Hidden ocean the source of carbon dioxide on Jupiter moon | Hacker News Reader

Hidden ocean the source of carbon dioxide on Jupiter moon

phys.org

103 pointsBrajeshwar59 comments

Does anyone else think that if news of underwater life on Europa being found is announced someday the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?”

New creatures being discovered in Earth’s deepest oceans don’t really even make most news. Europa is just a deeper ocean.

> the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?”

That wouldn't be annoying me much, if at all.

The possibly infinite conspiracy theories and misinformation making it probably impossible to follow the developments without getting confused on the other hand...

TBH if life is there or anywhere in our solar system it'd 99% chance be single-celled bacteria/archaea type life.. because that's what like 80% of Earth's history has been... and yes... I think you'll find most of the population would probably give it a shrug.

If you found multicellular crawly life "like us", sure, people would be excited. I also think that's exceedingly unlikely. If life itself here is a "fluke", eukaryotic life is wayyyyy more of a fluke.

I think if you judge the general public by TikTok views, probably. But science isn’t a general public topic. That’s ok, there’s a few hundred million of us science fans which is enough for me to feel thoroughly socialized.

Science WAS a general public topic, what changed?

Reality TV, celebrity obsession, Simon Cowell's rubbish... where do I begin?

Fractal balkanization of general public attention context windows via social media simclusters and engagement maxxing feed algos.

Finally, somebody that speaks English!

It was never a general public topic. I don't get where you think that it was. The only point where it was a general public topic when a science topic crossed politics. Like the us space program against ussr space program that was what got the publics imagination not the science.

Revisionist af. 40 years ago advancements in everything from particle physics to biology (and yes the space program too) were a staple of nightly news broadcasts. Hell there was an entire broadcast TV channel that featured programming on everything from cosmology to plate tectonics. The 80s were a thing my friend, don't discount them.

It was a general public topic in the brief period between WW2 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now the best we can hope for is shark week.

It's not like people aren't curious - it's just that there's such a deluge of content that it's hard for science to stand out.

The most likely scenario is that it would be microbes, but even microbes would be pretty amazing if they turned out to be based on something other than DNA/RNA or proved sufficiently distinct from Earth life to suggest a second abiogenesis event.

it's more interesting if they're not that different from Earth life. many species of fungi, bacteria, and lichen can survive in space. it's not just tardigrades. they're not a fluke; they're part of a pattern.

I think it's extremely likely that we'll not only find life is very common, but that many species found on earth are also found on other planets.

Rocks and dust, from what we've seen so far are governed by the same rules of physics for their size and composition. Will life obey the same rules?

Species? Surely they would diverge over the timescales involved...

And maybe evolve into the dominant life or civilization. It may turn out that upright bipedal “5 star” form is very conserved in advanced civilizations. So maybe you have the Lion people planet, the lizard people planet, the wolf people planet. We are the chimp people planet haha :)

We're the lizard people planet that appears to be a chimp people planet.

lol but why trade being lizard people for chimp people? are we ashamed?

No, we're the chimp people planet that's been taken over by disguised invaders from the lizard people planet.

They even made a TV show about this back in the 1980s, called "V".

Exactly

Hahaha. Maybe, maybe. But what if (at least some of) the lizard people are actually not from another planet but are from an alternate timeline dimension of Earth where the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event didn't happen and it was reptiles that evolved into a "humanoid" 5 pointed upright form? o_O

species is probably the wrong word. maybe genus or phylum. apologies for the rusty biology.

but sharks have been sharks for 400 to 450 million years.

I'm sure sharks are terrestrial in origin, but that's an intergalactic timescale during which very little evolutionary change occurred, or was necessary, for a particular category of creature.

maybe tardigrades have been tardigrades for 450 million years too.

Nobody is sure, but my guess is that perhaps DNA and RNA are inevitable, because perhaps they are the best/easiest solution for the problem. Even proteins and amino acids are probably inevitable, but there are more variants here.

The interesting part to detect a second abiogenesis event is the translation table from DNA to amino acids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code It's almost blocked, but as far as we know, the blocks are random. And there are even a few small variants here on Earth, that suggest in a second abiogenesis event it would work with a different randomization.

I wrote a comment with more details a long time ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34229988

Self nitpicking: The DNA could be twisted in the oposite direction. As far as we know it should work if you have the "mirrored" version of all the helper proteins and stuff. This could be a strong evidence of a second abiogenesis event.

Some form of DNA, RNA, and proteins are all technically inevitable because they're just polymers built up of standard monomers just like complex carbohydrates, fiber, plastics, waxes, etc. It's just an accident of history that carbon based life on earth settled on the specific nucleotides and amino acids. What's likely to be the most different is the transcription and translation machinery.

On the nucleotide side there are synthetic creations like Hachimoji DNA [1] and xDNA [2] and a grand total of over 500 (!) amino acids have been found in nature but only 22 are encoded in DNA. IIRC it's mostly a question of the initial conditions on Earth, specifically the acidity and temperature that decides the possible chemistry available to evolving life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachimoji_DNA

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XDNA

IIRC the 4 bases of DNA are easy to produce before life reactions, and they can form steps of the same size so the chains of the DNA spiral can go parallel. Adding more bases make everything more complicated. You need more versions of ATP, TTP, GTP and CTP and you a huge number of versions of tRNA. If I'm allowed to guess, I'd prefer a version of DNA with only 2 bases and longer codons.

(Are long codons a problem? We have codons of length 3 but the last base is somewhat ignored. Is it to hard to have codons of length 4 or 5? With 4 bases it would be a problem because you would need too many tRNA, but with 2 bases the number of tRNA is similar to ours.)

They are certainly not. Open your imagination.

It's not clear that the only option is DNA, but we will not know until we find a few independent live origins.

Anyway, even if there is a unknown biology law that says that DNA and proteins are inevitable and that confuses us when we detect a second planet with life, if they have an independent origin there is absolutely no way that they have a "genetic code" that can be confusing.

If there are microbes on/in Europa, I think they're most likely from Earth.

You just need one rock with live microbes to splash into the Europa ocean, and over 4 billion years, many such rocks must have been knocked off Earth.

Between here and there is... a lot of cold, vacuum, and extremely intense radiation. I'd be surprised if anything that evolved here could survive the trip.

Tardigrades can survive in space[0].

> In September last year, a team of scientists launched a squad of tiny animals into space aboard a Russian satellite. Once in orbit, the creatures were shunted into ventilated containers that exposed them to the vacuum of space. In this final frontier, they had no air and they were subjected to extreme dehydration, freezing temperatures, weightlessness and lashings of both cosmic and solar radiation. It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable environment for life but not only did the critters survive, they managed to reproduce on their return to Earth.

[0] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/tardigrad...

Yes, but.

https://www.esa.int/Enabling_Support/Space_Engineering_Techn...

The radiation around Jupiter is... really crazy. Like, not around-orbit-of-earth crazy, way worse.

Deinococcus radiodurans has enough radiation resistance to handle the trip from Mars to Earth (or vice versa). And that's just one we know about. We are very, very far from having ever performed an exhaustive catalog of all bacterial species, let alone one which determined the full range of bacterial radiation resistance.

Yes and I believe there was a study about them surviving reentry, and they didn't, regardless if they could survive in space

One interesting thing I guess about Europa is that it doesn't really have much of an atmosphere, so I guess re-entry wouldn't be like re-entry to earth.

On the other hand, landing on the surface of Europa doesn't get you much. There's likely several km of ice and insane intense radiation before there's possibly anything looking like a habitable zone for earth-life.

Compared to decades/centuries in space hitched to a flying object, what's a few kilometers of ice?

I was more thinking fungal or bacterial spores.

"Surviving" in harsh environments until they get somewhere nicer is their entire purpose, and they're very good at it.

When i was young we didn't know for sure that planets outside the solar system even existed. There were even some theories that planets could be extremely rare and our solar system was special. I think life is in the same category as extra solar planets once were. So yes.

That’s pretty much the whole plot of the movie Don’t look up

The Extrapolations series on Apple TV also touches on this

Oof. I forgot how ham fisted nonsense that movie was. Truly garbage and just so popular for a week.

If it's not intelligent life we can talk to, that seems about right.

Not sure what else we would do?

Is TikTok content ‘intelligent’?

Is it really surprising to you that people are more interested in things relevant to their lives? Whitey On The Moon is as relevant now as it was in 1970, hell arguably even more relevant.

Dinosaurs are still around. Everyone got used to it.

The only people to be affected will be people like Ken Ham, and literally NOTHING is getting through to them at this point.

I think if we actually found irrefutable evidence of life on Europa (or some other celestial body) and that life was definitively non-terrestrial in origin, it would make global headlines.

Even if it's just microbes and not, like, some exotic whale- or octopus-type creature, it would be a momentous event.

It'd have a huge impact on the Drake equation. Life in Europa is very much a different set of conditions too Earth.

If we found abiogenesis happened twice in one solar system, I'd start to think it must happen pretty much everywhere.

The religious leaders will probably have to do a lot of mental gymnastics to explain why this isn’t really a big deal.

Nah. It’s easy. “The Bible is god’s word, for mankind, on earth. It wasn’t written to exhaustively document everything in existence. It didn’t mention extraterrestrial life because that was not relevant to the creation and salvation of mankind.”

"There are 517 currently known species to have higher intelligence than humans, but you my fellows are the chosen race"

What would we even do if we found life on Europa?

Would we try to send a rover down and risk contaminating?

Would we be willing to risk leaving our earth junk on the planet, have we ever brought something back off a foreign body?

Would we try to study from orbit?

Could we rely on countries of earth to adhere to star treks' prime directive?

> ...have we ever brought something back off a foreign body?

Yes. Last week.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/22/nasas-osiris...

Rephrasing a bit, did osiris-rex leave anything on Bennu?

Coming back to answer my own question

We left nothing on Bennu but a 26ft crater and a cloud of debris that was gravitationally bound to Bennu.

No part of the lander was left behind

shrug Different people have different priorities. They're judging you just as harshly for not caring more about the economy or socially relevent-for-them news. I'm glad someone's engaged with the economy and politics more than I, those things are important, and there are only so many hours in the day to doom scroll.

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37602239

Well the cracks on the Europan surface were already suggestive of volcanism and this carbon dioxide detection is now more evidence for that. Nice

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

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