https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrothermal_vent_microbial_co...
That's yet to be determined as far as I know: extremophiles have all evolved from less tolerant life forms as far as I'm aware.
It's uncontroversial that life is much denser in more hospitable environments. If the extreme environments are in regular contact with the hospitable environments, and if evolution is sufficiently random, you would expect over time that most organisms anywhere have an ancestor in the hospitable environment.
Even if life can arise in the extreme environment.
See the excellent book The Vital Question by Nick Lane.
What are your odds?
Once in orbit it's possible to reach things in the asteroid belt entirely through very high efficiency ion/hall effect thruster propulsion, which can have specific impulse as high as 8000.
Any probe capable of drilling or melting into the crust of ceres or Europa or similar will have to be quite large...
And, perhaps let's talk about a conditional bet that removes the difficulty of space exploration:
The bet pays me X dollars, if human vessels can go to the asteroid belt and not find life. It pays you Y dollars, if we find life. And no payment in either direction, if we can't go to the asteroid belt and don't find life. Say, all limited to the next 100 years.
What's the ratio of X to Y that would make you accept such a bet?
1. Backtrapolating exponential evolution finds an origin older than Earth. https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.3381
I'd be happy to pay up in case of pre-historic panspermia.
Before SpaceX commercial launch payloads cost $5,000 to $10,000 per pound.
Falcon 9 payloads cost around $1,500 per pound.
Falcon Heavy payloads cost around $1,100 per pound.
Starship payloads will cost between $100 and $500 per pound. It will be able to lift at least 100 tons to orbit. And using in orbit refueling, it will be able to accelerate that 100 ton payload 6.9 km/sec, making landing it on Ceres trivial.
How it will likely work is passengers will take a Starship to orbit. It will be refueled in LEO, then accelerate to Mars injection velocity to match orbit with a passing Cycler. It will dock with the Cycler, passengers will switch to the Cycler for the duration of the journey. The Cycler will be much roomier, have better shielding, and likely rotate to provide Mars level artificial gravity. Passengers will have far better work, entertainment and workout options.
Once the Cycler approaches Mars, passengers will reboard their Starship, and it will Aerobrake to land, while the Cycler continues on in its orbit, which returns to Earth. The Cycler never slows to orbit either Earth or Mars, it just coasts between them but occasionally will need fuel for course optimizations.
The only problem is that Cyclers will take 9 months to go to or return from Mars. They will be like large cruise ships. Starship can make the trip to Mars in as little as 3 months, and some will still do that. They will be the equivalent of the long distance direct flight, trading a less comfortable and less healthy trip for a big time savings.
The trajectory adjustments may be small enough that Hall thrusters, or even just reorienting solar panels or inactive radiators get enough light pressure to make it work. If we are OK with spending a little more propellant, the cycler can be put on a shorter quasi-cyclic orbit that requires course corrections on every pass (IIRC, the shortest trajectory Aldrin considered in his paper would enter Earth's atmosphere, or crust, I don't remember). The cycler maintenance cycles also don't need to coincide with in-transit crews and, in some passes, crews can bring more cargo (or the cycler can dock with autonomous cargo freighters).
If the cycler is large enough, it may have its own food production, so you don't need to carry that too, but then we can also imagine it as a full habitat that's permanently populated and passes by Earth and Mars every now and then and also plants us firmly into science fiction territory. IIRC, the shortest real cyclic path also takes a trip to the Asteroid belt before passing Mars on its way back to Earth. That, I imagine, would be a popular destination for future space colonists looking for resources in the belt to supply passing cyclers.
But Cyclers won’t save much fuel. Starships (or their descendants) still have to accelerate and decelerate the same, and still need almost as much shielding (a solar flare during descent once you’ve left the cycler is still deadly). Most of the starship mass isn’t radiation shielding, it’s reentry shielding, tankage, engines, etc.
But once we get to the Cycler stage I think fuel costs will be low on our lists of concerns anyways.
Manufacturing fuel in space would be the way to go.
Or eg have giant solar panels in orbit that power a laser to shine at your spaceships. Either to propel them directly, or to transmit power for their ion thrusters etc.
Starship enters LEO with empty fuel tanks, meaning it can lift much more payload per pound of fuel. Being refueled in orbit is cheap, because fully reusable flights are cheap. And for Mars, Starship only needs enough fuel to get there, it can make fuel on Mars. That means it doesn’t have to carry even more fuel to fly the return fuel to Mars.
Starship will be fully reused. It will launch a 5x larger payload than the partially reusable Falcon 9 at a lower launch cost. So somewhere in the $5M to $20M range.
Starship can be fully refueled in LEO with eight tanker flights, Even at $20m per flight, that costs no more than the Atlas V that just launched perseverance to Mars, only with 40 times more mass.
That's still not cheap enough to do lander/surface manipulation science in the asteroid belt without significant philanthropic or government funding.
At $500/pound, if a Ceres unmanned probe lander with drill/melting apparatus weighs 15000 kg when placed in low earth orbit (before whatever staging/fuel it expends to get to ceres and land), that's still a $16.5 million launch cost before you add the cost of the R&D to build the spacecraft, operate its command and control network, etc.
I will be very pleased and enthusiastic but also shocked if something like that is accomplished for a project budget under $30-40m in the next 20 years.
Not saying it's impossible but we're well within the realm of "big budget" science. Like the operating budgets of one of the smaller (not McMurdo or Amundsen-Scott) permanent research bases in Antarctica, or something like the this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiky%C5%AB
Big enough that even top tier universities form consortia to collaborate in science projects such as the ALMA array.
Do you mean NERVA?: