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Europa 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 f
by monlockandkey 3y ago
Europa 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.
- johnchristopher 3y agoEuropa Report (movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avzqYgtpdMQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avzqYgtpdMQ I enjoyed it ^^
- TedDoesntTalk 3y agoGreat film with the suspense and tension of Aliens.
- RamblingCTO 3y agoI was thinking that just now and will rewatch this evening! Any other recommendations of the same vibe?
- codeulike 3y agoGreat movie, smart script and they did a great job without huge budget
- sigg3 3y agoWell technically they would just be Europeans.
- seventytwo 3y agoTechnically, they’d be Europans. ;p
- ekaryotic 3y agoAre you sure, I think they would be called Europaeans.
- v4dok 3y agoTo solve your dillema as a Greek. Both the continent and the planet have the same name. Europeans it is.
- rz2k 3y agoThat doesn't seem like a very Greek spelling of dilēmma.
- tzot 3y agoWhile on the subject of etymology, spelling the Greek word “dilemma” (δι+ληπ+μα) incorrectly does not help with providing a definitive answer as a Greek. I'm not starting a flame war, I just make an observation (and as it happens, I'm a fellow Greek). Yes, the word “European” (inhabitant of Europe) is rooted on the Greek word Europē, Zeus' mythical mistress (one of many), after whom both the continent and the satellite were named, but is the “-ean” a proper transcription from Greek? Perhaps “Europaean” could be the better answer to the question we discuss; after all, in English the continent's name is a modernized “Europe” while the satellite stays closer to the intermediate Latin as “Europa”, and since this discussion is in English, I feel that the difference in suffix justifies a different label for the inhabitants of the satellite.
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- __MatrixMan__ 3y agoFrom an Arthur C. Clarke novel: > ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA. > ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. So yes. Clarke thought it was special also.
- XorNot 3y agoIt's also one of my favorite sequences in the 2010 movie of Space Odessey series (which IMO, works a lot better as an actual movie pacing wise). Just something about the tension gets captured really well there, without their being any sort of actual threat (since it's a robotic probe).
- andrewflnr 3y agoFunny that the Clipper probe is still only flying by, attempting no landing.
- staplung 3y agoWell, kinda, eventually. The book of 2001 points Discovery 1 at Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Evidently, the special effects crew for the movie couldn't do a convincing job of faking Saturn because of the rings so they did Jupiter instead. Then when Clarke did the book for 2010 he retcon'd it to match the movie.
- pndy 3y agoI'm pretty sure that Clarke stated somewhere in the preface that each story in the Space Odyssey series doesn't necessary happens in the same universe and thus that's why there's a difference between places in books Nevertheless, Jupiter as the biggest planet within our star system being forced to collapse into a small sun feel extremely right
- xwdv 3y agoWondering if we could eat fish born on Europa and if there would be any ill effects.
- ricksunny 3y agoNo doubt on some Europan version of HN right now they're posting wondering the same thing about us.
- Qem 3y agoProbably a prerequisite is their biosphere has a common origin with ours, so the biochemistry is shared. Otherwise you wouldn't fare much better than someone eating random chemical compounds from an organic synthesis lab.
- Phrenzy 3y agoThis is where chirality rears its ugly head.
- wishfish 3y agoDon't forget about Enceladus. Also a massive ocean with the added benefit of shooting enormous geysers into space. Would be wonderful if our solar system had at least 3 worlds with ocean life. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus
- whimsicalism 3y agoor terrible news a la great filter arguments
- omnicognate 3y agoExcept those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".
- whimsicalism 3y ago> The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there That’s not true at all - simple assumptions would make it likely we would have encountered intelligent life if it evolved in the past in this galaxy.
- omnicognate 3y agoWe don't have the technology to detect signals similar to our own from the distance of even the nearest stars [1], and there is no reason to assume that more technologically advanced civilisations will generate vastly larger signals. Therefore the absence of detection to date tells us nothing, except to place an extremely generous upper bound on the power of signals they generate. [1] https://www.seti.org/press-release/can-et-detect-us https://www.seti.org/press-release/can-et-detect-us - where a SETI researcher concludes an alien civilisation around a nearby star would require technology much more advanced than ours to detect us. (And what technology we do have has been pointed at a vanishingly small fraction of the planets in the galaxy.)
- BurningFrog 3y agoIf it turns out to not have life, we should introduce Earth life and let evolution run amok there. I realize some conservationists disagree.
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- d-lisp 3y agoThis could be the cause of our presence
- BurningFrog 3y agoGotta pay it forward!
- mechanicalpulse 3y agoThe Venusians certainly weren't conservationists.
- bbor 3y ago_highly_ recommend the "Red Mars" series - deals with questions I never thought of before, namely "to what extent should we preserve the surface of other planets?
- Pxtl 3y agoI mean if it's confined to geothermal vents I'd think bugs would be the absolute outside limit for most complicated life, and realistically it's probably prokaryotic life if anything. That would still be mindblowing, and also horrifying when you think about the Fermi paradox.
- Phrenzy 3y agoI am excited to see what can be in Europa's deep oceans. But I've always felt Enceladus would be a better place to start looking. Europa requires a lot of burrowing into ice, whereas Enceladus could reveal some of its secrets with a couple of proper flybys.
- mclightning 3y agotechnically, most exciting part of our solar system is Earth. Have you never been to Vegas?