6 ms·
> ‘"One elephant per year of glycine into an ocean 12 times the volume of Earth's oceans is not sufficient to sustain life," said Neish. "In the past, people of
by pavlov 3y ago
> ‘"One elephant per year of glycine into an ocean 12 times the volume of Earth's oceans is not sufficient to sustain life," said Neish. "In the past, people often assumed that water equals life, but they neglected the fact that life needs other elements, in particular carbon."’
Titan’s underground ocean is 12x larger than the Earth’s oceans? I had no idea. Wow.
If this result holds, it’s a shame because the gas giant moons always seemed like the only chance of discovering some interesting extraterrestrial life within my lifetime (or the next few dozen generations — the stars are incomprehensibly distant and nearly impossible to visit).
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y agoCan't we send two elephants per year? Do they even have to be elephants, or can we send plain glycine?
- sph 3y agoHow many elephants per olympic-sized swimming pool? Per (american) football field? I have never seen any of those things in real life, yet journalists making stupid comparisons. I guess the field must be full of people that were deathly afraid of maths and numbers.
- ryukoposting 3y agoWait, wouldn't a football field be a unit of area? How many elephants per cubic football field?
- qsi 3y agoA football field is an area, so a cubic football field would be a six-dimensional volume.
- eru 3y agoThey are talking about a (cubic football) field. Cubic football is played in three dimensional 'fields', not on flat patches of grass.
- ezzaf 3y agoHow do you make a cubic football roll?
- eru 3y agoYou don't. Why would that be a requirement? In regular football the spherical ball spends more time in the air than rolling, too. And in popular variants like Australian rules football or Rugby the ball is egg shaped, and that doesn't seem to cause any problems with enjoyment of these sports.
- Nevermark 3y agoIf they are a mating pair, we can send just two and wait. On a far more serious note, the day we can send just one AI system (and wait) must be just a few decades away.
- _justinfunk 3y agoAsk it to make paper clips.
- Nevermark 3y agoI was going to say lifespan rejuvenation devices. But you are right, a simpler first test case is obviously superior. So paperclips. As many as it can make. We can request more useful constructions after it has demonstrated skill at that...
- bitwize 3y agoOthers may have beaten us to the punch; we should keep a look out for a black boxy thing with a 1:4:9 aspect ratio...
- eru 3y agoAI wouldn't solve much here: Whatever your AI could do, you could do remotely from earth (with some light lag). However, AI can't magically conjure resources like carbon. You would also need some good robotics and production capacity, preferably able to self-replicate. AI is great, but it's not solving the greatest current bottleneck here.
- waldrews 3y agoElephants can swim really well, but the G-forces at liftoff would be tough on them. Plus you've gotta supply them; 70,000 Calories per day (ideally in the form of oranges), and something like 25 kg of oxygen.
- eru 3y agoNo need to worry about the supply nor the acceleration at liftoff (nor even at lithobraking): none of these factors influence the carbon content of your elephants.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- russellbeattie 3y ago> I had no idea. Wow. Same here. I just looked up Titan's size [1] and it's in between the Moon and the Earth in size. I know water is just a thin layer on the crust of our planet, but 12x? If you look up "all of Earth's water in a ball," [2] it's about a quarter the size of the moon. Titan isn't that much larger. It must just be a floating blob of water or someone's estimations/illustrations are way off. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Titan_Earth_Moon_Comparison.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Titan_Ea... 2. https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-sphere https://www.usgs.gov/media/images/all-earths-water-a-single-...
- hackeraccount 3y agoIs it all the water on Earth or all the water on Earth's oceans? I'm pretty sure those aren't the same... I seem to remember reading that there's a very large amount of water chemically locked up in the Earth's crust.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoI never thought about this before, but the volume of water in the atmosphere must be huge too, right?
- chmod775 3y agoNot really. Earth has hardly any atmosphere. The part with any density to speak of is just a thin film. To see for yourself, look closely at any picture of Earth and around around its circumference you will notice how little atmosphere there actually is[1]. It's something many people don't realize because from down here it looks like it goes up far. Just 16,000 meters up the atmosphere is unbreathably thin and most of Earth's oxygen lies below you. We have mountains that are higher than the main mass of Earth's atmosphere (50% is below 5.6km)[2]. The mass of Earth's hydrosphere is about 1.4 × 10^21 kg, while the mass of water in Earth's atmosphere is merely about 0.00002 × 10^21 kg[3]. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Ocean_world_Earth.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f6/Ocean_wo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Earth [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrosphere