Space

Repost-Marxist Jamborees In Paris, Getting A Humanities Education & Getting To Space-Some Links

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Claire Berlinksi visited a Marxist Jamboree in Paris (The City Journal):

‘“Oh.” She rearranged her face to look less judgmental.’

Roger Scruton on his experiences in 1968 Paris (behind a paywall at The New Criterion):

‘In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back…’

Speaking of The New Criterion, they have a piece on Jeffrey Hart:

‘Lit by an inner illumination, which regularly showed through the glimmer of his blue eyes, he checked his politics at the door and let the lyricism of “books, arts, and manners” lead the way for students.’

Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis on ‘The Return Of The Space Visionaries:’

‘Saganites view the universe as a precious jewel. How beautiful! “Look at it — but don’t touch it!” Tumlinson quips. Space is for scientific inquiry only, and that is best done by investigating it with robots. Later in life Sagan recognized the value of sending humans to other worlds, but as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist, his goals were focused on science, not economic development or settlement.’

Barring revolution, an attractive option for many committed ideologues lies in gathering under the ideals of education, health-care, peace and the environment, becoming institutionalized at taxpayer expense.

Common threads?: ‘Social’ justice is a kind of unclear concept.  Ideology ain’t necessarily science.  Many adrift in the postmodern humanities are quite hostile to the sciences, living within their own dramas and [even] doing dirt on the arts. A move towards the liberal idealist and rationalist invites the activist and irrational response.

As previously and consistently posted-Thanks to a reader. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.’

Universal wokeness need not be confined to Earth. 

I’d like to get ahead of the move towards legitimizing UFO claims in the popular mind.

Workers of the Galaxy Unite!

CLEARLY, alien life (haven’t seen any myself) should be conceptualized as the poor, noble savage kind. These Romantically Primitive oddities could do with some solidarity. I envision studying these proud, native creatures as a space anthropologist, seeking to live and work amongst them as a tribe of distant cosmic relatives.

When the bad colonizers and rapacious corporations come (as they must), I face a harsh choice: Return to my traditional roots, joining my rational secular space captain and his universal peace treaties, or take up arms with the Shining Star Revolutionary Brigade in the worm holes of Rulon 7?

Eat Gakk, muyalino.

Repost-Well, Maybe Attempt Some Kind Of Landing There-Some Europa Links

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If you’d like a breakdown of the relative sizes of our planet, our moon and all these other moons, click through for a helpful visual.

Also, there’s a lot of space out there:

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:

More here:

‘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?:

Via Another Reader Via Youtube-BBC Interview With Various Cassini Mission Scientists

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~25 minutes.  Well-edited.  Informative.

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.

Roger Scruton & The New Witchcraft, Universal Geometry In Rocks & Werner Herzog-Some Links

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Roger Scruton (R.I.P.) discussed being misrepresented in the pages of a major publication, effectively purging him from an unpaid government architectural committee job.

So it was, and so it is:

Tim Hunt was a witch. Larry Summers, briefly became a witch.

—

Via Quanta magazine: ‘Scientists Uncover the Universal Geometry of Geology‘

“The math is telling us that when we begin to fracture rocks, however we do it, whether we do it randomly or deterministically, there is only a certain set of possibilities,” said Furbish. “How clever is that?”

Our author uses a bit of Plato to tie the piece together; a discussion of ideal forms:

As for Jerolmack, after first feeling uncomfortable over a possibly coincidental connection to Plato, he has come to embrace it. After all, the Greek philosopher proposed that ideal geometric forms are central to understanding the universe but always out of sight, visible only as distorted shadows.

“This is literally the most direct example we can think of. The statistical average of all these observations is the cube,” Jerolmack said.

“But the cube never exists.”

‘Universal’ is saying a lot.

In the meantime, enjoy walking through an abandoned mine. From engineers and geologists to wise men, fools and crazy old coots, it’s dangerous, dirty work.

Travel inside the Earth:

—

Maybe out of the depths of post-war guilt and nihilism, some Germans are still trying to thread the needle of all experience through the new fields of knowledge.

There’s something about the earnest piety of ‘We Germans’ and the Natural World which unsettles. The triumphs and failures of German Idealism have convulsed to some terrible extremes.

Nevertheless, join Wener Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer as they use documentary filmmaking to discover something true about that Natural World and deep within ourselves and our origins.

Here’s an interview with both men here:

–

Well, Maybe Attempt Some Kind Of Landing There-Some Europa Links

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If you’d like a breakdown of the relative sizes of our planet, our moon and all these other moons, click through for a helpful visual.

Also, there’s a lot of space out there:

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:

More here:

‘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?:

There Are Multi-Levels-Marxist Types, Old Media, Mars & Some Seattle Photos

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Thanks for stopping by, and to everyone that has.

Some links:

-A Multi-Level neo-Marxist Marketing Scheme. If you’re at a BLM protest, fast becoming a riot, you’re the sucker.

-If you’re a police officer, responding to a scene with a young, armed type….don’t expect most media outlets to try and get at the truth these days. Not getting backed up by your own institution nor political leaders exposes you to more risk.

-In fact, if you’re still partaking in old media outlets, you have a higher likelihood of being a sucker. Then again, there’s a sucker born every minute, so try not to be one on new media, either.

As found on the internet.

Hmmm….predictions are hard, especially about the future, though I largely agree on simple matters of technology, capital assets, and attention.

Scaling-up usually means more brittle, unwieldy institutions. Combine old media outlets, trying to crush competition by becoming co-opted by the ideological grifters parasitizing institutions, and it’s ugly out there.

Though there’s plenty of capture in the new institutions, as well.

They’re flying a little helicopter on Mars!:

Some photos from this weekend in Seattle:

We all float down here?

Mars and What People Are Doing Down Here On Earth-A Few Links On Perseverance And A Mild Critique Of Liberal Idealism

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On Mars, Curiosity Rover helped establish the existence of flowing, liquid water on the Martian Surface some billions of years ago. This water would have been highly acidic, pooling up in the lower places, and probably (from what I currently know) not part of a water cycle with condensing and precipitating water (rain).

Long ago, Mars had enough of an atmosphere to support this liquid water, but lacking the size and electro-magnetic field generated by Earth’s core, Mars slowly had all the water molecules combine with other particles blasting away at the surface from space. Slowly, the water dwindled, as the atmosphere drifted away, and so the temperatures dropped.

So did protection from the Sun’s radiation.

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 and maybe just enough O2 to support some microbes.

Worth thinking about.

What are you doing with your imagination?

‘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’

Jezero crater, where Perseverance has landed, has both inflow and outflow channels, like a holding tank. There is a deposit plain near the inflow channel. If you’re going to go digging in the Martian dust, digging through what was once muck, hoping to find some evidence of microbial Martian life, Jezero crater is as good place as any to do it.

I noticed a tear in my eye watching video of the rover touching down. So much hard work. So many deep dreams and aspirations made into reality. A functional robotic exploratory team is slowly being built, with little outposts on other worlds.

—

For those who didn’t ask, Dear Reader:

Liberal Idealism–>I want to live in a free and human world, constantly progressing, full of human compassion, equality and justice. People, and people like myself, are generally good. Our change is good, and ought to be in charge–Output 1: Technocratic Bureaucracy–>Process 1: Change-focused ideas are in positions of key institutional leadership and authority (conserving certain elements of the past according to liberal ideals, excluding others). Science is invoked by many non-scientific actors. Process 2–>Institutional Capture by Ideologues and True-Belief from radical-change agents who believe that no authority is legitimate, and that it’s all power and no truth.–>Behind the Scenes: The people dedicated to an institution’s mission and purpose are fighting with the people who control the promotions within the institutions, and the loudest activist voices often win (see Jerry Pournelle).

Examples: See the NY Times, many Grant Foundations (Ford, Poetry), and many colleges and universities. See also, Health and Education departments. Most Liberal publications are now negotiating with the radical discontents within them. Such radicals, when not claiming collectivist supremacy, claim, from within the postmodern morass, a certain kind of feeling-first irrationality and primacy of Self (an irrational and mystic response to the ‘oppression’ of reason and the sciences).

Deeper Reasons Why: The Liberatory model of freedom (freedom against the oppressor, supposedly for the ‘victim’ and ‘oppressed minorities’) is an utopian and ideological model. Such a worldview has profound authoritarian/totalitarian implications. The ‘personal is political’ makes all areas of life (knowledge, sports, break-rooms) into political arenas. The Utopian promise of people actually getting along is pushed ever further into the future at the cost of people…you know….getting along in the present. Mediocre people and bad ideas are in charge. The easiest outlet for blame is anything standing in the way of progress (religion, tradition, liberal dissension, those who conserve).

What the Liberal idealist (and many anarchists) likely get wrong about human nature: People need ‘low-resolution’ ideas to make sense of reality, hierarchy, death, uncertainty and fear. This is an emergent feature within ourselves, and ignored at our peril. Human behavior, in aiming to be morally good and true, must be restrained, honorable and focused on consent. If such ideas and behavior are not incentivized into models of authority, then worse men, and the worse in men, will come to be in charge.

The more religious, frontier and freedom, flag and country type of America I once knew (with all its flaws) is looking more like a minority position these days.

Any pushback is welcome.

Some interesting links:

Shelby Steele and his son, Eli, have made a documentary about the killing of Michael Brown, and what happened in Ferguson. A lot of what seems to be the truth is not what many people claiming to have the truth are saying. Many of those people are in charge:

Who can afford to speak out?

Maybe if you’re a Stoic living on the fringes, whose needs are lesser than the punishment exclusion can bring. Maybe if you don’t have anyone directly dependent on you for love, security and safety.

Maybe the people with ‘F-You’ money who actually say ‘F-You’. The really well-to-do and the academic. I’m not holding my breath.

Repost-Marxist Jamborees In Paris, Getting A Humanities Education & Getting To Space-Some Recycled Links

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Claire Berlinksi visited a Marxist Jamboree in Paris a while back (The City Journal):

‘“Oh.” She rearranged her face to look less judgmental.’

Roger Scruton on his experiences in 1968 Paris (behind a paywall at The New Criterion):

‘In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back…’

Speaking of The New Criterion, they have a piece on Jeffrey Hart:

‘Lit by an inner illumination, which regularly showed through the glimmer of his blue eyes, he checked his politics at the door and let the lyricism of “books, arts, and manners” lead the way for students.’

Rand Simberg at The New Atlantis on ‘The Return Of The Space Visionaries:’

‘Saganites view the universe as a precious jewel. How beautiful! “Look at it — but don’t touch it!” Tumlinson quips. Space is for scientific inquiry only, and that is best done by investigating it with robots. Later in life Sagan recognized the value of sending humans to other worlds, but as an astrophysicist and planetary scientist, his goals were focused on science, not economic development or settlement.’

Barring revolution, an attractive option for many committed ideologues lies in gathering under the ideals of education, health-care, peace and the environment, becoming institutionalized at taxpayer expense.

Common threads?: ‘Social’ justice is a kind of unclear concept.  Ideology ain’t necessarily science.  Many adrift in the postmodern humanities are quite hostile to the sciences, living within their own dramas and [even] doing dirt on the arts.

As previously and consistently posted-Thanks to a reader. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

‘Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

 First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.’

Universal wokeness need not be confined to Earth.  Zoe Satchel, cast adrift from her graduate English work at Yale, discusses Space Oppression!

Have you read Zoe Satchel’s piece about pre-blaming the West for any potential damage done to any potential extra-terrestrial life? Now that’s groundbreaking.

— Chris Navin (@chris_navin) March 11, 2019

Alas Arecibo, Old & New Media Thoughts And A Link To Heather MacDonald

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Alas, Arecibo. So many findings.

Maybe we can start thinking about building a telescope on the dark side of the moon?

There are reasons for hope and optimism.

This, perhaps, is one of the more important developments in recent history: Reusuable rockets mean much cheaper payloads mean much cheaper space travel:

—

On to other things…:

Ladies and Gents, here are my two cents: Getting political means having a principle and choosing a position about moving around limited resources. This competition is formalized through the political process, with boundaries set by our Constitution, from elections to lobbying to policy implementation to street-level politics. Washington D.C.’s a two-party town where the business is politics, and where there are some decent people and some pretty ugly people looking to be celebrities.

For old media outlets like Fox/CNN, getting political means serving a product to viewers once you’ve made certain ideas and political opinions an explicit part of your business model. This might work better during periods when our Republic has deeper reserves of institutional competence and public trust.

For NPR, who claim to speak for all the public, it means having some built-in incentives to neutrality and impartiality, but also similar capture by highly political actors and loud-Left activists, while succumbing to the same incentives of audience feedback-looping and gang-like rivalry we’re seeing elsewhere.

Merely gesturing towards your high ideals probably won’t put the genie back in the bottle, especially if politicizing your personal life and then formalizing this into a political coalition is your path forwards.

For the new, increasingly walled media gardens of Google/Youtube, Facebook and Twitter, it means creating and innovating the technology upon which people increasingly communicate, but also increasingly dealing with the politics of Washington D.C. and the politics of…people.

Business decisions are usually the primary guide, but all are subject to the biases of the people within them and the places in which they operate. In my opinion, it would have been nice if more of them choose the harder, higher road of more speech.

The restrictions could get pretty serious, pretty quickly. Follow the money.

What I expect: The older and more principled Left (Weinsteins, Greenwalds, Taibbis) have already moved to different platforms. As much as I don’t agree, there will likely be an American cultural and political center further Leftward, with a slower-growth economy and more ‘class’ resentment than before. The New-Old Left will push back, somewhat, against the New-New identitarian Left:

Ever more vigilance against the inherent autoritiarian/totalitarian consequences of the radical Left (unresolved philosophical foundations) will be required, as they push up into a new majority which will involve increasing technocracy.

Beware the Men Of System.

For me, the Trump split is a sign of the fracturing of the old Republican coalition, the likely movement of Christian America to a minority or a plurality, and people who’d like a more limited government into a fighting minority.

Basically, I’m okay with religious belief as an agnostic, would like a limited government, and support the 1st and 2nd amendments vigorously.

Maybe you disagree?

In the meantime, let a thousand Gretas bloom. [They’re coming…]

In my view, if you’re not getting a lot of reality and human nature right from the jump, reverting to authoritarian and hare-brained means of control once you co-opt institutions is a feature, not a bug.

Utopia and dystopia tend to go hand-in-glove.

In Seattle the City Council Of Nine is where the radical action happens.

Via the City Journal:

‘In October, the Seattle City Council floated legislation to provide an exemption from prosecution for misdemeanor crimes for any citizen who suffers from poverty, homelessness, addiction, or mental illness.‘

Don’t count on some journalists to support your right to speak, as they….speak. Other ideas, incentives and pressures matter more to them:

If you’re thinking diversity is enough to unite a Nation under its laws, in order to keep things civil and not violent, I have my doubts.

Heather MacDonald has a new book out, and I think it’s generally correct about what mid to longer-term solutions might actually unite us: ‘The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture‘

Thanks for stopping by, and to everyone that has!

The Planets Of The Solar System-Some Links

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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..

The Sun-(George Gamow)

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.

Related On This Site: Repost-’More On “Dark Flow” From Space.com’…Repost: Richard Feynman at NASA…A Short Post On Red Sprites And Blue Jets: Cosmic Origins Of Lightning?.Via Hulu: NASA Mission To The Moon And Mars..

Via Youtube: ‘Space Shuttle Launch From The Perspective Of A Solid Rocket Booster After Detachment”…From Listverse: ‘Top 10 Incredible Sounds’