Pluto’s dark side spills its secrets – including hints of a hidden ocean | Hacker News Reader

Pluto’s dark side spills its secrets – including hints of a hidden ocean

nature.com

122 pointssohkamyung49 comments

If you look hard enough, you'll find evidence of what you want. Life on Europa or Enceladus seems like a far shot but relatively possible. Pluto feels like an entirely different league.

This article seems to point more at our obsession with finding life than anything else.

There’s more truth to your first statement than anything else that exists.

If you add up the numbers in 8jy89hui’s username, you get 8+8+9 = 25 = 5*5. The Law of Fives is never wrong!

http://principiadiscordia.com/book/23.php

Fnord!

Honestly, even if we find microbial life on other planets/moons, it wouldn't make the news that much as we already know some forms of life actually came to Earth by meteors.

I think it would expose 2 camps of people. Like masks have. Some would react with anger and disbelief. And for others, it would be Tuesday.

Biologists might lose their shit over seeing new forms of life. Of course it would be decades at a minimum before anything useful came out of it.

> it wouldn't make the news that much as we already know some forms of life actually came to Earth by meteors.

No, we don’t know that.

Uh, source for that? Because it's complete news to me as something "we know", and I think to pretty much most of the world's biologists and mainstream scientists of all kinds.

And we called it Covid-19. War Of The Worlds in reverse.

It begins. Ooola.

The surface layer is mostly irrelevant for life conditions when considering oceans enclosed in ice. Even a few meters under a water ice surface you already have plenty insulation from surface temperatures, whatever exothermic process you get going is going to stay warm for a long while.

Europa surface is actually more hostile for life due to the heavy radiation from Jupiter.

If we find life in icy moons, then we have to consider that the number of icy dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, the Oort cloud and the orbits beyond are likely in the thousands. As long as they kept some heat from impacts, nuclear decay or binary tides they may have oceans suitable for life. Impacts carrying life may be rarer up there but they are probably lower speed being in higher orbits, so they'd be more survivable for organisms.

Why would Jupiter give off radiation?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter

You could find the answer to this question with a 20 second web search.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter

It's more fun to have a conversation with someone though, you can have a more nuanced discussion. You shouldn't assume people are just being lazy, sometimes they just want to engage with the community.

This is a community of learners. No question is stupid. Don't assume laziness. By taking this attitude as a default, you stifle the curiosity of others. Healthy discussion shouldn't be discouraged.

Im not super knowledgeable on it but from what I understand it is a combination of solar winds, Jupiter's magnetosphere, and and Io's volcanoes blowing tons of shit into space, all intersecting together and blasting protons out.

A very strong magnetic field and a spinning planet interacting with volcanic gases from one of the moons makes a particle accelerator in orbit of the planet.

Well it's got a warm centre for a start and the elements required for RNA according to a documentary I watched the other night, so perhaps not so far-fetched.

IMO, the first non-human intelligence we find will probably be the AI we create. Might also be the last intelligence we find.

Unlike many BBC "science" programmes, this recent one about Pluto was not terrible: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqm9

Again, that question of life elsewhere when we have an abundance here but are killing it with indifference. Can we prioritise.

This is a false choice. We could both protect life here and still seek out new life at the same time.

We could. But we're not.

We are not trying particularly hard to find life elsewhere either.

This is like asking the baker to help make candles because there's a candle shortage.

People need to do what they are efficient at.

...especially in this case since China is producing the most CO2 and hasn't even agreed to slow down their CO2 production _growth_ until maybe 2030!

Pluto is probably a better place for habitation than Mars.

Most of Pluto's mass is volatiles such as water, carbon monoxide and nitrogen: things you can use to make plastics and pharmaceuticals, breathing air, trees, and human bodies. Instead of supporting millions of people on Mars Pluto has the resources to support trillions of people.

Quick google and Pluto has something like a surface temp of 47 kelvin. That’s cold enough that I think the material on the surface would turn explosively energetic if ever exposed to something like the temperatures we humans live. It also wouldn’t have soil. That far out, you really need good sources of energy like fusion and fission as solar wouldn’t provide enough.

On the other hand, I’m sure there’s some incredible science to be done out there. Like making gigantic structures (particle accelerators, telescopes, etc) out of what ever can be scraped from nearby asteroids and such. I wish we could park a satellite around it.

Who wants to live on the surface? Cut Charon up into small ringworlds (e.g. no structural difficulties at 100 km radius but you do have to put a roof on; if you could make a journal bearing that can handle 10 km/s then you can make these bigger and not put on a roof)

You can make very thin solar arrays out of plastic film + semiconductor layers. You only need D+D fusion once you get even further out.

Seems to be about 1w/m2 at the best at Pluto. It’s over 1000 times higher out here. 1/1600 th the power available at earth. Doesn’t seem enough.

We're gonna need computers there so we will ship some 10th gen Intels to use as heaters.

And run some Flash apps on them to keep the fires burning!

Electron apps probably to keep up with times I would say

given the surface temperature obviously some large corporations could run all its server farms there to keep them cooled. I nominate Facebook.

I'm sure we can scrap together a few thousand Pentium 4-based Dells to send.

> trillions of people

Really? A frozen dwarf planet in the outer solar system supporting a thousand times more people than the Earth? Without a functioning biosphere or solar energy?

Yup. Leaving aside that we have never yet to send an unmanned lander there, and it has roughly the surface area of Russia. If it were as densely populated as Manhattan over its entire surface it would have a population of less than half a trillion (appr 442,000,000,000) people. That on less than a thousandth of the W/(m^2) solar radiation of Earth.

I'd be really interested if anyone is bored enough to figure out a trillion person's population energy requirement and see how long a 50% mass/energy efficient fusion process could sustain a population of that size of a fuel base the size of Pluto. edit: assume 1 year at 1 GW-year per 1000 kg fuel for fusion power.. global energy use is about 18 TW-years, and round the population to 10^10 people. Not entirely comparable, but 10^12 people -> 1.8 * 10^3 TW-years or 1.8 * 10^6 GW-years. So about 200 million kgs of fusion fuel burned per year? And how much of the H in Pluto's water would be T or D?

Technically, once you start colonizing a planet's underground you have little vertical limitations. Manhattan isn't a cube, most people live in a 50 meters layer from the ground. 50 meters is nothing if you are building an underground grid.

Thermal insulation would be nearly perfect and radiating excess heat can be passive, so there wouldn't be energy usage from that.

Yes, but people have to eat and try accounting for per 1000 w/m^2 of sunlight over crop and grazing land, after adapting for food production in tunnels with LEDs. Or trying to figure imagine what transportation looks like. Easier to just look at current usage and accept it's a spitball estimate. For cubes, what building material available there will support 3-d structures at that scale? It's mostly ices out there. Relying Ni/Fe asteroids feels like magical thinking and is not in line with scales involved. For that mater, where's all the carbon going to come from to make the people out of?

For reference, if you assume 1000 sq ft per person (maybe generous, but you have to account for transportation conduits, plumbing, food production, structural reinforcement) with 10 ft height, it's about 300 cubic meters. For a trillion people, that ends up being a 70km cube. I doubt there is any durable foundation on Pluto, and any structure would melt the ground it's (axiomatic thermodynamics) without active cooling, which increases the energy requirements.

Ultimately, I don't see why anyone would want to live packed into a small cube on Pluto eating engineered food. A trillion people packed in a cube underground in a block of gas ices isn't going to experience wonder and joy of exploration.

Building a massive Trantor-like vertical city over the entire surface area would presumably exhaust / deplete the non-renewable resources that is the driver for this concept. What do the trillion people do then?

To quote Asimov:

"Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millennium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor's delicate jugular vein".

What would be the point of that? Even if possible, Mars is orders of magnitude easier.

Trillions? It's a tiny planet and people would have less than 20 square meters to live on. Do you have a plan for how to feed these people?

Why would you need more space on a people farm? Is it free range, probably not.

Kind of depressing to see people see a fascinating new world that has developed for billions of years in the cold made of volatile chemicals, and the first reaction of people reading about it is to cut it up and remake it in our image.

Not unlike a westerner who visits an exotic foreign country for the first time and looks for a McDonalds for lunch.

But what’s more sad here. They want McDonald’s or that there is a McDonald’s?

And what would be so sad about there being a McDonald's? Or maybe you believe that most of the developing world should be conserved in an "authentic" state for your aesthetic and political benefit?

Because if that McDonald's exists in X place and is doing a brisk business, some not too small percentage of the local population is perceiving a benefit from it. Not to mention that, being a franchise business, it's benefiting some local entrepreneur, his/her family and all the people they benefit in the local economy through the restaurant and earnings they spend elsewhere.

Sure, let's not stuff western megabrand businesses into every nook and cranny of the world's cultural landscape, but to call the rise of modern market brands in developing countries "sad" is self serving and narrow-sighted at best.

And is a toasty -230 degrees C on the surface. Just think - all those trillions of people could sunbathe without even breaking a sweat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com