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Yes, I agree. My personal favorite candidate for alien life is Europa, which is real cold, real barren, and not sunny on the outside, but probably has a nice wa
by jvanderbot 4y ago
Yes, I agree. My personal favorite candidate for alien life is Europa, which is real cold, real barren, and not sunny on the outside, but probably has a nice warm salt water ocean inside with all kinds of hydrothermal vents and tidal heating.
There's probably twice as much water in Europa's ocean than there is on all of Earth.
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/jupiter-moons/europa/in-depth/ https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/jupiter-moons/europa/in-d...
I think we'll find Cthulhu down there, if we ever get around to drilling through a few km of ice to look (or learn to scan from the surface somehow).
- slashdev 4y agoProbably just some single celled life, like a batería analog. But still, that would be the biggest discovery of the century.
- jvanderbot 4y agoDiscovering life on other planets would be at least a Copernican-level shift in most sciences. I think it'd be the discovery to trump all other discoveries. I can't decide what's weirder: That it'd use similar DNA/RNA for replication, or that it wouldn't.
- slashdev 4y agoI think they would both be massive discoveries that would shake things up. If it used DNA/RNA it's almost certainly from the same tree of life as us, validating the panspermia theory. If it didn't then we'd get to see a completely novel chemistry of life, although still water based.