... you're lucky that this is typed instead written, then you might have a point about readability do to my terrible handwriting and tendency to use obscure abbreviations.

    waiting patiently for an email


    p.s. i hope your happy with my spelling this time
  • oops replace by with by between saying and sounding in point 3

    sorry
  • It's between 36 and 53 light minutes from Earth to Jupiter, depending on the time of year. I'm basing this on my memory of Jupiter's year being 12 Earth years which puts Jupiter at about 5.24 AUs (Earth orbits) from the sun ( y2/y1 = (d2/d1)^1.5). 10 light minutes a about 1.2 AUs; I'm not sure if that will get you from Jupiter to the asteroid belt and probably not Mars, even on a good day (can somebody give me Mars' and the asteroid belt's obital distances or periods?).
  • go ahead and disprove it, neither side can prove their side or disprove the other, i've seen enough to believe in God.

    btw your point doesn't answer my point, i said that the tolerances for start to be able to exist are tiny, go outside them and they couldn't exist in the form they are now. if you could show wm "squillions" of universes with different physical constants and life, that would be a point.

    i never said they don't form naturally. if God set everything up right than stars, life everything would take care itself. i believe once you get past the setting up phase than everything can formm "naturally" its the setting up phase i have trouble believing occured without an outside influence

  • Seas? (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Didn't we already hypothesize that there are oceans on Europa? With a frozen crust?

  • Woohoo! (Score:3)

    by rde ( 17364 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:42AM (#1675982)
    This is good, good, good news.
    The discovery of life on mars would be great, but it's possible (nay, probable) that this life would have the same origin as life on Earth.
    Europa, however, is way to far away for this to be probable. It's still finitely possible, but that's all.
    And, as we all know, life probably needs water. Life as we know it certainly does.
    If there is water on Europa, there may be life. If there's life on Europa, as far as I'm concerned it's ubiquitous.
  • . . .So 98 foot tides would be quite possible.
    But what, then, is holding up the ice shell ?? Unless they're claiming that the shell moves, at least for the most part, as a unit, and only excessive stresses would cause fractures, etc...
    Still, it'd be nice to put a probe in long-term orbit around Europa....
  • you'll all have to excuse me, but it's been 7 or 8 years since I read 2010...

    remember when the rescue crew (were they russians?) heading for the Discovery ended up on Europa? didn't they discover that Europa's icy surface covered a liquid ocean? and didn't somethign come out of the ocean and eat their spaceship or something? (told you it's been a while.)

    sort of interesting that Clarke forshadowed this so accurately, if I'm remembering right. If memory serves me, there's also a big white area with a black dot in the millde on the moon where dave bowman found the third monolith. (I believe I read that in some interview with Clarke or something.)

    anyway, all very interesting.

  • Ahem (Clarke) (Score:3)

    by HP LoveJet ( 8592 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:43AM (#1675985)
    '"It sure would be exciting if we could go into that ocean if the ocean exists," says Dr. Kargel. "Who knows what we would find there? Maybe an organism."'

    ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA.

    ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

  • Hmmm... (Score:3)

    by Rabbins ( 70965 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:46AM (#1675986)
    In the article, it states that the first life requires photosynthesis... which would not be able to penetrate more than 15 meters of the frozen crust.

    On Earth, isn't it now believed that the first life was formed from "hot beds" on the ocean floors. Where magma broker through the Earth's crust and warmed the water. Obviously, absolutely no rays from the sun are able to penetrate miles down to the bottom of the ocean either.

    How are they implying that this could not happen on Europa?
  • Since Europa is a satellite of jupiter, think about the tides that must be occuring with a giant of that size nearby. Also, the tides would probably affected by the other moons as well. crazy.

    I'm still skeptical though, of the existance of the ocean itself. But its implications on how planets form would be very interesting, in terms of the heavy body and water distribution from the accretion disk that formed jupiter and its moons.


    -- Moondog
  • Yes. The concept of liquid water underneath Europan ice is not new. What's new in the article is the mention of tides. Jupiter's gravity makes the Bay of Fundy seem like small beans, tidally. Tidal forces will tend to make the oceans swell up and down underneath the ice. If the ice is thin enough it might crack and heave (as evidenced by the cracks on Europa).
    Laser measurement is a good way to measure the altitude of the ice very precisely, to see just how much it moves up and down.

  • Wow. (Score:3)

    by grappler ( 14976 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:45AM (#1675989) Homepage
    Sounds like something right out or Arthur C Clarke's 2010 and 2061. Basically he wrote about Europa having all the ingredients for life (specifically plenty of water) except for a nearby heat source (which is why the monolith turned Jupiter into a star). He wrote about some life forming at the bottom of this ocean next to sources of geothermal heat.

    Cool.

  • Re:Seas? (Score:1)

    by rde ( 17364 )
    There was always the possibility, but no-one knew for sure that the water on europa was liquid. Tidal forces, scientists thought, would probably generate heat, but no-one knew for sure.

  • This is far from new (Score:4)

    by konstant ( 63560 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @06:49AM (#1675992)
    Liquid deposits beneath the surface of Europa have been posited for a considerable number of years. Easily since I was in middle school. The Christian Science Monitor is not exactly breaking scientific ground here.

    Here is a link [sji.org] to a 1996 conference on this subject.

    A similar story is running in Scientific American. You can see the table of contents for this month's issue here [sciam.com].

    Points to Remember:
    *it may not be water. Long-chain hydrocarbons have also been proposed. It could be from mineral oils to salt water, really.
    *the only "new news" here is the theory proposed by these guys from the U. of Arizona that the cracks are consistent with tidal patterns. This is cool, but it is only confirming evidence for what people believed in the first place.
    *Europa has strong volcanic activity, similar to its lava-covered sibling Io. This is due to Jupiter's insane gravitational pull. But Europa is colder than Io, because it's further out and has no atmosphere, so it has an icy crust. The idea is that (if it really is H20 ice) the volcanic activity has melted some of the ice. But, again, lots of stuff besides water freezes. All we know is that spectrogr aphically [msnbc.com] there is some kind of salt there.

    I hope it does prove to be water, but let's not get carried away just yet.


    -konstant
  • This theory has been knocking around for a while. In fact, this is also the cover story of the current editaion of Scientific American [sciam.com] (I haven't read it yet, it's on my living room coffee table).

    I remember reading somewhere that there are plans to send a probe of some sort out to Europa and pierce the icy crust to see if there be any beasties beneath.

    Good hunting to 'em.

  • I recently saw a Discovery Channel special on robots, and there was a segment about an experimental probe that is being worked on that would be dropped on Europa, bore through the ice, and, using the lander as a relay, this underwater probe would beam back LIVE SHOTS (as live as you can get with a 10 light-minute distance between here and Europa, anyway) from beneath Europa's ice crust.

    Then there's the theory that life on Earth (and possibly Europa) developed first at geothermal vents deep in the Oceans... It would be so cool if we discoverd life there while Clarke is still alive. I'm sure he's hoping too.

    -t
  • It's been a while for me too (about 7 years) but dave bowman found the third monolith on a moon orbiting saturn. The black dot was, of course, a huge monolith that took him through some kind of wormhole.

    The story was changed for the movie, in which the third monolith was orbiting Jupiter. Probably to include Life on Europa in the next story. The books written after that followed the movie's storyline.
  • The current issue of Scientific American [sciam.com] had a long article on this, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be an online version. By the time you read this, maybe they will have updated the online version of the current issue [sciam.com].

    The article goes into considerable detail about the effects of torsion from Jupiter and the other moons on Europa and how this generates tidal heat that can keep the sea liquid. The icy "shell" seems to rotate faster than the moon itself, with the sea acting as a kind of bearing. The most interesting evidence for me came from analysis of the Galileo probe's telemetry: subtle perturbations in its radio signal as it moves through its orbit suggests various properties of Europa's gravitational field, which in turn reveals the density at various levels, which ultimately is being used to estimate the thickness of the probable Europan sea, etc. All from a little distortion in the telemetry. Not bad.

    The article is very good, and worth going by a news stand or library to look over if you get a chance.


  • Re:Liquid != Water (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    However, if you recall Chemistry class, very few substances have the ability to have the solid float on top of the liquid. If it is true that there really are tidal waves under the solid (I'll call it ice for the sake of argument), that would mean the ice has to be able to float on top of the liquid, and that would mean there's a good possibility that it is water.
  • http://www.pufori.org/news/nws0203981.htm

    http://www.scifiweb.com/frames/main.html

    http://www.sddt.com/files/librarywire/98/02/02/i ndex.html

    ...before you go making uninformed sweeping statements like that!
  • I clicked on this article and then wondered why there was nothing about Linux then I realized..

    It's not "Linux Oceans on Europa" rather:

    LIQIUD Oceans on Europa.

    Time for a new monitor.
  • You'd still get tides, because Europa does not orbit in a perfect circle around Jupiter. (As a matter of fact, nothing does.) In theory, if you had a moon tidally locked on a planet AND orbiting in a perfect circle, AND with no other large celestial objects, then you'd still have tides, but they'd be constant - they'd just pull the satellite and the planet slightly out of round, very slightly egg shaped, with the points of the eggs facing each other.

    Since Europa is not in a perfectly circular orbit, and since Jupiter has 3 other "tidally significant" moons (i.e. big enough to matter on a macroscopic scale) you could get some killer tides. In fact, with Jupiter, the Sun, and Ganymede, Callisto, and Io all creating separate tidal patterns, you'd have five different high tides and ebb tides each day - day being the same as an orbit, of course, since we're locked - and those tides would all reinforce and cancel eachother out. 96 foot waves would probably require all five tides in sync - but that would happen several times a year, I think.

    My head hurts...

  • Ganymede is believed to have water ice, and there is some indication that Callisto does, too. The difference is that Callisto and Ganymede are much rougher planets, so you don't have such a large mass of ice to retain heat. It's also possible Europa got its water from a collision with a massive comet billions of years ago. Or five hundred years ago. We'd never know...

  • There are presently plans for a Europa Orbiter to launch in 2003, and arrive at Europa in 2007. Details at the JPL site [nasa.gov].

    The mission plans to determine the thickness of Europa's Ice and determine the existence of water. There's also a link on that page about the mission being a precursor to "hydrobots", underwater submaries that would melt their way through the Europan ice to explore underneath... Very Cool.

  • Well, if there is inded water on Europa, now all we need to do is bring it over here and set up a really big vacuum to give us filtered "Europa-Water-In-A-Bottle" and sell it to nations that need water. There ya go. But seriously, if there is indeed water on Europa, we're just one step closer to finding something out in that big nothing they call "Space". G4
  • "as live as you can get with a 10 light-minute distance between here and Europa, anyway"

    Ok So what planet are you posting from? :)




  • I am a Christian Scientist, and as such I have learned tolerance for those with different beliefs, but some of the posts on this topic truely sadden me. You may not agree with our religious beliefs, but there's no need to insult the Christian Science faith. It, to me, shows a huge lack of maturity.
  • No, you're right, the CSM is affiliated with the famed crank Christian Science movement. Amazingly, however, they keep the newspaper clean of their nonsense, and surprisingly secular. Good news source, actually. Strange but true.
  • Hey, your logic is of the same quality as your writing! That's so useful!
    Anyway, using your logic, I could walk about the Grand Canyon, marvel at the many awe-inspiring vistas presented, and think, "There must be a Designer! The action of water on rock could never have produced this beauty!"
    Oh, and it wouldn't matter if the entire U.S. and the rest of the world believed that the Christian God created the Universe; that doesn't make it true.
  • no, thats not what i'm saying. if you found a watch on a beach would you assume that it came about naturaly. we are more complex than said watch, there was a good article in a magazine called Analog a few years ago that pointed out that the tolerances for even star production are incredibly tight. i've researched this type of thing have you. i find absolutly no contridiction between what the scientific community believes to be the have happened and the teachings of the bible. tehy aren't there, look at the order of creation in genisis, do you think that 6000 years ago people would have had the same order for the creation of the universe and evolution of life as the current theories go? i agree thought truth by democracy is horrible. all i have to say is believe what you like but research first, don't be afraid to learning something new and don't discount ideas just b/c they come from a source that you don't share the same beliefs, evaluater them on a case by case basis, other wise you will end up missing many insightful viewpoints. oh yeah i you misunderstand my logic, you relise Zeno used perfectly sound logic to prove motion doesn't exist, you have to be careful how you apply logic, existince does not mean design, the incredible odds against us being here point that way
  • > ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS. EXCEPT EUROPA.
    > ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

    Yeah, 'they' wanted to protect the incipient life forms so they could turn Jupiter into a star, melt Europa, destroy its ecology, and thoroughly kill the life forms they were so vigorously protecting (and probably most of the life forms on dear old boring Earth, too).

    What a lame movie. But the advice is probably good: if there is life there, then we shouldn't go. Or even send a lander.

  • I think he was refuring to the book. The movie sucked.(2010 of course not 2001.)

    If he was refuring to the Movie there was an extra line in the message. In the book it's made clear that the Monoliths had determined that the more intelligent forms of life on Europa could stand the warmer climet. And living on land was essantual to thier development.

  • The 'Christian Science Monitor' ??? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...And the article talks about te possibility of life evolving on Europa?! I thoght they believed evolution was a myth.
  • Well, the ice shell would not always have a source of light, or more importantly, a source of heat energy... While it is facing Jupiter, there is be some elecrtomagnetic intereference with the huge planet that will cause some heat to be released on Europa's surface... And we all know that it is warmer during the day than at night. So, it may be possible that when Europa is facing the sun and is close enough to Jupiter, parts of its surface may heat up enough so that a liquid sea underneath the crust could break through, if even just a little bit. And on a very large moon covered completely with water, 98 feet is just a little bit :)
    --
    Matt Singerman
  • This 'novel explanation' for those flexi isn't new. People have theorized for some time now that Europa has a liquid ocean underneath all that ice.

    I can't cite anything off of the top of my head, but has anyone else read Clarke's 2069? The Europan ocean features prominently in that story.

    Ok, I did a quick search on altavista. Here's what I came up with. I'm sure that you can find more if you're curious.

    In re-reading the article, I see that the announcement is of a theory describing the mechanism which creates the patterns in the ice, not that Europa might have a liquid ocean, as the title of the slashdot post implied.

    --
    A host is a host from coast to coast...
  • http://www.sciam.com/ [sciam.com]

    Unfortunately, you can't read current articles on-line. Subscribe! It's a great mag.

    One of the interesting bits in the article was that the Russian Vostok [wunderground.com] [2 [slashdot.org]] outpost in Antartica [flex.net] is right on top of an under-the-ice lake [nasa.gov], al-la Europa. They are going to field-test the Europa explorer equipment on it -- satellites and robots. Two robots are proposed; a "cryobot: and "hydrobot". The cryobot would look at the ice and melt a hole down into the water. The hydrobot would look at the water.

    There's also an article at Nasa [nasa.gov] about life on Europa.
  • The same tidal forces that slosh a liquid ocean inside Europa are strong enough to keep tiny Io volcanically active.

    True, Io is much nearer to Jupiter (and thus subject to a more severe gravity gradient), you have to balace that out against Io's tiny size. A small planet has a much greater ratio of surface-area-to volume. Io loses heat very rapidly compared to its bigger neighbors. Even so, the tidal forces are enough to melt rock and create volcanoes.

    To determine if Europa might have hot springs/ volcanoes/black smokers/etc, you'd need to figger out how much energy Europa absorbs in the form of tidal forces and balance it against how much energy it takes to keep an ocean of unkown volume liquid. It's a lot of unknowns. A probe in orbit around Europa would truly kick ass.
  • The human in him is dying in order for the star child to be born. You could read it in all sorts of symbolic, metaphorical ways -- it's an incubation period, a gestation period, a man's death, a man's rebirth, the end of humanity, the rebirth of humanity, the birth of something far, far beyond humanity, finding religion, losing religion. That's what makes it such an amazing movie -- there is no one answer, only what you make of it, what makes sense to you.


  • Here's a few more europa links, for those who need something to do until quitting time on a friday afternoon.
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ice_fire/europ ao.htm [nasa.gov]
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/s tatus970718.html [nasa.gov]
    http://cass.jsc.nasa.gov/researc h/outerp/euro.html [nasa.gov]
    http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galileo/ [nasa.gov]
  • I could be a bit off on this, but if memory serves, one of Sagan's more recent origin of life on earth theories said that primitive earth was a frozen ball, much like Europa seems to be now, covered with a skin of water ice, and that organic elements may have been introduced my colliding asteroids, or at least the primitive ocean would have benifited from the heat and chemicals of early impacts.

    it goes on to say that by keeping the ocean liquid underneath with hydrothermal activity in combination with asteroid impacts, this could have lead to an abiogenic formation of life.

    and here we see Europa with an ocean covered by a water ice crust (so it is water underneath, if at all) heated by hydrothermal vent activity, and it has undoubtedly dealt with asteroid impacts...hrmmmm....
  • According to this [cnn.com] article at CNN, Scientists think they have liquid seas on Titan [seds.org], a moon of Saturn. Not below ice like Europa, but above the surface. They hypothesize that the liquid are hydrocarbons.
    This [nasa.gov] was also released 2 years ago (April 9, 1997)
  • I know it might be hard to push anything resembling facts past that forcefield of bigotry you have up, but I'll try anyway....

    "Christian" != "religious fanatic" for all values of "Christian." Judging people based on short, one-word labels is called 'prejudice.' It's ugly. If the name of the group were "Religious Fanatic Scientists," your point would make sense.

    And, no, I'm no Christian either. But having an unthinking knee-jerk namecalling reaction to religion makes one just as much a mindless zombie as blindly following religious dogma does.

    Pot and kettle, my friend....

    --
  • The moon is Tethys, and yes, it is all black with an oval white patch. When the images first came in at JPL, I'm told (by someone who was there) there was a stunned silence, and one of the mission heads faxed the image to Clarke, claiming they'd kill him if there was a black dot in the center of the image.

    Fortunately, (?) there wasn't. We don't think. Hard to say. That's probably just a spot on the image.

    Right?

  • Even if what you say is true (see other reply deeper in this thread regarding the validity of these claims), deciding the value of art based on the character of the artist is a completely invalid mode of thinking.

    Clarke's works are, for the most part, very impressive pieces of futurism, and will continue to be, even if it's discovered that he's a pedophile crack addict Nazi war criminal.
    --
  • Why oh why can we not travel faster than the speed of light? I want my warp speed!!!

    Far as I know, Einstein's theories are still just that -- theories. You have to actually give it (FTL travel) a go to know for sure. But what do I know...

    Seriously, NASA are going to have to do some fancy dancing to keep [the common man] interested in their exploration projects.

    That has always been the problem with the space science programs. People do not see an immediate benifit to going into space. There is no oil to drill for, no gold to mine, no resources to rape, no buck to be made. Or at least they think so. Pure science and abstract knowledge is all that is left, and that never sells very well to the unwashed masses.

    This brief monologue from Babylon 5 is one of the best arguments I've heard for space exploration. The commander in charge of a large space station has just been asked if space exploration is a mistake...

    No. We have to stay here and there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe... and Lao-Tzu... and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes... and all of this... all of this was for nothing -- unless we go to the stars.

  • Not all Christians are fundamentalist boneheads whose faith is threatened by scientific observations.
    I know that the Roman Catholic Church has no problem with evolution. A lot of the mellower Protestant denominations don't get ruffled about it.
    I don't know how Christian Scientists feel about evolution. I do know their 'zine is highly respected for being impartial on international matters.

  • Well sure (Score:4)

    by cpt kangarooski ( 3773 ) on Friday September 17, 1999 @11:41AM (#1676038) Homepage
    Everyone knows there's life on Europa. Those lines on the surface are from ice skating. I haven't seen a picture of it yet that didn't have a Figure-Zorb in it somewhere. I just hope that when they do send a probe they don't accidently have it arrive during the off-season, when everyone's over at South Molten Lead Beach on Venus.
  • See the Scientific American article. (Not online or I'd give an URL.) Maybe it's just me, but I'd call a surface temperature of around 50 kelvin pretty damn cold. Europa has internal heat, but have no illusions, the surface is *cold*.

    The Europan oceans would be getting their heat not from what the Sun or Jupiter radiates, but from the immense gravitational forces from Jupiter and the Jovian moons. The moons may be warm internally, but *not* at the surface.


  • Christian Science news reporting is one of the best sources of news around. As a trained theologian, I have a VERY hard time with their theology, but their news services have proven themselves to be top notch for years. Very often you will find rather major events and stories that are only being reported by the CS group for the simple reason that they aren't provocative enough to sell in the mainstream press.
  • Heat could (and may well) be generated by the tidal flexing of the planet. It seems like there definately WAS water. I just hope there still IS. I think there is. The larger impact craters that are still visible have faded/filled in to a tremendous degree. What would be cool is if we could hurl a big artificial meteorite at its surface and then watch to see if the damage 'heals' itself by filling in from underneath and icing over. That wouldn't be very nice, of course, if there really *is* life in there!

  • If there is a planetary ocean, then the cracks are what are called "leads"; Areas of either open water or thin ice between large ice sheets. These are the places where there would be enough light for some photosynthesis to occur. The question I have is; "What is the radiation environment at or near the surface of Europa's leads?"

    Jupiter has a simply huge magnetic field that traps cosmic rays and energetic solar wind particles for very long periods of time. This is bad enough that our space hardware has an difficult time with it, and I have heard the speculation that human beings could never visit the region of Jupiter without taking a lethal dose.

    Could life evolve or take root (transported from Earth on tektites) in the leads of Europa given the extant conditions?
  • I noticed a lot of people addressing the fact that Europa was mentioned in the 2001 series.. No one has really pointed out yet though that in the final book of that series, 3001 - its explained that once Jupiter becomes a sun as well, the ice on the surface melts, allowing for the creatures underneath to become amphibious(sp?) and start evolving.


    Not really to relevant, but 3001 is an excellent book and ties up a lot of the loose ends in the series quite nicely.

  • I dunno. When they revived Poole, I just started to lose it. And that was very early on. The whole virus thing was kinda strange too.

    His books of late have been rather poor (3001 and the Rama series comes to mind). Disappointing, as his earlier works were *excellent*.

    Unfortuntely, the same was starting to happen to Asimov before his death (see Foundation's Edge and Foundataion & Earth). They weren't *bad* but definately not up to par with his earlier works.
  • How bout 1 for each planet....or 2 if ya wanna get real wacky.......then have one way way way out between Pluto and that other thing people like to call planet 'x'-windows.

    We could use the excuses of 'education' and early warning system for 'meteors' 'rogue aliens' 'more extensive scientific study'.

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