Astro-boffinry breakthrough: Loads of ingredients for life found on Saturn's Enceladus Tantalizing new evidence of hydrothermal vents on Enceladus and liquid water on Europa have reignited hopes that alien life may exist in our Solar System, NASA announced today. First, some quick facts: Enceladus is Saturn’s sixth largest moon – smaller than Europa and easily identifiable by a bright surface riddled with …
God created life only on Earth 6000 years ago.
Man-made globlal warming - #FakeNews
Billionares in charge at the Whitehouse creating chaos for their own personal gain - #FakeNews
Don't believe it? See which of the NASA programmes are being shut down by the orange-faced tiny-handed baboon. Those looking at climate change and life elsewhere.
In addition to 0.8 million cubic miles of Uranium and 1.2 million cubic miles of Thorium....
Earth has fission energy from the Bridgeman Effect, where metal atoms, under 50,000 atmospheres
of pressure, and the presence of Hydrogen, undergo fission. A missing source of energy.
no idea to why one would bother with hydrogen fission theories when various groups suggest the Earths core has an iron moderated fission reactor of sorts or heat derived simply from presence of heavy metals like uranium and other radioactives. For that matter, we have what seem to be mantle samples but zero core samples to have an idea of exactly what is down there. Not disputing mostly iron but what concentrations of other elements is unknown.
So NASA will probably manage to launch a probe for each planet to them sometime in the next decade
Personally I wish NASA and ESA would figure out ways to launch as secondaries on most launches with one instrument per probe on a "little and often" basis. JPL was certainly looking at this with Ariane 5 comm sat launches.
With reasonable timing they could arrive more or less simultaneously on target. If they all make it great science haul. If one or two didn't make the window not a complete loss.
Cost kills that idea.
Not monetary, the mass cost.
Every probe needs a "bus" - thuster pack, generator, heating/cooling and communications.
All that is a nearly-fixed overhead.
The individual instruments of a deep space mission weigh very little, so it's a far more effective use of a mass launch budget to stick as many instruments as is feasible onto each probe.
Not according to JPL, They have actively looked at so called micro missions
Presumably the feasibility studies found that it didn't really work out, as a Mars trip has among the lowest delta-V requirements and they didn't launch in 2007 when the payload was highest.
Secondary payloads get aborted if the main payload becomes marginal, so they have to be essentially disposable.
SpaceX rapid launch capability changes the game though.
So the Enceladus probe has discovered the ingredients that went into the famous Miller experiment of 1953: hydrogen, and hydrides of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen.
The outputs of the Miller experiment were relatively simple organic compounds, but a long way from the highly organised large molecules of protein and DNA.
The news from Enceladus is an encouraging start, but nothing to get excited about. When the metal-digesting microbes there start chewing up Cassini's equipment, that will be news, if the reports get back to us.
Actually later variants of Miller, including bubbling the gas mix through hot sand, got as far as all of the amino acids.
Magnus Pyke's "Synthetic Food" is a bonkers book on assorted efforts to find out what it takes to make all the primary food groups and keep people healthy.
If you are following the literature you will see that someone has carried out a more advanced set of experiments which have included conditions more likely to resemble those on the early Earth, and obtained RNA precursors including the bases. Now try doing that for a billion years or so.
Surface gravity of Enceladus = 0.113 m/s^2 = 1/90G. So first approximation 65 km there is roughly equivalent to a depth of 720m here pressure wise. Toss in some inverse square law and we're down under 500m depth equivalent, if my somewhat limited understanding of gravity inside the body generating it is correct.
That's damned near backyard submersible territory, so I'd say yes.
I think the bigger problem will be melting its way down through all the ice, and figuring out a way to perfectly sterilize it so it doesn't bring Earth based extremophiles along for the ride and potentially contaminate their ocean with Earth life. Or seed their ocean, depending on whether something's already living there or not...
"scientists have uncovered the best evidence yet that life could exist somewhere beyond Earth."
Since we have absolutely no a priori reason (other than some pre-scientific books that make statements without evidence) for believing the Earth is in any way an unusual planet, the best evidence for life on other planets is that it exists on this one.
Exceptionalism is still a big thing in people's minds (like, why do we measure interstellar distances in light years or parsecs, which are based on the orbital period and diameter of the Earth's orbit?). But, as I say, we have no good reason to believe we are exceptional.
exceptionalism: units of measurement. Perhaps because what else do we use ? Alternatives like using powers of ten for frequency and length have been suggested. And rapidly ignored. Who wants to redefine and rewrite the textbooks, as well as that modern sacred cow, culture (so long as it is not traditional tolerant Western)
No good reason ? You gotta to be kidding. Unusual planet in so, far, unique solar system, with very unusual star, in unusual location in not standard galaxy in very quiet galactic cluster. Only one with a prior commitment to one of the various fundamentalist materialisms would insist there is nothing unusual about Earth and life.
As for Enceladus, hydrogen and ammonia in water plumes is anomalous. This suggests either very weird ocean vents or a lot of ammonia in ice shell. On Earth, these are acidic from the sulphur derives acids in vent water. This alone suggests vent theories for biogenesis are a desperate guess. Living organisms are much more than collections of amino acids.
Simplest hypothesis is that NASA need headlines for funding as the West willingly returns to barbarism with its zero sum economics and non-stop tribal warfare.
"Unusual planet in so, far, unique solar system, with very unusual star, in unusual location in not standard galaxy in very quiet galactic cluster."
I refer you first of all to Douglas Adams's famous "Space is very big" quote.
Now I refer you to the word "Exceptionalism". You're doing precisely that by emphasising how unusual the Earth is and how its solar system is unique. Based on a sample of how many?
Until telescopes there were supposed to be 7 bodies orbiting the Earth. And then more and more kinds of space rock turned up, upsetting traditionalists. Bode's Law turned out to be just Bode's Observation. As telescopes get better it turns out there are far more small stars than anticipated. Thus the universe isn't just bigger than we can imagine, it is more complicated than we can imagine. Eddington thought a star was a pretty simple object, then it turned out that no, it wasn't. The long refusal to admit the possibility of water on Mars is an example of scientific resistance to change; the discovery of cold places on Mercury, and that Venus has tectonics, they are just different from ours, shows how our understanding of things tends to be oversimplified and based on "if it isn't like this it doesn't exist".
The tl;dr is that you are trying to generalise from a known almost infinitely tiny sample of what's out there, and that is exceptionalism, i.e. we must be special therefore anything not like us isn't.
other way round Voyna. From sample size of about 4000 which is big enough to be statistically significant. No other solar system resemble this one, so far. Most exoplanet stars are like Sol. Only 18% of G3 stars resemble Sol in element distribution. Milky Way aka home galaxy seems to be a big barred spiral. Most unusual. And don't get me started on the irrelevance of a sample size of one known planet having life. Too small for any conclusions. Further, mere forming of organic chemicals does not make life possible. It only demonstrates carbon chemistry, which is way simpler than simplest life. Water destroys RNA and DNA unless very carefully buffered, which is unlikely in a submarine vent. This raises an interesting point. if the water is heated by flexing of rock core which suggests sulphuric acid or relatives, why is there free ammonia in the jets ? Is this an indicator of a very different silicate core ?
BTW, what has size got to do with anything ? Ancient knowledge how big the universe is.
It's been one of the most fantastic adventures of mankind yet. The science , the imagery , Huygens landing , this has been a stellar bright mission and accomplishment. Congratulations to the engineering team that gave us such a great ship. Ill be sad to see it plunge , but then again , it's time to say bye bye and thanks for all it did for us. Mission accomplished. o7
Well, if non of the ingredients include a stuffed crust pepperoni pizza, there isn't in my opinion viability for me paying a visit........
Although I do like the idea of a low gravity scuba dive, I'd imagine I would be able to go deeper than 50m before getting 'narked'.... would look good on my log book.... "300m dive on Saturn's Moon, dive time 5 hours"
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