9 ms·
The mission to discover if Jupiter’s moons support life
- ShredKazoo 4y agoIt's incredibly cold in the outer solar system right? So why is it that there is liquid water in these moons? Is it some sort of geothermal heating? What's the most complex life which could conceivably exist in such a cold environment? Presumably there's very little sunlight penetrating through the ice to the liquid ocean.
- sanxiyn 4y agoFrom Earth's hydrothermal vents, we know sunlight isn't necessary for life although energy is.
- Mistletoe 4y agoWe don’t know if life started in the light though and then migrated to the vents and adapted. My memory of it is that this is an unanswered question so far.
- causality0 4y agoWe know that life is older than photosynthesis. I'm not aware of another light-dependent metabolic process that could predate chemosynthesis.
- dcminter 4y agoIt's definitely an open question. But in his book "The Vital Question", Nick Lane makes an interesting case that they're actually the origin of all life: https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-the-way-it-is/ https://nick-lane.net/books/the-vital-question-why-is-life-t...
- peter303 4y agoIts a good hypothesis that life start at deep volcanic vents. Geologist Robert Hazen conducted lab experiments showing that all steps of the metabolic citric cycle occur in this environment without needing catalytic enzymes. Chemical reduction of magma provides the energy. As life developed enzymes to improve metabolism, it could migrate to colder, lower pressure environments.
- akiselev 4y agoTidal heating [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating
- Aardwolf 4y agoInteresting stuff! Made me find that even rogue planets (free floating without orbiting any star) might theoretically be warm enough to support oceans and life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet#Warmth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet#Warmth
- PaulHoule 4y agoCould be either tidal or geothermal. It’s been conjectured that even Pluto could have liquid water inside. The point is that generic small outer solar system bodies have liquid water, whereas the generic inner solar system body doesn’t. If you think liquid water is the most important requirement for life then most of the habitat in the universe is outside the frost line. It’s totally plausible that simple life could form around geothermal vents on such a moon but harder to believe you could support a complex ecosystem enough to evolve intelligent life without sunlight. At the high pressures in such an underground ocean I wouldn’t expect our proteins to work, you can kill bacteria with very high pressure. I suspect that proteins that evolved in that environment could work just fine. I can picture a creature from that kind of world drilling up to the surface somehow, but the low pressure would be deadly and in a system like Jupiter where Io ‘breeds’ radiation (vapor from volcanos gets ionized, gets accelerated, ionizes more vapor) the surface could be a dangerous place. Such a creature though might have a leg up on starfaring as getting into orbit might be easier (never mind building a beanstalk) and rather than being tempted by boring destinations like Mars (smaller planet, smaller civilization) they might go straight to cutting up wet/carbonaceous asteroids to build large (100-1000x more habitable area than Earth) habitats and if they developed D-D fusion they might be quicker to see the advantages of a comet-hopping lifestyle.
- lumost 4y agoOne of the Main limiters with underwater intelligent life would be industrialization. How are you going to use a steam engine underwater? What do you burn to heat it? Given that geothermal vents would be the source of life for such a species - capping them for machinery would also be unwise.
- wkat4242 4y agoIt's also awash with radiation from Jupiter. If there's life, it won't be as we know it :)
- zirgs 4y agoWater is really good at radiation shielding.
- jvanderbot 4y agoI've heard that if you swim into a nuclear reactor spent fuel containment pool, you will actually measure the least radiation somewhere in the middle of the pool, thanks to shielding from the universe.
- dan_hawkins 4y agoSpent Fuel Pool https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
- jvanderbot 4y agoNice, thank you!
- revicon 4y agoThe last lines are the best... But just to be sure, I got in touch with a friend of mine who works at a research reactor, and asked him what he thought would happen to you if you tried to swim in their radiation containment pool. “In our reactor?” He thought about it for a moment. “You’d die pretty quickly, before reaching the water, from gunshot wounds.”
- wkat4242 4y agoI know someone who worked at a medical isotope reactor and there were no guns there, at least not in the reactor area. Security tends to be much much further outside ;) After all, remember some things in a reactor don't react well to bulletsch.
- bvoq 4y agoVery cool! Does anyone know why we don't use Juice tools to also observe IO and the other moons of Jupiter in more detail/orbit. Is it fuel constraints only?
- localplume 4y ago[dead]
- c-linkage 4y ago[flagged]
- justinzollars 4y agoWhat's wrong with EUROPA?
- q845712 4y agoi think those of us with the [mis?]fortune to have watched the movie "2010" have this iconic phrase perpetually ready. To be honest I barely remember the movie, but that one line really sticks somehow. The gist of it is that whatever power is associated with the mysterious monoliths is starting life on Europa, so the humans shouldn't mess with that "world".
- blame-troi 4y agoIn spite of its flaws, I still enjoy watching 2010. I had the good fortune to see it in theater with many Sci fi friends.
- danjoredd 4y agoIts a reference to 2010 which is the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. IDK how to spoiler tag in HN, but be warned...spoilers for the first two Odyssey books/possibly both movies below. Keep in mind this is off of memory and I have not read them in many years, so I might be wrong on some points. I have also not seen the movie, so IDK if there are any significant differences between the movie and the book. In 2001, David Bowman transforms into a starchild. The monoliths that created man chose him to evolve. A starchild's responsibility is to foster life throughout the universe. David Bowman discovered life on Europa, and decided that this would be the population he would evolve. However, he knew how humanity tends to exploit those below them, so any time a human satellite or spaceship got too close it would mysteriously go wrong. Blow up, go missing, etc. This was because David Bowman was protecting his population from humanity by preventing humans from interacting with Europa at all.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoIt takes too long to go to these places. We need some sort of thrusters with which we can reach these places in months.
- User23 4y agoThere's no getting around acceleration. Subjecting your crew to high g forces due to acceleration for months on end isn't going to be very good for them if not lethal.
- Tagbert 4y agoIt doesn’t take high acceleration. If you had a propulsion system that could do a sustained 1g acceleration a trip to Jupiter would take around 6 days, including deceleration. That is a quite reasonable transit time. There is just the small problem of finding such a propulsion system. https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-1g-get-you-there https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/840/how-fast-will-...
- kbelder 4y agoAbsolutely. I think people don't really have a gut feeling for this, but you don't need high acceleration to get anywhere in the solar system; you just need sustained acceleration. Right now, our probes accelerate for minutes and then coast for years. If you could sustain 1g acceleration for, say, weeks, it even makes interstellar travel reasonable. A day of 1g acceleration will get you up to about 850 kilometers per second... or, 73 million km per day. Thirty days of 1g acceleration gets you to 2 billion km/day. That's close to 1% of the speed of light.
- oneshtein 4y agoWe can build a fuel station on Moon, which will make pellets of fuel, then shot them in direction of a spacecraft at Moon orbit. Spacecraft can collect them, then fuel an ionic drive for constant acceleration for weeks. Moon has low gravity, no atmosphere, thus it makes it ideal for a railgun[0]. With a fuel station on Moon, it will be much cheaper to reach Mars, so it will be possible to build second fuel station at Fobos. With two fuel stations, it will be even cheaper to refuel a spacecraft for long-range missions. [0]: https://www.space.com/36442-could-moon-miners-use-railguns-to-launch-ore-into-space.html https://www.space.com/36442-could-moon-miners-use-railguns-t...
- pookha 4y agoGetting some heavy John Carpenter vibes with this Europa situation.
- danjoredd 4y agoDavid Bowman is going to be pissed
- insane_dreamer 4y ago> Every time the Galileo spacecraft drew near to Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons, readings from the magnetometer instrument indicated that something inside the moon was interfering with the mighty magnetic field generated by Jupiter. Well, they __did__ warn us to "attempt no landing there".
- mech422 4y agoHehe...thats a blast from the past :-)
- shubhamjain 4y ago> But the biggest surprise was the amount of water that the theoreticians needed to account for the signals: more than twice the amount of water found in all of Earth’s oceans. Because Europa is only a quarter of Earth’s diameter, the water must be spread around the moon in a global ocean, 25 to 95 miles deep, beneath a 10- to 15-mile-thick ice crust. What is this fixation with water to see if Planet X supports life? Antartica would have been more habitable than Sub-sharan Africa if that was the case. What about the average surface temperature (it's -125C btw)? Gravity? Can it support Atmosphere ie, does it have a magnetic field? How much the round trip time be from Earth? Does it have anything at all that can sustain a farming ecosystem? It's almost as if we just throwing darks in the dark just to find something. Maybe the conclusion is far more banal. There's nothing in the solar system, or maybe even in many light years, that will not be 100x harder to make habitable than least habitable regions of Earth itself.
- yieldcrv 4y agoThere is simply an interest in answering the question There are other parties interested in finding life in the least habitable parts of planet earth
- LatteLazy 4y agoIf there was an area in the solar system beyond earth with either sub-saharic or Antartic conditions we would look there. This is the next best thing. So we look there...
- awb 4y agoThe goal isn’t necessarily to find a second home, but to study extraterrestrial life. Right now we don’t know if alien life exists and if it does how common it is, how similar it is to life on Earth, if it formed spontaneously, etc. It would give us a second data point which we could use to calibrate our understanding of one of the greatest mysteries of our existence.
- wruza 4y agoAfaik, current life ideas are all under-ice. Magnetic fields and surface conditions don’t matter, because Jupiter’s own magnetic field is a source of acute radiation. Callisto receives 7x Earth’s dose, but other surfaces are basically unhabitable.