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NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa
- steve1977 3y ago“All these worlds are yours - except Europa. Attempt no landing there.” You have been warned guys… ;)
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- tunnuz 3y agoCame for this, was not disappointed.
- CuteDinosaur 3y agoWhat is this quote from?
- ikesau 3y ago2010: Odyssey Two, Arthur C. Clarke's sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey
- CuteDinosaur 3y agoSeems pretty. Will read soon.
- twoodfin 3y agoThe film version is flawed but still well-worth anyone’s time who got this deep in the thread & enjoys hard, near-future sci-fi. My theory is that 2010: The Year We Make Contact is a lot like Blade Runner, pre- the various Ridley Scott re-cuts. Drop the voiceover, tweak the ending to be less literal / sentimental, fix some of the FX matting, and you’d be left with one of the best serious SF films since 2001.
- ck2 3y agoSurprised they haven't made 2061 with modern FX and budget so they can market it as a trilogy. Must be too busy rebooting batman over and over for the 100th time I guess.
- pndy 3y agoI enjoy both; 2010 is more an action piece wrapped with this period-specific visuals, coming also with burden of the real-world Cold War. While 2001 is a cinematic masterpiece that ended times of this naive pulp-scifi with its metal pointy rockets and damsel in distress tropes. The only thing I really really don't like the paint-psychodelic visual that Kubric used instead of Clarke's "Grand Central Station of the galaxy". I really wish the remaining books would be turn into movies and so the Clarke-Baxter' A Time Odyssey series.
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- sph 3y agoHonestly, the only thing I wish to see before I die is a submarine mission to Europa or Ganymede. It would be even more mind blowing and an amazing achievement for humanity, and the search for extraterrestrial life. That, and the dragonfly-helicopter-thing on Titan. Have you ever seen the Sun set on a methane lake? It's time for a rewatch of Europa Report (2013).
- dotnet00 3y agoIt's such a shame that the lander component of Europa Clipper got cancelled.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIt did?! :(. Shame. We should be scrambling to land probes there yesterday.
- dotnet00 3y agoYep, yet another casualty of Congress's obsession with wasting money on SLS. Spending another $10B on an SLS upgrade that is still too rough of a ride for any payload is fine, but spending $1B on a lander is too much. With Europa Clipper there was also the incident that Congress tried to write into law that it had to launch on SLS. The Clipper team were leaning towards using Falcon Heavy ($90M). In the end Congress only relented because the Clipper team said they'd need another $1B in funding (in addition to the $2B+ for an SLS launch itself) to make the delicate instruments on Clipper capable of withstanding the extremely rough ride that SLS offers. So now Europa Clipper will be a Jupiter orbiter that does several flybys of Europa.
- dylan604 3y agoI'm ready for beach front property when Jupiter finally becomes the Sun's companion star to warm up Europa
- mikeInAlaska 3y agoA Europa submarine mission is a good bucket list, but don't sell us too short. * Humans on Mars * Room temperature Superconductors and their effects on humanity. * Sustained Fusion Power for the masses. * General Artificial Intelligence * Human brain-computer interface. * Full reversal of climate change. * Extended human lifespan. * Curing all forms of cancer. * Universal translator for all human languages. * Discovery of extraterrestrial intelligent life. * Understanding dark energy and dark matter. * A true virtual reality, indistinguishable from reality. * 100% renewable energy global infrastructure. * Establishing a lunar base. * Sentient AI companions. * Discovering the origin of life. If you elect me, I will make all these come true!
- spazx 3y agoUse them together. Use them in peace.
- dwaites 3y ago[flagged]
- grecy 3y agoCan Webb image Europa?
- svachalek 3y agoYes, the NIRCam images in the article are from the Webb telescope.
- eganist 3y ago> Can Webb image Europa? The implication by the presence of "Europa Carbon Dioxide Distribution" (NIRCam and NIRSpec IFU) images on the NASA release is that yes, it can.
- icapybara 3y agoThere’s an image of Europa from Webb in the article.
- SoftTalker 3y agoIt's less clear than I'd expected. Is that image deliberately downscaled so as to not reveal the true capabilities of the telescope optics?
- baggy_trough 3y agoNo, moons are not very big.
- dwaltrip 3y agoNo, I doubt it. Europa is fairly small and very far away. For reference, the best photos we had of Pluto prior to the fly-by were from the Hubble telescope, and were even grainier.
- mlyle 3y agoIn addition to moons being big and far away, the specific instrument here (a spectrograph) is not very high resolution-- at least spatially. For each "pixel", it measures the brightness of many wavelengths of light.
- slg 3y agoThis is obviously a ginormous leap from this announcement and just a tangent sparked by it. The possibility of intelligent life developing on a world like Europa encrusted with what is effectively a miles think solid atmosphere has always been one of my favorite feasible sci-fi hypotheticals. Could you imagine how that would impact their culture? Would they even know there is anything on the other side of the ice? Them finding out about us would be even more world shattering them us finding out about them.
- abracadaniel 3y agoFor comparison, the furthest we've dug down is about 8 miles, and Europa's ice crust is estimated to be 10-15 miles. So, yeah that would be like us getting discovered by mole people from nearly twice the depth we're capable of reaching. It's fun to think about what a civilization on Europa would think about their world. You can go up, but it gets colder and the pressure gets lower. It'd be like trying to go to space, but you have to dig to get there. Perhaps the change in density would make any such upward drilling unstable and beyond their means.
- sgt 3y agoNo need to dig, you just melt yourself downwards. It's not exactly like digging through rocks on Earth.
- monlockandkey 3y agoEuropa is definitely the most exciting part of the solar system that sparks imagination. Literally 100s of miles of pitch black ocean with thermal vents, ripe for life. Getting kiddy thinking about the leviathan sized aliens roaming the deep ocean of Europa. Does anyone else feel this way?
- yakz 3y agoCould you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Seems like thermal vents would provide a lot less energy than the Sun, but I’m really out of my depth.
- lisper 3y ago> Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Yes. See e.g.: https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/how-giant-tube-worms-survive-hydrothermal-vents https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/how-giant... These aren't "leviathan-sized" but they could easily provide food for something that big. The base of this food chain would be chemosynthetic bacteria. After that, energy is not the limiting factor on size.
- andrewflnr 3y agoBroadly, yes, but chemosynthetic organisms tend to be benthic (afaict, IANA marine microbiologist), so they can stay close to their food source. So something big that feeds on them would probably be a grazer more than a swimmer. Unless, perhaps, they need to swim between vent sites or something...
- andrewflnr 3y agoSo I asked my friend who knows things about marine microbiology and she was actually pretty optimistic about free floating chemoautotrophs as the base of a food web. You just need enough chemicals dissolved in the water (which I guess is how they grow them in the lab). Some other ideas we discussed were bacteria growing on suspended particles and as endosymbiotes in larger animals like the aforementioned tube worms. So yeah, leviathans are on the table.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoAn aside, but hovering over the image only to have it obscured... and then smaller on click, is a little comical.
- whoisthemachine 3y agoAnd then if you click on "Expand" (after clicking on the click which makes it smaller), it is restored to its original size.
- spookie 3y agoWe might have discovered carbon below 10km of ice on another celestial body, but we still cannot make sense of magic smoke.
- wsinks 3y agoI'm glad you posted this - I went back just to see this and gave an audible laugh. More than a little comical!
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- poopbutt7 3y agoIs the significance of CO2's presence 1) it's necessary ingredient for (our) life, 2) it's a likely biproduct of life, or both?
- TeMPOraL 3y agoThe first one. It can be produced through non-biological processes and is fairly stable, but is also necessary for "life as we know it". Gaseous oxygen would be 2 - it's highly reactive, so if you detect it in an atmosphere, it means there must be some kind of activity going on that replenishes it. On Earth, it's what life does.
- gpm 3y agoNote that mars's atmosphere has more CO2 in it (per unit volume! Despite having almost no atmosphere) than Earth's does. Definitely not 2.
- analog31 3y agoA rapid change in CO2 concentration could be a clue that something such as life is rearranging the molecules on a planet. In fact, I think the aliens have been monitoring us with a spectrometer for a few million years, and have guessed that we're here.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoIndeed, and looking at exoplanets through a spectrometer is a possible way for us to discover life in our stellar neighborhood, should it exist. But as I mentioned in my parallel reply, oxygen is better than CO2 for initial screening, because its very presence on a randomly observed planet indicates something wonky is going on - there shouldn't be any, unless it's being actively replenished by some process, as otherwise it would've oxidized other matter both on the surface and in the atmosphere, and be long gone by the time we pointed our telescopes at that world.
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- dmix 3y ago> a fascinating world with a salty, subsurface ocean of liquid water—possibly twice as much as in all of Earth’s oceans combined. If we brought water back a container of water from Europa would this be the largest amount of new water entering the earth since planets struck it billions of years ago? I briefly googled it (I dont know much about this stuff tbh): > The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years. So far, we haven’t managed to create any new water, and just a tiny fraction of our water has managed to escape out into space. The only thing that changes is the form that water takes as it travels through the water cycle. Anyway interesting thought experiment.
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoComets do fall from time to time, and Earth collects 5000 tons of debri from space each year. So I imagine Earth does gain a few tons of water from time to time.
- dmix 3y agoOh good point, I didn't think about Comets.
- jstanley 3y ago> Earth collects 5000 tons of debri from space each year That is a lot more than I would have guessed. I had thought that we were very slowly leaking precious resources by sending rockets into space, but I guess we're actually still gaining resources on average. (At least, I don't think we're sending 5000 tons beyond the atmosphere every year).
- hollerith 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Variation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_mass#Variation
- tracedddd 3y agoDon’t commercial hydrogen fuel cells create water as a byproduct?
- biggestlou 3y agoI’m still looking for intelligent life on this planet!
- ijidak 3y agoWhy does one random Jovian moon have so much water? And why not all similarly sized rocky bodies in the solar system? Isn't this even stranger than Earth's water?
- harph 3y agoThere's also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus so it's not just one random moon.
- spartanatreyu 3y agoSticking with just the Jovian moons, both Ganymede and Callisto are thought to have subsurface oceans too. Ganymede's oceans might be the largest in the entire Solar System. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_(moon)#Subsurface_oceans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ganymede_(moon)#Subsurface_oce... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_(moon)#Internal_structure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callisto_(moon)#Internal_struc...
- jcims 3y ago800km deep. Oof. Seems like an ocean world could develop intelligence but technology would be quite difficult.
- jayGlow 3y agothere are some pretty cool scifi books that look at how an aquatic species might develop technology. the "ringworld's children" involves a species that develops on a frozen world with an ocean beneath the ice.
- developer93 3y agoOur technology would be quite difficult, we might not even be able imagine what form an alien race's might take.
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- dadjoker 3y agoOnly a couple hundred more requirements that have to be exactly right for life to even exist there, but hey, this could possibly maybe be one...
- keepamovin 3y agoLinda Moulton-Howe covered some testimony from "insiders" that alleged that there is an octopus type species living under the ice covered ocean of Europa. I have no idea which Earthfiles episode this was in, but cool if true.
- ramraj07 3y agoDid they use a secret trillion dollar X ray glass telescope to peer through Europa's miles thick ice sheet and see?
- alluro2 3y agoOf course not - much more traditional methods - interrogation of their spies on Earth, cuttlefish.
- keepamovin 3y agoThat's quite funny, haha. But I think the story might be related to this, the insider told Linda this, and I can't recall directly, but the info may have been told to the insider by an ET.
- keepamovin 3y agoSkepticism is warranted, but there's no need for mockery. It only insults your humility in front of the great mystery. But to answer the question: I think they drilled down there, or sent a probe, but equally it could have been something told to them by an ET. But I can't recall the specifics.
- VerminOctopus1 3y agoMockery is deserved in this case. Not every cartoonish and outlandish claim needs to be engaged with seriously.
- keepamovin 3y ago
- simongray 3y ago> NASA's Webb I guess it may be technically owned and primarily operated by NASA, but it was developed from the start as an international project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Partnership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope#Par...
- bbor 3y agoI also hate American-centrism but it seems kinda justified here - they do go out of their way to mention ESA and CSA at the end, as well. From that article: NASA's lifetime cost for the project is[when?] expected to be US$9.7 billion, of which US$8.8 billion was spent on spacecraft design and development and US$861 million is planned to support five years of mission operations.[112] Representatives from ESA and CSA stated their project contributions amount to approximately €700 million and CA$200 million, respectively.[113] So it's 7.0% European, 1.5% Canadian, and 91.5% American (at current exchange rates). My takeaway is: good for Canada!!
- simongray 3y agoFair enough.
- sylware 3y agoPeople must understand the following: if we find One Microbe in such environment, it basically means life is common in the universe. The other thing people must understand: "life" and "fully evolved intelligent life" are two very different stories.
- jcims 3y agoUnless it has a common ancestor to life here. Then we still have to figure out if it started in this solar system or not.
- sylware 3y agoOf course, I was implying that such possibility would have been properly excluded.
- edgyquant 3y agoIt doesn’t. Due to proximity to earth it’s far more likely to share some common ancestor or precursor chemical reaction.
- bioinformatics 3y agoThat’s bad, I heard Carbon is pretty bad to any environment
- pcdoodle 3y agoIt's okay, as your savior, I have credits to sell you.