You’ll likely need an energy source (not necessarily our star, the warping effects of other massive bodies will do) and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years to sustain an environment conducive to life. You’ll likely need lots of protection from cosmic rays and short-wave radiation as some kind of shield. If your planet, moon and/or body doesn’t possess an atmosphere, and is too small to maintain an electro-magnetic dynamo like Earth, then sub-surface water under a protective shell might be enough.
On the recent findings of at least 1/17 observational days of water plumes near the surface of the Jovian moon, Europa:
‘They used a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory that measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.’
and:
‘Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18 that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.’
This is potentially good news for the upcoming Europa clipper mission. Otherwise, how are you going to get at all that water beneath an icy shell at least 10-15 miles thick?
‘From its orbit of Jupiter, Europa Clipper will sail close by the moon in rapid, low-altitude flybys. If plumes are indeed spewing vapor from Europa’s ocean or subsurface lakes, Europa Clipper could sample the frozen liquid and dust particles. The mission team is gearing up now to look at potential orbital paths, and the new research will play into those discussions.
“If plumes exist, and we can directly sample what’s coming from the interior of Europa, then we can more easily get at whether Europa has the ingredients for life,” Pappalardo said. “That’s what the mission is after. That’s the big picture.”
Aren’t you getting a little excited at the prospect?:
Both moons Enceladus (Saturn) and Europa (Jupiter) demonstrate evidence of huge oceans of liquid water protected by thick, icy crusts. The Cassini probe passed through water plumes emanating high above Enceladus’ icy crust. This water has been forced out of four long, deep cracks in the surface.
After analysis, the folks in the video above have discovered many chemicals within these Enceladus geysers (ammonia, carbon dioxide) but most importantly: Possibly hydrogen they think might be coming from hydro-thermal vents on the rocky, ocean floor of Enceladus.
You’ll likely need an energy source (not necessarily our star, the warping effects of other massive bodies will do) and tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years to sustain an environment conducive to life. You’ll likely need lots of protection from cosmic rays and short-wave radiation as some kind of shield. If your planet, moon and/or body doesn’t possess an atmosphere, and is too small to maintain an electro-magnetic dynamo like Earth, then sub-surface water under a protective shell might be enough.
On the recent findings of at least 1/17 observational days of water plumes near the surface of the Jovian moon, Europa:
‘They used a spectrograph at the Keck Observatory that measures the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres through the infrared light they emit or absorb. Molecules such as water emit specific frequencies of infrared light as they interact with solar radiation.’
and:
‘Paganini and his team reported in the journal Nature Astronomy on November 18 that they detected enough water releasing from Europa (5,202 pounds, or 2,360 kilograms, per second) to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool within minutes. Yet, the scientists also found that the water appears infrequently, at least in amounts large enough to detect from Earth, said Paganini: “For me, the interesting thing about this work is not only the first direct detection of water above Europa, but also the lack thereof within the limits of our detection method.’
This is potentially good news for the upcoming Europa clipper mission. Otherwise, how are you going to get at all that water beneath an icy shell at least 10-15 miles thick?
‘From its orbit of Jupiter, Europa Clipper will sail close by the moon in rapid, low-altitude flybys. If plumes are indeed spewing vapor from Europa’s ocean or subsurface lakes, Europa Clipper could sample the frozen liquid and dust particles. The mission team is gearing up now to look at potential orbital paths, and the new research will play into those discussions.
“If plumes exist, and we can directly sample what’s coming from the interior of Europa, then we can more easily get at whether Europa has the ingredients for life,” Pappalardo said. “That’s what the mission is after. That’s the big picture.”
Aren’t you getting a little excited at the prospect?:
Thanks for stopping by: I’m just a layman, and these links are for people who might know more, who might know less, or about as much as me. I’m not specially trained in any space-science, but whenever I get a few extra minutes, I learn a little bit more.
Dear Reader, maybe you’ve got some time to kill. Maybe you’re waiting on someone and they haven’t shown up yet. Maybe you’re at the airport and your flight got delayed a few more hours.
S.E.T.I–Aliens!
Frank Drake brings some realism to the S.E.T.I. (Search For Extraterrestial Intelligence) debate. The space-time distances are a huge hurdle, and the challenges of becoming a spacefaring civilization make the journey to nearby star systems fairly impractical at the moment.
The less evidence and fewer data points there are, the more rampant the speculation, inventive the Sci-Fi imaginings, and important the foundation to create such new fields of knowledge.
I maintain a healthy, healthy skepticism. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence..
As consequential as it is, it’s just another G class star:
We owe our lives, our weather, and our current home to this thing.
To be honest, I’ve stared at the sun for a few seconds with only some airy cirrus clouds, about 10 miles of atmosphere, and 93,000,000 million miles between me and this fiery furnace. I felt my retinas burn, blinking and blinking, and minutes later I still saw a bright patch in my field of vision, where my rods and cones were overloaded.
Maybe don’t do that.
It’s normally hard to see this ball of hydrogen, helium close-up.
Enjoy!
Mercury-Tidally locked (the same side always faces the Sun), small, and blasted by all that radiation (all the short-wave stuff we can’t see). Not too friendly.
Venus-The former Soviets/Russians have done the most work so far.
Imagine an Earth-sized twin, but with a runaway greenhouse effect, and such enormous pressures and temperatures at the surface as to melt lead. Toxic, acidic clouds.
Maybe high enough in those Venutian clouds there’s a belt of reasonable temperatures.
Kinda like hell, but interesting.
Earth-What can you say? It’s all most of us will ever know, and as much experience as we gather in our short lifetimes and can hope to pass on to our kids and their kids, it’s not so much.
As for me, while driving up to Mt. St. Helens (having erupted in 1980), I had a realization: The cone of this still-active volcano was still smoking.
Could…this thing blow again?
Nah, don’t be scared now, the odds are miniscule.
But…still.
Seeing the miles and miles of devastation, the valley still relatively barren 30 years on, and hearing the stories of lost lives and swift death, I thought for a few minutes.
Maybe conditions on Earth can get so bad that the Earth ain’t no permanent home, or maybe this place is a temporary home at best.
Earth’s Moon (our Moon):
Which kinds of people have the experience, training, temperment and balls to go on such a trip?:
Bob Zubrin at The New Atlantis: ‘Moon Direct‘. He’s a fan of creating a moon-base.
‘If we want to explore the Moon, and prepare to go beyond, we don’t need a space station in lunar orbit — but we could use a base on the Moon itself.’
There was a pretty tense atmosphere these past generations, as the primary geopolitical contest was between the United States and the Soviet Union:
Here’s actual video (just kidding):
Mars-What happened there will tell us a lot about what’s happened here. It used to have liquid water (billions of years ago), and it has ice beneath the surface, but with 1% the atmosphere and just 40% the gravity it not’s very nice now.
Mars has got some dust devils and what we might call seasons, but no water cycle (like ours). The Martian surface is blasted by the sun’s radiation and rusted toxic red.
Think of the driest desert, the coldest ice-field, and imagine yourself hanging around a mine-shaft with no oxygen nor air to breathe. No help is coming.
Would you sign-up?
Did we already find traces of microbial life on Mars?:
Jupiter: The ol’ 1994 Shoemaker Levy comet impact.
‘Holy shit!’:
Jupiter’s (Jovian) Moon Europa: It’s got an icy shell 5-20 km thick, and it very likely has liquid water beneath that ice. It’s pretty tiny compared to Earth.
In fact, Jupiter is so enormous, spewing out so much radiation, and warping space-time so much that these moons (what little to no atmospheres they have) are toxic places. Some mass sizes larger and Jupiter could have become a star.
Life very likely needs water, and a source of energy (heat energy), and at least a few hundred million years to get going and stick around.
Maybe….just maybe:
and:
Saturn-Another gas giant, tilted over and with rings and rings of rocks an dust around it.
Saturn’s Moon Titan
Yeah, it’s got a surface, and liquids on that surface and an atmosphere, but it’s liquid methane, man. It’s so very cold and so very strange, yet so very familiar…
We floated a probe right down to the surface, thank you very much:
Saturn’s Moon Enceladus: Even tinier and further away than Europa, it’s another ice-shell with liquid water beneath.
Big ol’ Saturn and tiny Enceladus do a dance, and this dance pulls and pushes and creates heat energy on Enceladus. The heat energy emerges through an ocean floor and rises. This heated water erupts out of the surface ice on the South Pole. Through that icy plume emanating into space, we flew a spacecraft.
What could be down there?
Uranus-Okay, this is freaky:
Neptune-I hear summers are nice.
Pluto-Listen to one of the guys who helped design the ‘New Horizons’ mission to Pluto. What a weird place.
Oumuamua-Sometimes random stuff just passes through, and we don’t have much time to notice.
‘Measurements of trace gases in planetary atmospheres help us explore chemical conditions different to those on Earth. Our nearest neighbour, Venus, has cloud decks that are temperate but hyperacidic. Here we report the apparent presence of phosphine (PH3) gas in Venus’s atmosphere, where any phosphorus should be in oxidized forms.‘
Despite being a near twin in size to Earth-mass and gravity, Venus spins too slowly for an electro-magnetic dynamo to create a EM field, enveloping and protecting the planet. With ninety times the surface pressure of Earth, and temperatures up to nine-hundred degrees Farenheit, to say it would be hellish would be an understatement.
Yet, it once harbored liquid water oceans, and maybe, just maybe, some kind of microbial life has migrated up into the fast-moving clouds. Click through for a visual.
Or listen to a podcast while you work, walk, or clean:
Addition: Anton Petrov sheds some light:
Next to Enceledaus, a tiny moon being warped by Saturn, this is probably the most important indicator of extra-terrestial life going right now:
Frank Drake brings some realism to the S.E.T.I. debate. The space-time distances are a huge hurdle, and the challenges of becoming a spacefaring civilization make the journey to nearby star systems fairly impractical at the moment.
The less evidence and fewer data points there are, the more rampant the speculation, inventive the Sci-Fi imaginings, and important the foundation to create such new fields of knowledge.
There’s been an explosion of private entrepreneurship and NASA partnership lately (loosened regulations and better incentives) to help get cargo (things and people) into space much more cheaply than before.
What’s it like to be on a spacewalk? In some ways, pretty normal and pretty not normal, apparently: Just pace yourself, focus, and get the job done in an unwieldy suit while you hover between everything you’ve ever known and an incomprensible abyss.
In addition to recent rapid advances in ‘seeing’ with radio waves, gravity waves and light, and we’ve got better tools to get a little further out into our own neighborhood.
This means we could find out if we can find some life on Mars (methane spikes), Jupiter’s icy moon Europa and Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus:
Solar radiation: We live within the envelope of Earth’s electro-magnetic dynamo, protected from the life-destroying short-wave radiation our star is constantly spewing. Over time (billions of years) this has helped create a relatively stable atmosphere and biosphere; stable enough for the life we know on Earth.
Despite this stability, of course, we know the star-energy we eventually consume as food and water to be scarce as such conditions are coded at the cellular level (and since we’re being depressively realistic, there’s vulcanism, earthquakes, cold, heat, other people, parasites and viruses to contend with). Such facts define us as does the occasional catastrophic event and the eventual catastrophe awaiting each of us. There’s love, friendship, knowledge, music, hope, beauty and a whole world to explore.
Okay, enough of that for now.
Zero or altered gravity: On the surface of Earth, we live x units away from a mass ball at the bottom of a gravity well. In space, we wouldn’t feel this force at all, and on Mars we would feel it about 40%. What if blood vessels contract/expand or slowly atrophy in zero Gs for reasons yet unknown? What if this dims your vision slowly, over time, and impairs cognitive functioning, especially during the reproductive process, pregnancy or early childhood? Wouldn’t you like to know this before it starts happening to you on the six-months-plus journey to Mars?
Once we know about such problems, we can figure out some solutions.
If there is life on Mars (a possibility, still, as of 2019), it’s probably microbial, living on an energy source beneath the surface. Up top, all that solar radiation has created a toxic layer of perchorates, oxidized, rusted dust and rocks, apparently hostile to life as we know it.
Imagine a place colder than Antarctica, drier than the driest desert, with so little atmosphere the atmosphere’s barely there. The EM dynamo and envelope petered out long ago. You look around and see a barren landscape, familiar yet strange; alien.
Imagine, one morning, stepping from a rover on an exploratory mission, feeling a deep nervous tension and excitement. You focus in on the scripted tasks and procedures the next few minutes require.
You know that if your suit becomes compromised, your blood would alternately freeze/boil and you’d die almost instantly. You know some little, unplanned problem can become a big problem. Any sort of help/supply lines would be pretty much impossible, at least six months but at least a year in coming, and probably not coming at all.
Yet, here you are:
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As posted: It looks like Gale Crater has its advantages.
‘Research suggests habitable conditions in the Yellowknife Bay area may have persisted for millions to tens of millions of years. During that time rivers and lakes probably appeared and disappeared. Even when the surface was dry, the subsurface likely was wet, as indicated by mineral veins deposited by underground water into fractures in the rock. The thickness of observed and inferred tiers of rock layers provides the basis for estimating long duration, and the discovery of a mineral energy source for underground microbes favors habitability throughout.’
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
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Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
Why was Mt. Sharp chosen for the Curiosity Rover landing site, and what about those rounded stones that it photographed, indicative of long ago ankle to hip-deep water? If the Martian surface is likely so full of perchlorates and life-hostile, irradiated soil, what are the chances of pockets of microbial life below ground?
The discussion later moves to Venus, Jovian moon Io, and the Chinese lander on the dark side of the moon in the final minutes:
Event Horizon discussion with Emily Lakdawalla.
—
As posted:
Imagine sub-freezing temperatures and free radicals bombarding the near atmosphere-less Martian surface (oxidized and rusted red, barren), but below the Martian surface lurk big blocks of briny ice; ice with freezing cold, incredibly salty water around them and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.
Worth thinking about.
What are you doing with your imagination?
Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported today https://t.co/zLkJwUESiPpic.twitter.com/aAt6hnMxI2
‘Due to the scarcity of O2 in the modern Martian atmosphere, Mars has been assumed to be incapable of producing environments with sufficiently large concentrations of O2 to support aerobic respiration. Here, we present a thermodynamic framework for the solubility of O2 in brines under Martian near-surface conditions. We find that modern Mars can support liquid environments with dissolved O2 values ranging from ~2.5 × 10−6 mol m−3 to 2 mol m−3 across the planet, with particularly high concentrations in polar regions because of lower temperatures at higher latitudes promoting O2 entry into brines’
Recently, a visitor from beyond our solar sytem passed pretty closely to Earth.
With the observed and limited data, Oumuamua was clearly anomalous. It likely had a 10/1 length to width ratio and was reflecting a lot of light, data which suggests a wobbling oblong or something nearly pancake-shaped (perhaps containing iron or other metals because it’s more reflective of the red, longer wavelengths on the visible light spectrum and it’s got to be of durable enough material to be so thin while surviving the roughness of interstellar space).
Our solar system is a fairly flat disk which is moving in relation to other star systems, all of which are traveling very quickly relative to Oumuamua, which was relatively stationary to these other systems when it came in at an angle to ours; speeding up again on its way out (perhaps not due to outgassing).
Dr. Avi Loeb has been working on lightsails, or thinking about how a civilization might travel and explore space and/or create something like a message in a bottle. Below, he is interviewed on Event Horizon.
His not-ruled-out hypothesis will probably attract some UFO and alien public interest, but it seems, in my limited understanding, that as an anomaly, this is a discussion with a first-rate astronomer performing an interesting exercise in taking past experience, current knowledge and conventional explanations to their limits in trying to creatively identify something new.
It’s a big universe out there after all, and we’re just starting to get some better tools with which to view and understand it: