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Comment by 8jy89hui | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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