Is it Snowing Microbes on Enceladus? | Hacker News Reader

Is it Snowing Microbes on Enceladus?

science.nasa.gov

95 pointsJ3L240426 comments

Off topic (sort of), but this reminded me of 2001/2010. Arthur C. Clark was on pretty much on target. In 2010 he predicted we'd find life on an icy moon of the outer solar system. He happened to posit it was Europa (around Jupiter) but then the original novel had the mission flying to Saturn. The movie and sequels changed it to Jupiter because Saturn was hard for the special effects. Anyway, pretty darn impressive sci-fi speculation that might come true. And now back to our original discussion....

I really hope that companies like SpaceX reduce the cost of space travel to the point where we can send out more probes to check things like this. It's early days for private space travel, but I think the next 10-15 years are going to be very exciting.

Not sure that they'll help much since most of the costs aren't launch related:

"The total cost of [the Cassini-Hughes] scientific exploration mission is about US$3.26 billion, including $1.4 billion for pre-launch development, $704 million for mission operations, $54 million for tracking and $422 million for the launch vehicle."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassini–Huygens

Space probes are already cheap for what they accomplish. For comparison, we could have sent about 45 Cassini probes for what has been spent on the International Space Station (all costs in).

I work for NASA in a planetary science organization, so let me say this: cost accounting of space missions is unique to the way NASA/ESA operates. Much of that cost is tied up in things like paying researchers and graduate students to do studies during the decades of time between missions, obscene university overheads, re-inventing the wheel with a new spacecraft design for every mission, prime contractors who attempt to maximize the number of subcontractors and resulting complexity because that awards them points in the selection committee, etc.

Private industry could do it way, way cheaper. SpaceX could probably build and launch 45 Cassini probes for what cost to do Cassini–Huygens.

Let's see how things go, thus far SpaceX has proved they can get stuff into orbit but they aren't super-cheap yet.

Private industry can do a lot of things but a Cassini probe mission for $71 million all in seems unlikely in the near future.

NASA has a contract with SpaceX for 12 supply missions at $1.6 billion while NASA says a shuttle launch was about $450 million (but that figure probably doesn't include all the costs).

So SpaceX at this stage is at about 25-33% the cost of a space shuttle mission, but that's still a long way until we get to "45 Cassini probes" for $3.2 billion.

"...And we have found that aside from water and organic material.."

Surely finding organic material is an incredibly big deal, yet it's mentioned in passing. I feel as though I'm missing something fundamental here.

It used to be the case that life was considered as some sort of fluid stuff which was added to the Elements to turn the 'inorganic' material into 'organic' material -- the low-level chemical distinction between 'nonliving' and 'living'. In Latin the life-fluid stuff was called vis vitalis and this view was called Vitalism.

What you are missing is that in 1828 a dude named Friedrich Wöhler took two indisputably 'inorganic' compounds, put them together, heated them up on a stove, let them cool, and got an indisputably 'organic' compound called urea, which disproved vitalism and established that 'organic' is a relatively arbitrary condition having nothing to do with life per se. Today it basically means "It contains carbon in it, and it wasn't one of the carbon-containing substances which were so plentiful in non-living places that vitalists considered them inorganic." The list of exceptions is not too long, but it dates back to this old philosophy. Organic no longer means 'living' because of the disproof of vitalism.

The More You Know.

Thank you, very well explained.

"Organic" in this context just means carbon chemistry.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_chemistry

Chemist here. This is absolutely the correct response.

Organic does not imply biological in origin or nature whatsoever. The laws that govern organic chemistry are constant throughout the universe -- I'm not an astrochemist, but there is likely a nontrivial amount of very interesting organic chemistry happening in our solar system. I believe we've detected the presence of amino acids, for instance, which are the product of both organic (and in our case) biochemical reactions.

A lot of "organic" molecules are created spontaneously by inorganic reactions. Most of these molecules are important to living organism (and they (we) create more of these molecules on purpose, faster and more efficiently).

For example, many of the molecules that were found in the space near stars are "organic". (In this list, most of the molecules with 4 or more atom are "organic".) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_interstellar_and_circum...

Slight correction and/or distinction here: organic molecules are formed by organic reactions. Organic does not imply biological, merely carbon chemistry. Addition, substitution, Diels-Alder, etc. etc. There is nothing special going on here, it's just how we organize and typify common themes and patterns.

Organic has a precise meaning to the chemist. See my other reply in the grandparent thread for further elaboration.

Is it snowing organic compounds? Probably. Is it snowing complex organic compounds? Let's go see. Is it snowing microbes? At this point, we're leaving the realm of scientific evidence and throwing out sensational headlines. I'm not saying that it's a particularly poor speculation, but I personally think the article name could have been more accurate.

I agree. Nasa makes a lot of searching for life in various places, but I reckon it's something for media soundbites than the actual reason they explore places. For example, they're still searching for life on Mars. Google "nasa life on mars" for examples.

It sounds like they can't figure out where all of the heat is coming from. Is it possible this moon is partially heated by radioactive decay like the earth is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_gradient

Tidal heating is likely the largest contributor.

Tidal friction explains why Io is the most volanic body in the solar system and its deformation.

Enceladus has a density of 1.6 g/cc, so it is mostly water and has little of the heavy radioactive elements. It probably does have a noticeable amount of light potassium-40 though. Earth has a density of 5.5 g/cc, because it is loaded with the dense elements, especially the uranium and thorium that make much of Earth's geothermal heat.

(Numbers from Wikipedia.)

This is so exciting! and I don't really know why. These are just microbes we're talking about.

Life appearing independently on two different planets in the same solar system dramatically jacks up the odds that life appeared somewhere else in a universe made up of 100 billion galaxies, each of which contains 100 billion star systems.

If we find life elsewhere in our solar system, my money is on it sharing a common ancestor with life on Earth. We already know that rocks ejected by meteorite impacts can wind up on another planet. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine some spores coming along for the ride.

The converse is true as well. If life is not found in an environment that is hospitable to it, it dramatically reduces the odds that life exists anywhere else.

We need to monetize the investigation of Enceladus. Bringing back alien life from another planet would give us the opportunity to adapt their sensors and tools into our technology. Could we patent the blueprint of the alien life to reward the company that brings it back here?

Could the government say: "whatever company brings back an alien life form from enceladus can receive just compensation for any company who uses it for 50 years?"

You are assuming that:

a: There is life there.

b: That the life has some kind of economic value.

c: That there is a world wide government that could enforce this.

d: That it's morally OK to patent life.

Incidentally, Spewing Plumes is (now) the name of my (nonexistent) band.

Wow -- apparently as karma goes up, humor goes down.

No really, please bury this: - You expended energy clicking it - I get the satisfaction of righteous indignation - In 12 months, my bitterness is justified by the meaninglessness of it all

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