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NASA study finds life-sparking energy source and molecule at Enceladus
- ianai 3y agoyesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652897 Hydrogen cyanide, acetylene, propylene, ethane, propene. There's bacteria that live off acetylene (though surely abiotic processes too). I suspect this indicates plenty of energy and complex chemistry on Enceladus. Some of those compounds are energetic while others (I think?) are combustion bi-products. Otherwise, I wonder when/if we'll ever see oxygen (O2) confirmed in a study like this? I realize it's highly/easily bound up in reactions, but what a finding that'd be. They list a probability of 0.64 (aka 64%) chance of O2 here. Imagining a surface of water ice and near vacuum atmosphere, I suspect any free oxygen would be very difficult to detect. But they also see co2 so maybe any oxygen is quickly used up? source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02160-0.epdf https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-02160-0.epdf
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- passwordoops 3y agoHydrogen cyanide, acetylene, propylene, ethane, propene would all react very quickly with oxygen, if it is being produced. I imagine like early earth, if there are organisms they are following an anoxic pathway
- ianai 3y agoSo is it because the life signals so far suggest simple life that money isn't really pouring into an expedition? That's my inkling anyway. Turns out us apes are still far more interested in everyday stuff than even life outside our sphere. i.e. I would expect "enthusiasm" to look like discussions on building the infrastructure for multiple missions out there. Communications way points, some basic resource stuff, etc. Stuff to make getting things in that system more robust and timely. Edit: Maybe experiment/do the laser propulsion tech. "Lighthouses" at critical points.
- staplers 3y agoThe discovery of even the most base simple lifeform outside Earth would be forever world-changing. Society, religion, mass institutions would be forced to reconcile with this fact. I don't think it's necessarily about money.
- NateEag 3y agoWhat do you think would change about religions? The only one I know well is evangelical Christianity, having been raised in it. I've read through the Protestant Bible several times, and I'm not aware of anything in it that changes meaningfully if there's other life forms in the universe.
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- martin-t 3y agoYou overestimate people. Most wouldn't care at all, a few would say that's cool and move on. Religious people would just say their favorite god created those too. Unless the aliens were more advanced than us, nothing would change.
- staplers 3y agoIn the short term yes. The church accepted Galileo's heliocentric theory at first because it helped fix their calendars, later they realized what it truly meant as the general public started connecting the dots.
- cwillu 3y agoThe struggle with the religious types is forever that they can't be pinned down in the details: it's not that new information can't be assimilated because it conflicts with doctrine, it's that doctrine, aside from a few very core concepts, is extremely fluid and will seamlessly flow and change to admit the conflicting information without affecting anything of importance.
- Symmetry 3y agoI'd be very surprised if we saw oxygen. Photosynthesis took much longer to evolve on Earth than life did in the first place, and on Enceladus you have both a thick layer of ice preventing sunlight from reaching liquid water and also a much dimmer Sun in the first place due to how far away Jupiter is.
- Sharlin 3y ago*Saturn, but yes. If there’s life, free oxygen would likely be incredibly toxic to it, just like it was to early life on Earth (and still is to some chemosynthesis-based ocean floor life).
- intrasight 3y agoI don't much like the spark and fire analogy with life. Not sure what analogy works. We don't yet really understand life well enough to have a good one.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoWhat oxygen-breathing cells do is pretty much nanoscale combustion, so the analogy seems apt.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThe proton gradients are quite different from combustion though…
- anticensor 3y agoThe proton gradient serves to regulate the combustion, one molecule at a time...
- gitaarik 3y agoThat's the whole reason why they call it like that, because they don't understand it and it seems like something magical. And it will always be like that in the current materialistic paradigm. Why would dead unconscious matter suddenly combine into something which seems to have some kind of consciousness? Also see the Hard problem of consciousness: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousnes...
- superposeur 3y agoThis is intriguing and I’m very happy this exploration is being done. But, for decades, I’ve been reading reports of the discovery of evidence for the trappings of life elsewhere: water and organics and “habitable” exoplanets. These are valuable discoveries, but the tone of the reports suggest they imply life is about to turn up. It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation, some of which may turn out to be correct but equally may turn out to be dead wrong). The oft cited fact that life arose “quickly” after the formation of Earth has no bearing on the question.
- tshaddox 3y ago> It’s worth remembering that there is not one single shred of evidence that life has ever existed anywhere in the observable universe but Earth. I’m curious how your epistemology is working here. It seems to me that this will also be true in the future if we have found life on a hundred other planets. There still won’t be a shred of evidence of life anywhere else, and we still won’t have the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur, right?
- ianai 3y agoidk, I think if we see even simple life at multiple points in our own system that we can increase our expectations for the prevalence of life very significantly. And of course given how vast and indifferent to life the universe is, life would still be vanishingly rare in the universe. It's going to be always precious and a gem.
- superposeur 3y agoI agree, if — that’s an enormous “if”.
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- 725686 3y agoFor anyone interested in the origin of life, and the origin of complex life I highly recommend Nick Lane's Books. You can start with "The Vital Question". There are also some fantastic videos of him online.
- borissk 3y agoYes, Nick Lane has done a great job of popularizing the metabolism first hypothesis of origin of life. What his books and videos don't address is the biggest problem of metabolism first - once there's a proto cell (say inside a pore within a white smoker) with working metabolism that turns H2 and CO2 gases into sugars and other organic molecules - how are the proteins that make the metabolism work translated and encoded into an RNA code.
- qvrjuec 3y agoHis book The Vital Question does actually address this. He says the RNA world hypothesis doesn't perfectly explain early catalysis, as RNA is a sophisticated polymer. It was most likely more simple things like metal sulphides or other inorganic complexes were primarily responsible. Amino acids and nucleotides also have catalytic activity.
- yoble 3y agoSeconding this, as a layman I've found his books both technical and fascinating. He's a great teacher, getting into the details but explaining in a really engaging manner.
- mekoka 3y agoI think the title is pushing it a bit. When I see "life-sparking energy source", I think of an inextricable property. Get that and you can spark life. But we have and we couldn't. They're merely ingredients, building blocks, fuel to sustain life as we understand it on Earth, as the article more sensibly admits. The "life-sparking" source itself remains a mystery.
- 0xedd 3y ago[flagged]
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- dwaltrip 3y agoInstead of something extricable, I imagine a series of processes that, due to specific conditions, results in some new process that has distinctly different characteristics from the originating process. E.g. snowpack melt -> mountain stream -> waterfall A waterfall is a vastly simpler system than a living organism, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the origin of life has a flavor similar to waterfall formation. I like the idea that all phenomena we observe are emergent in a similar way.
- CrzyLngPwd 3y agoWe don't know what causes life.
- bytearray 3y agoI always thought Enceladus was just an icy moon, but turns out it's cooler than that.
- gitaarik 3y agoWarmer you mean?
- holoduke 3y agoThe fact that there is something, just something can drive me crazy. Why is there something and not just nothing.
- tigerlily 3y agoI feel the same way you do. It drives me even crazier that more people don't feel this way.
- ryanSrich 3y agoThe simple answer is the controversial answer. Life needs something to spark it from nothing to something. That's more evidence of a demiurge than anything else.
- jamiek88 3y agoWhat made the demiurge?
- ryanSrich 3y agoIf we're just having fun here, then I'd say it doesn't have a creator. Which is not a concept humans are capable of understanding. It could be the demiurge is eternal, forever and always. The concept of time may have been an invention by such a creator.
- NineStarPoint 3y agoSure, but time isn’t necessary for a causal chain. Even if from the perspective of the demigurge it has always existed, in some causal (or anti-causal depending on the laws outside our reality) way it must have spontaneously come in to being (Or, if the demiurge was created from another being, eventually the chain of causation comes back to some being spontaneously coming into existence). You can’t avoid the “something came from nothing” reality, even if what came into being first came into being in a way that from a human perspective seems timeless.
- owlstuffing 3y ago[flagged]
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- rqtwteye 3y agoI really, really, really hope we will discover life on another planet, preferably in another solar system. Right now we have a sample size of one so a lot of thinking about the origin is speculation. I hope this will change.
- echelon 3y agoI always like to daydream about the various solutions to the Fermi Paradox. If we're not early, if life isn't rare, and there are intelligent species [1], what might most of it look like? I don't think most of them would match the techno signatures we're familiar with. Factories, gas emissions, etc. are an industrial age thing. What if they're really smart? What does that look like? What kind of signals might we detect? What kinds of energy might they be harnessing? Are there any good reads or papers that posit these things? [1] I also imagine they've found a way to escape the limitations of intelligence and death, perhaps by becoming computers of some kind.
- hotpotamus 3y agoI wonder if any sentient being would really want to live forever. What would there be to look forward to as the galaxies recede out past the cosmic horizon and all the stars shutdown? What would be the point? Just wait around in the dark until the heat death gets you? I sometimes suspect that simple nihilism is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
- echelon 3y agoWith all the compute and energy available at that stage, perhaps there are more possibilities than we can currently see or imagine? I sometimes like to think that we ourselves are actually the memories of a distant descendant. Maybe it reversed the light cone and was able to replay everything with exacting precision. Maybe it's studying and musing over its humble beginnings. (It might get a laugh that we're communicating this to one another.)
- hotpotamus 3y ago
- fwungy 3y ago[flagged]
- Exendroinient23 3y agoEnceledaus is very small though.Europa is much more exiciting.
- AlexanderTheGr8 3y agoI have a related question : if we set up sensors a few light years away capturing every signal it is possible to capture by our tech (the full electromagnetic spectrum). And then if we put all this data into an anomaly detection algorithm, will the Earth stand out? Based on the data that we capture, are we actually special? The reason for anomaly detection (unsupervised) alg is that it doesn't have any of our subjective biases. The answer can give evidence for whether seeing signs of interesting planets is actually sign of life or not. Thoughts? I don't think Earth will stand out based on the information that will reach tens of light years away.
- Mithriil 3y agoI'm just going to leave this here: https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=C%23N https://chemapps.stolaf.edu/jmol/jmol.php?model=C%23N
- Mithriil 3y agoIt's the Hydrogen Cyanide molecule [1], also available on Titan [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide#On_Titan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_cyanide#On_Titan