NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty ocean
science.org
science.org
Liquid oceans beneath the surface.
A brownish-red smattering of color despite the solid ice on the surface... maybe it's irradiated salt or magnesium sulfate, but it's an awful odd color for ice.
We need to send a probe to Europa, like yesterday, and we need to send one that can get below the ice and look around.
IMO, "need" is a strong word here and if I thought that this is something we needed to do I would re-examine my priorities. We need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war machine, we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change.
Explore space together or in competition, instead of war.
And climate change is a concern for everyone.
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/...
We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities. You would not spend your time trying to find out if there is a form of life 20 feet below you.
Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not have these basics.
Often enough. Quite succesful, even though I brought most basic supplies with me. So I know about basic needs.
"Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not have these basics."
And there is a possibility, that this always will be the case. And I would not wait to find out and stop with all general progress till then.
My compassion is with humanity as its whole, not with every single human. I fear, I have not limitless compassion and I don't see, how we can stop all wars just like that(the main reason for famine today - can you stop the Gaza war for instance?), but I see how little effort can be spend to finance such an interesting mission.
Also, space exploration is a tool to bring humanity together.
No, they both exist. Motivation by your legislator is what doesn't exist. There's a reason some departments get almost everything they ask for and others get almost nothing: they know how to grease the political machine. That doesn't mean we should fight over scraps for science and social programs, it means you need to acknowledge that there's a game that needs playing. And yeah, it feels real bad that there are lives at stake playing that game, but that's the fault of capitalism, not science.
"As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The US has the worst infant mortality, and maternal mortality rates, of any first world nation.[2]
Just think of it: with the highest spend of GDP per citizen, and getting so much less you're the butt of every other country's jokes about healthcare systems.
"Lack of money" has so little to do with the conditions in the US, it's essentially negligence to think it's the problem. The US doesn't want to fix any of the problems you list: it easily could, with the resources it has today.
[1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2...
[2] https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mor...
But we should aim high, higher than we think our potential is, to actually get somewhere.
Sure thing. We don't have to do them in a specific order, there are enough resources to tackle them all at the same time. A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't affect others, but at least someone is doing something about one of those projects.
> A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't affect others,
$5 billion would go a long way to providing shelter, water, fire, and food for the homeless in the United States.
Priorities.
It's no longer enough to work hard to get into heaven, you need to work hard on something useful for humanity (decided arbitrarily by whomever) to reach eternal life.
Which is frankly hilarious coming from someone who's supposedly "following the Dao".
I agree this is a false dichotomy, but also pretty sure dumping money into building houses and hiring every unemployed person at a socially inclusive minimum wage would eliminate both housing and unemployment.
But I also think we have enough resources to both conduct space exploration, house and feed everyone. We can eliminate involuntary unemployment with a couple of keystrokes.
The sum total of all of this would be to stimulate the type of innovation required to transition to a zero carbon emissions economy.
It’s one of those things where the details of the implementation are critical. In the US specifically, large amounts of money have already been put towards these problems to little effect.
To be clear, I staunchly support spending money on these things; clearly, they’re dire needs that should be addressed, but if something isn’t done to increase effectiveness and hold those responsible for the spending accountable, increasing spending is unlikely to move the needle.
Additionally, even if the goal were to reallocate funds, space programs aren’t really the best place to look. The pile of cash that would be yielded by “just” cutting fat in the US military apparatus would likely eclipse that of shutting down NASA altogether.
No. That $5B paid lots of people directly in their salaries, which then got spent in their local economies which then in turn went to construction workers building houses for those employees, the grocers selling the food those people eat, etc. It also went to go buy lots of actual raw materials, which once again employed lots of people and spurred those industries and all the secondary and tertiary spending that happens and what not.
So in a way, that government spending on science is investing in those towns. And ultimately does lead towards more people being able to afford a home, put groceries on the table, etc.
Growing up surrounded by NASA in Clear Lake it was quite obvious to me how important government spending was to the local economy, and how negatively it would affect people if the government decided it wouldn't be worth it to fund it anymore.
How many blue-collar construction workers will do better when NASA gets funding to upgrade their 1960's facilities? Won't it help them afford housing? Won't it help ensure their kids don't go hungry?
Creating a dependent local economy or industry that consumes more than it produces is not an investment, it is welfare.
While government can make investments, not all spending is an investment any more than all the purchases I make are investments.
> An investment is something that provides positive return over time
That's one definition, implying it will just continue to give a return. Like dividends. Another would be "an act of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result." A definition on Wikipedia is "commitment of resources to achieve later benefits". All the spending is investing in knowledge of space, material science, biology, and more, hopefully for a worthwhile result.
One could say, "a student invested a lot of time studying for their sixth-grade math exam". Very much an acceptable statement to make, I don't think most would argue it is improper English. Is that strongly tied to positive productivity and economic exports? Did passing that test directly affect the GDP of the country?
Either way, the people I'm replying to weren't trying to debate the semantic differences between "investing" and "spending", and that wasn't really my main point. I do agree there are differences in this, but that can often be a matter of opinion and perspective.
I would just add the following thoughts. When discussing investment in terms of money, and especially government spending, the connotation is typically positive economic returns.
Similarly, if we are being pedantic, a bad investment is still an investment, as in the case where the returns are less than the cost. I would categorize much of this spending as a bad investment, one that leaves the country worse off in the long run.
I think the word is largely without meaning when used with the subjective definitions outside the economic context. It simply reduces it to "I like this thing". Buying beer is now an investment, because it will have some later "benefits", and I think getting hammered on a Tuesday night is "worthwhile" because I like doing it.
So, the only reason why a city should build a park or a library should solely based on positive economic returns. We should price out how much actual dollar value return the library directly gives to the town this quarter or the playground on the park. How much did adding that swing set really increase property values? I guess we shouldn't have done it. Otherwise, it is purely just wasteful spending.
I would leave you with the following thought. Not everything needs to have an easily measurable economic/financial benefit to be a good thing. Having such a myopic view isn't a positive thing in my opinion. I agree there's still such a thing as waste even in (especially in?) the space programs of the last few decades, but acting like funding space programs in general is a waste because it didn't generate positive economic returns in an easily measurable fashion to be quite a shortsighted viewpoint.
And as mentioned, it's not like the money evaporated. It moved. That money spent is in the communities. It's in the homes there. Its built businesses. Its grown entire cities. People went to college because of that spending. People planted crops because of that spending. That spending kept the velocity of money up instead of having it stagnate under someone's mattress.
I dont think I agree with the velocity of money argument. It wouldnt be stagnating under some mattress. However, that is a much bigger topic that I dont think Im up for today
Should we instead force the scientists working on this to abandon space research to "fix the ills of the world" so they do "something useful" instead?
I honestly don't know what people who keep complaining about scientific research, especially space exploration, want. It is not those billions spent to send a probe to Europa the cause or the solution to the world's problems. Hint: it is not money the cause nor the solution to the world's problems, nor are drive-by social media activists complaining about it.
In comparison, many other branches of science work on much leaner budgets, and sending stuff to space actually does look very wasteful from a "$ per paper" perspective. If you disregard the weapons development value, there is actually very little reason to do these big-money experiments that could instead support the research of hundreds or thousands of more frugal science experiments.
At the same time, there are lots of ways to do space research more cheaply, like launching small satellites. Most of the people who don't like this stuff are against the billion-dollar single missions rather than against astrophysics or against the concept of sending things to space. Many of them also are against the FCC project at CERN, for example.
That's ridiculous, though. But it's the logical extreme of the defeatist argument that there's no way to get more money for these things.
It's obvious that we can tax them a bit, but if we tax them too much they use their power to stop it. That power manifests in many ways. It can be to give money to right wing politicians, or it can be to move to lower-tax regimes. But anyway it's clear that there is not an unlimited pot of rich/corporate tax money out there ready for the picking without resistance.
This is objectively not true. Resource usage (money or other resources) is zero sum, and every dime spent on science is money that cannot be used for something else. I'm not opposed to spending money on science, but it doesn't do any good to make false claims like this.
But sure, we also need to tax the ultra-rich more, so that we can have money for all the things that need to be done. Tax evasion is a problem, not NASA's spending.
So basically you are proposing to forcedly seize money from 0,01% of the population to fulfill your view of a multi planetary future for human kind. I don’t see that very ethical or appropriate to be honest.
I’m all in for space exploration, but should be done in a way that respects individuals and their decisions on how to live their life and not by taxing them to fulfill the wishes of a few. That’s why space exploration needs to be a private endeavor or at least financed publicly but only via optional taxing.
It is usually people refusing to do any work and pay the cost, but telling others that they should do these things.
Most topics have no lack of advocating, and a large lack of people willing to take action.
In short, I think most advocates are hypocrites trying to exploit others.
These things don't seem to depend on each other. And different people want to do different things in this world. I don't think that the people who want to help shelter homeless people would be deterred by other people wanting to send a space probe, or vice-versa.
I picked housing from the problems you mentioned just because it was the first one. I think this argument would still apply for the others. The reasons we're having those problems have nothing to do with how many probes we send to space.
Society hasn't processed something we have no evidence of (yet), that doesn't make much sense. Ask "society" at large if they believe there are other species out there and most of them will say "I don't know" or "Probably not". In many places, religion is likely to be more believable to people than multi-cell life somewhere else than Earth.
I can't figure out what you're referring to. Can you post a link?
>> In 1996, a group of scientists found features in the likeness of microscopic fossils of bacteria in the meteorite, suggesting that these organisms also originated on Mars. The claims immediately made headlines worldwide, culminating in U.S. president Bill Clinton giving a speech about the potential discovery.
Finding life on Europa, or anywhere other than Earth, would be foundational. The most likely scenario is that it would be carbon-RNA based, which could imply a panspermia theory rooted in the early stages of the solar system’s formation.
The off chance that we find something non carbon, non RNA, or some combination thereof -based (non carbon RNA would be wild) would obviously have some pretty large implications as well.
Though unfortunately the most likely scenario is that we don’t find any life forms, as is the historical trend, and our search continues.
Sure, finding actual living organisms would create new opportunities for study in xeno-biology, but it likely wouldn't change anything significant in our lives unless it is contact with complex multi-cellular and preferably intelligent beings.
Even for science, the most likely possibility (life on Europa, if it exists, would use the same basic chemistry, but not the exact same things as life on Earth) would not have any major impacts in reality: it would end various kinds of speculation, it would give us some new avenues for looking for extra-solar life, and it would create new carriers in studying this new branch of biology. But it would likely not change anything major in existing fields, it wouldn't give us some new perspective on life on Earth, and it would not change much about how we study biology. Just like finding out that not all protozoa are bacteria (some are archaea), or before that finding that fungi are a completely separate kingdom of life from plants and animals, didn't fundamentally change anything even in the day to day lives and study of even the vast majority of biologists.
Life on the level of bacteria is interesting, but as you say still uses our chemistry. We put something in a text book and move on. Maybe a few study it and science learns a lot but nothing that affects our life.
If the life is intelligent though they may have solved some problems we have. Maybe they have a quantum theory of gravity that we don't (my understanding of physics is we think this should exist but we don't have one - but I'm not a physicist).
Of course the life may be intelligent but at a level equivalent to us 3000 years ago - just learning the basics of geometry. There is now the moral issue of how much should we tell them that we know.
This is like saying the normal people in the Marvel Universe are basically no different than people in ours, which I guess is true but only in the most superficial anti-imaginative way
But if we found out that there are bacteria-like micro-organisms on Europa, or even "fish" in the oceans there, I don't agree that this would change anything in the outlook of the vast majority of people on Earth, even subtly.
It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.
Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal form after death.
The likelihood of anything we would consider 'intelligent' being first contact is likely fairly low.
As much as saying that does make me sad, evidence of alien life is honestly the one big thing that I am sad about living when I am living since I would love that to be a reality before I die.
I wondered about this - perhaps some sort of lander with a thermo-nuclear energy source that could slowly melt its way down to the liquid water, spooling out some sort of antenna from an internal compartment as it goes.
Turns out though that the crust is up to 25KM thick though. Probably not viable!
Edit: turns out 25KM spools of fibre are openly available to buy online (so i.e. not exactly unheard of) and only weigh 3-4kg. Maybe not so out of reach after all? Leave a "base station" on the surface at one end of the fibre, and at the other end another "subsurface station" that has a ROV-style tethered- "swimmer" (not a lander) that communicates back to the surface via the fibre, and the base station radios back to some orbiting thing/DSN etc. Fun to imagine these sort of things without any knowledge or experience or credentials! :)
So a water channel within the ice (going "up" from the sea below) would have a decreasing pressure gradient as it ascended?
E.g. What would the pressure of a bubble of water under 1km of ice vs 15km of ice?
[1]: https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/draft5.pdf
I think your main issue will be that the hole freezes over behind you, meaning you'll need some serious power to pull the fiber through 20 km worth of ice. You can of course pull the fiber in a sleeve of some kind, if you can keep water out of it, and if you can't there's really not much you can do about it.
I would think the best option would be a somewhat high power radio transmitter/receiver.
> would think the best option would be a somewhat high power radio transmitter/receiver.
If you can figure this one out, the militaries of the world would love to have a chat with you. Water/ice is ridiculously good at attenuating EM. It's a huge issue with submarine communications.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo
Getting an ice plug started is a problem, you need meltwater to get fast heat transfer from the melt-head to the ice, but you can't have liquid water at Europa surface pressure.
I mean, that's why we go. Clipper is going to figure out, in part, whether we actually need to go down 20km or if we can just scoop up stuff kicked by cryovulcanism into low orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from...
Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms of ice is short-sighted.
Just saying, there are people in these comments observing that "you can buy a 25km fiber cable online" lol... I love the exuberance but people may not be fully grokking the scope of the engineering problem here :) every mission comes at the expense of other possible missions, and drilling 25km down into Europa could easily be a feat that we would fail to accomplish even with 5 or 10 missions. There are challenges we will not surmount in our lifetimes, and this might be one of them. Deep drilling is dramatically harder than your average HN user probably realizes... exuberance alone cannot conquer physics.
On a more serious note, it's a travesty that lawyers get all the hate and PEs get none.
Code & techbros are not the solution to everything.
Where is all of this energy coming from?
A nuclear reactor, probably.
All 300 watts of it? It's not going to even make an indentation, let alone through 10s of km of ice.
Even a fully fleged nuclear reactor isn't gonna do much damage to Europa and potential life. Swimming in a nuclear reactor's fuel pool is quite safe; water's some of the best shielding we have. https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
(Google image search suggests that a similar approach has been taken by the TOW, it's not a spool that could be reversed by adding a motor to an axis, more like a tightly packed coil that gets straightened as wire is pulled out)
As for the energy, I assumed GP was thinking of solar panels on the surface. I also assume that we share scepticism based on the low sun intensity out in the orbit of Jupiter... (and that's before you even start wondering how much further away from the melting point that ice will be than all ice of conventional human experience)
Wouldn't this be limited to the tensile strength of the material and the weight of the cable? Granted, Europa has much less gravity, but 25km is a lot of cable weight.
Consider something as small as fishing line; one online estimate gives it .245g/m. At 25km, that's over 3 tons of line weight hanging down a hole on Earth or nearly 800 lbs on Europa.
What you have to worry about is the ice shifting and severing the cable.
>The probe bears on the ice below it
This implies it is bearing the weight of the entire cable above it. So instead of the tensile stress being the limiting factor, it's not the compressive stress. If you're intent is to retract the spool, it would still be in tensile stress as it comes up. (And you'd need enough torque to do so. But maybe you the plan would be to abandon in place).
>What you have to worry about is the ice shifting and severing the cable.
I agree, that's a pretty big concern.
Rest assured that incredibly smart people at a propulsion laboratory are working on solving these sorts of problems. If you are a citizen of the USA, you can help by asking your elected representatives to adequately fund these efforts so these personnel won’t be laid off in the next few months.
If that's not your claim then I don't understand your valuation and the rest of the comment doesn't track.
And not to engage at a base level but my use of immeasurable is correct in being interpreted as "large" unambiguously, at least by Merriam webster.
A "viable billion dollar mission" includes all sorts of other things that are of value, including developing capabilities to do things that are strategically important, which I would claim is where a large majority of that billion dollars comes from. Similarly, I would expect that JPL would very much inflate the value of their own work. Everyone does.
Also, I see "incapable of being measured" with "broadly : indefinitely extensive" tacked on in the MW definition. There is no requirement there that "immeasurable" mean "large", just "incapable of being measured" with the expectation that it is used when describing things that are extreme. My most recent use of "immeasurable" was "immeasurably small" which I'm sure you would agree is a proper use.
Hosting the photos costs money too, which I don't think GP is considering.
If NASA had to personally crowdfund these $5b missions, they'd probably still happen. That sum is also in the ballpark of Apple's marketing budget - I would not at all be surprised if they spent that much just to get their logo on the mission. Not to be outdone, Samsung pays next one.
But maybe you wanted to talk about the value-add to the society instead - which is easily going to dwarf $1m by many orders of magnitude just through advances in sciences, industry, and international cooperation that happen in the course of planning, building, executing, and pouring over results of such a mission. All of these things have a tendency to accrue interest, so the sooner, the better.
You could also take a state-centric view, and there also I guarantee you that the value of the image-lift and international cooperation is going to be worth more than a measly $1m to the US. A US president making a single international state visit costs multitudes of that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
They did some drilling to the Ice at the Antarctica Vostok station, going donw to about 3 km:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilli...
Still one of my favorite movies though.
Yeah, but if one of them had, he'd probably be too embarrassed to tell you!
Once the ice freezes again behind the probe it would protect the fibre... perhaps?
Fortunately something like that wouldn't be too difficult to test on Earth - probe recovery might be tricky though.
A nuclear reactor could produce basically no heat while offline, then be switched on and suddenly provide 100s of kW when it gets to wherever it's going. The hard part in space is radiating away the heat, but if you're on an ice world, that's orders of magnitude easier.
The hardest part I'd see would just be getting into the ice; there's not really any "melting" in vacuum. The constant boiling away of the water would keep insulating your heater from the ice. Meters 1 to 20,000 are probably pretty easy.
https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/water-wiggler-toy
So it can "slip down" by a continuous unrolling process!
In fact you could just boil the water to steam and vent it out the top via a surface valve assembly - the interior would act like a vacuum thermace flask.
You mean in the Arctic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology...
I know this because I was always interested in the possibility of deep mining operations in other planets, and did some research on it. There are a few interesting things we can achieve with deep mines in other planets:
- Preserving resources and nature on earth. Mining is quite disruptive to the ecosystem and other planets are abundant with common minerals, like iron, cobalt, gold and silicates.
- Underground bases might be easiest and simpler way of building any settlements on other planets, removing material can be done in-situ without need send as much construction materials. It gives great protection against radiation, good insulation agains temperature changes, and can be pressurized to Earth's atmosphere.
- It gives access to materials only found deeper in the crust. And different planets might have different mineral deposits
- This is not practical, but also interesting, you could technically dig deep enough to have enough air pressure in a open cave to not need a pressurized suit. In Mars that would be around 20 km, a much more comfortable atmospheric pressure would be found around 40km though.
The mission is: > 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life.
For those who don't know "SSP lore" is the idea that a technological breakaway civilization descended from Mars-via-Antarctica "Space Nazis" who back-engineered anti-gravity tech in the 1950s (the bell craft) with the help of psychics who channelled aliens designs, and then began retrofitting submarines with advanced propulsion systems, before graduating to more advanced "interstellar craft", have long been out among our local cluster of stars, pushing humans beyond the limits of public space programs, and now consist of an international cadre of Earth humans (and born-on-Mars humans), involved in intergalactic trade and exploration....Aaaand it's so secret that if you are recruited and then allowed back to Earth, you are mind wiped and age-regressed/time-travelled back to the moment you signed up after a 20 year stint, the fabled "20-and-back" program.
Eventually, Admiral Byrd was dispatched to bring these space Nazis to heal and steal their tech, but was defeated, by said tech. The US then engineered operation Paperclip to get as much of this advanced German tech as possible. And a detente was reached with the Space Nazis in Antarctica, and possibly some deals, while they continued to develop their "high voltage electrogravitic and torsion field technology", all of which resulted in them eventually moving their operations to Mars, while the "Allies" (now well infiltrated by these Space Nazis in supreme positions of power thanks to Paperclip and their own wiles) took over most of the Antarctic underground bases, perhaps even procuring some of this advanced technology for themselves, before the Space Nazis became Mars Germans and broke away with it.
After some research: Yes, you're thinking of Battlezone (1998), a sci-fi game developed by Activision that includes a plot about a breakaway civilization. In this first-person shooter/real-time strategy hybrid, a covert space race unfolds between the U.S. and Soviet Union during the Cold War. The plot reveals that both superpowers discovered a mysterious bio-metal on the Moon and Mars, which led them to develop advanced technologies far beyond what is available on Earth. This triggers a secret battle for dominance in space, particularly on Mars and other celestial bodies.
The story builds up to the idea of hidden, advanced tech and a breakaway society-like structure, with the various factions vying for control of extraterrestrial resources and power. Mars serves as one of the major battlegrounds, and the breakaway civilization theme is interwoven into the covert war that's kept hidden from the general population of Earth.
Similar but not exact. So doesn't rise to the level of "must have lifted from the game". However, it's also similar to the plot of DOOM (grunt has to repel demon invasion from secret research outpost on mars), and Bioforge. And a whole bunch of other great 90s sci-fi stuff. Those were the days! Hahaha :)
So, you should be on meds, right? But maybe they don’t have meds for what you are. So maybe you should be in therapy, but maybe you’re not prepared to do the inner work to make yourself a better person. So that’s what we get, this you, right now.
Or maybe you just can’t get what you need in Tokyo, yeah? Hahahaha!
It's unfortunate, because NASA is probably the only organization on earth capable of achieving such goals.
Most people would agree we dont need to know about Europa today. If you look at other issues where the government spends money like a drunk sailor, there are at least debated claims of urgency and need.
And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of money into some venture, only to give up on it after the first failure is something we should all be angry about. If its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.
Getting out of LEO has a lot of challenges; the delta V is expensive, but also survivability away from Earth's thermal radiation and magnetic field gets harder. This has a compounding effect where costs and scope run away; if you need to buy expensive launch, rad-hard hardware and do exotic things for power and heating, you want to amortize the fixed portions of these over more science...
I want my Star Trek timeline back :(
I hear China is kicking our asses at space stuff. Don’t look it up, there’s no time to check me on that, we need to hurray and load up the dump truck with money for NASA before China takes over Europa.
I am this close to suggesting a round of Barotrauma in the next team-building exercise I'll participate in, as it reveals a lot about what works and what doesn't in a team.
I get why they do the narration that way, but man I do not care about the folks narrating their experience back on earth when we could be watching the folks on / near Europa. It has an unintentional self important vibe about the "I was on my way into the office when something happened." whole thing.
So we are going to wait 7 years, and spend $5B to actually not search for life on Europa? Why? Sometimes it feels like Nasa is doing everything possible for not searching for life outside earth, which would be a game changing discovery for humanity, several orders of magnitude more important than the habitability of Europa.
That statement isn't remotely true and it all depends entirely on what you define "life" as being.
That being said, I have no logical reason to know life exists anywhere else except on this planet. I think it's important to differentiate between the likelihood of something and claiming certainty about it. While the possibility of extraterrestrial life is exciting and worth exploring, until we have direct evidence, we can't confidently say it’s out there.
In fact, we can't even answer the philosophical question, "Do other people aside from me even actually exist?" with 100% certainty. This brings us to the ironic part: sometimes, claiming we know life exists elsewhere can be a reflection of the same kind of ego that leads others to believe humanity is uniquely special in the universe. Both positions can, in a way, stem from an overestimation of our ability to know the unknowable.
I think it's great to remain curious and open to discovery, but also humble about the limits of our current knowledge. :)
I am not sure how to talk about things outside the observable universe. If light speed provides the ultimate limit for causality, this outside might as well not exist, from our perspective.
You are right in that it seems pretty “obvious” that we aren’t alone… the math is overwhelmingly in favor of it being everywhere. But there is a huge distance between the math saying it exists and actually looking at it with your own eyes.
How common is it? In what environments does it occur?
Does it start the same way everywhere? Does it end up going the same directions the same way everywhere? Does it use the same metabolic pathways and the same genetic material?
Even just a confirmation without taking samples or deeper analysis is enough to start on these questions. Right now we can't even really start.
The obstacles are numerous. Even Jupiter's magnetic field is a huge problem. There was recent talk that this missions electronics may not be sufficiently hardened. Typically, space probes to the gas giants will have a highly elliptical orbit to mitigate potential radiation damage.
So just surviving in Europa's orbit is a problem. Landing on Europa is another huge problem. There's no atmosphere to brake into. An icy surface may have crevasses and such and you could potentially immediately lose your probe. So how do you land safely on ice when you don't know how much weight that surface will support? A solution might be to do a burn to slow down and do a stationary land but that's also complex and adds a lot of weight. Also the engines and the fuel need to survive for 7 years until they're used.
Conquer all those obstacles and you're now on the surface. Now what? The ocea is under kilometers of ice so you can't really reach it. You really have to look for a volcano/geyser and you have to get to what that produces without being destroyed or damaged. Does the ice thin? Is there heat that means the ice thins and there's (heated) liquid water underneath? We really have no idea.
Finally you get a sample of subsurface ocean water and now what? What does life look like? How do you detect that? What signatures are you looking for? How do you avoid contamination from EArth-based life? That's not as easy as you might think.
The contingencies and redundancies required are jus tmind-bogglingly complex.
I’m not a space probe engineer but I sometimes wonder if we go overboard on specialized compute hardware. I kinda wonder if that made more sense “back in the day”…. Ingenuity only rad hardened microchip is its flight controller. The rest is commercial off the shelf “normal hardware”.
I dunno… all I know is most people including myself ask the same questions as the parent. What the hell are we waiting for? Send some shit over there! Let’s do this.
...Probably not.
Yes and no. The atmosphere on Mars is a great example of the worst of both worlds. It's actually worse than having no atmosphere at all. It's not enough for aero braking. But it's enough to blow corrosive dust all over your solar panels and instruments and generally make your life miserable.
Of course, aero braking works exceptionally well on Venus but it has... other issues.
It did help on Titan though with the Cassini-Huygens probe.
> Without that you need to burn just as much fuel slowing down as you did speeding up
Not really. It's... complicated. If you were going between two points in the same inertial frame of reference then yes you need equal delta-V to slow down at the other end but, as you point out, that takes less fuel because your weight is lower (although part of your initial delta-V comes from the launch vehicle you disposed of).
But the EArth is going around the Sun at ~30km/s. Jupiter is going around ~15km/s. Europa is going around Jupiter at ~13km/s. So we have to speed up to escape EArth's orbit (around the Sun) and the EArth's gravityh well but also slow down to match Jupiter's velocity and also avoid speeding up too much as Jupiter's gravity well captures you.
But the lower orbital speeds of the outer planets is why we have never done an orbital insertion on Uranus or Neptune. This distance and delta-V requirements put flight times at like 10-30 years, depending. Heck, we haven't even done a flyby of each and that was back in the 1980s. Saturn is kinda of our practical limit for orbital insertion currently. And that's expensive and takes a long time.
But Europa having an icy surface is just a huge complication. Even if you do a burn to slow down, what's the heat on those thrusters going to do once you land? Is it going to melt ice and then you immediately drown? How thick is the ice? I don't mean overall thickness. I mean there may be crevasses and such. Just look at how dangerous it is to walk across glaciers.
How will you get traction on ice in relatively low gravity?
You don't need to worry about puddles of water in a vacuum, you may need to worry about sublimated water vapor frosting up whatever you land though.
I wonder, would it be viable to send multiple probes? What cost effect would it have on the mission to build and launch an extra one?
I know that e.g. for the Curiosity mission they've built a second rover that they've kept on Earth for potential troubleshooting. How much more expensive would it be to build yet another one and launch two of them?
What NASA is not doing is looking for communications from intelligent aliens. Why? Because Congress decided in the 1990s that that would be a waste of money, and banned NASA from doing it.
NASA is not in charge of its own budget. Neither it is, ultimately, in charge of what missions get greenlit. Sure, NASA is an inefficient organization in many ways, including planning and management practices that never seem to get better despite numerous reviews, but honestly it's incredibly difficult to be efficient when your bosses sit in the Congress. You don't want to know what NASA's Planetary Science division could have achieved in the last twenty years with all the billions that have gone to the boondoggle that's the Senate Launch System and its earlier incarnations.
Such a mission would involve landing on an outer solar system body with no atmosphere, penetrating 10-15 miles of ice, and directly sampling liquid water for microbes. That's a huge undertaking that would cost a lot more than $5B. If any part of that failed, it would be a pretty bad look for NASA and those who voted to fund it, and a negative result still wouldn't mean there is no life.
I certainly think that's something we should be attempting to do in the future. But an initial close flyby mission is something we know we can do with a high probability of success, and data gathered from such a mission could build support for a more extensive follow-up in the future. The data gathered might even make that future mission less expensive and more likely to succeed by mapping likely places where the ice is thinner, or where tectonic activity pushes water to the surface.
And hey if a microbe in a plume of water happens to land in a collection receptacle on this mission, that's just an incredible bonus without setting the mission up for disappointment.
Pretty cool to actually be doing this.
Our existence proves that life is possible.
Obviously. But it would still be nice to know how probable or improbable it is.
I would guess that now it's quite unlikely, we might be an ant colony far, far away from others. Finding specific biota or small organisms seems like our most effective approach.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/08/22/22081/earth-ejec...
The more we look around the more wrong the “surely complex life couldn’t exist in that” crowd become.
We are going to contaminate the solar system with humans eventually. A spore that may survive and MAY be viable is the least of the Europa's problem.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22680694/
https://astrobiology.com/2014/05/space-station-research-stud...
Regardless, it'd be extremely cool to have some distant cousins swimming around that far away. It'd also be extremely cool to find completely unrelated life.
Attempt at galactic empire fails completely, and hundreds or thousands of generations later some civilizations who remember their origins reacquire the ability to travel between systems and attempt to remind each other that we are all brothers even though we have evolved very different traits.
> By the 24th century, universal translators had advanced to the point where a full-fledged UT could be built into the combadges worn by Starfleet personnel. The translation was so natural and seamless that beings unaware of them believed that others spoke their own language.
Without that trio it may just be too difficult to keep going up the ladder to tool user and sentience.
That doesn’t eliminate crab people. It may not eliminate cephalopods. It may eliminate sea mammals without external help (David Brin gives dolphins prosthetic arms via human assistance).
It may also be that we need combustion to advance, or that may be only a problem on planets with our parameters.
- monkey
- dry-land octopus
- eagle with four claws (perch on the back two and handle things with the front two)
- big raccoon (yikes!)
- big spider
- honey badger
- many lizards have hands
If any of these could be large enough and smart enough, they’d make a convincing alien. And these are based on Earth creatures - I’d expect a huge variety of much weirder things in a Star Trek universe.
Granted the environment on our space probes is a little different than a shattered rock sent from an impact event but still…
https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection#pl...
Why does Popular Science even exist anymore, really? Why don’t the journals just hire journalists directly? It would presumably cut down on clickbait misunderstandings, and it would give the journals a tool in the upcoming antitrust litigation against them. If the journalism is good enough, the journals might even get to net-zero value add someday!!
> Clipper is a pricey gamble. Even though it was scaled back from a design that included a lander
And what did folks try and do in the sequel? Attempt to do a s*t-ton of moon landings!! Best commentary on the nature of humanity in any work of fiction since the Bible.
When they were stranded in Europa it was still an icy moon.
For those wondering, this is from 2010, the sequel book/movie to 2001 a Space Odyssey.
IMO the title of the post should be "Ice Skater"
Have to admit I read this and my immediate emotional reaction was "that's so far away, that's the far far future" .. and then realized, no, no it is not in fact that far away.. and I've just ... gotten old.
Thomas Dolby - Europa And The Pirate Twins
Please try your best to resist apathy. Contact your representative and let them know your priorities, especially in light of a looming government shutdown that threatens funding to exactly these kinds of initiatives.
Just because:
1. we can
2. we have no idea what we'll find
No excuses!
Oh, and 10 more James Webb telescopes, too!
With something like Starship I wouldn't be surprised to see SpaceX cheaply provide a starship approaching end of life to a scientific mission. With cheaper and readily available launch opportunities we could see deep space missions that utilize larger amounts of probes manufactured more cheaply that have much less longevity (die after a year of data collecting) but can do a greater amount of science over their shorter lives. Essentially, using a large launch vehicle like starship as a mothership until they get to their destination. Reducing the need for RTGs.
I wonder if any organic matter from Earth has ever fallen on any other planets or moons?
However something to consider is that whatever biological material that ends up landing elsewhere probably wouldn't be able to survive and reproduce. I say that because even the hardiest microbial organisms on Earth still depend on the activity of other species in the ecosystem. For instance, only certain species of bacteria produce Vitamin B and I can't think of any species that is completely self-reliant. It's one thing to keep a cell from dying in a harsh environment, but it would have to bootstrap itself into metabolizing and reproducing in a barren environment with no prior life to consume building blocks from.
That being said, I'm not enough of a biologist to know if there are any extremophile bacteria which are completely self sufficient. If there are, we can rule out my layman's assertion/thought experiment.
(Radiation shielding is an exponential function; a few meters of water is, for most purposes, total shielding [0]. The major radiation source on Europa is solar particles trapped in Jupiter's magnet belts, which bombard Europa's airless surface. The ocean begins multiple tens of kilometers below that surface).
We have life in practically every hostile location on earth and bacteria survive even the most constantly sterilized environments like hospitals and clean-rooms?
https://www.amazon.com/Hardness-Minds-Europan-First-Contact-...
1) the life is non-intelligent 2) the life is intelligent
They could even create an abstract visualization of the total number of people of viewing, so that when you look back into outer space you are overwhelmed with the realization that this is a moment for all of humanity, not just another stream amongst so much drivel.
Best VR use case I can think of!
Here's what I don't like. Nothing living appears on Europa's surface. In the same 4.5 billion years, Earth went from single-cell life to whales, jungles, and humans.
It is also extremely cold (-171C mean) and near-vacuum (100 nanopascal).
If there is life in Europa and it bears any resemblance whatsoever to the biology we know, it simply couldn't exist on the surface. Even the hardiest single-celled organisms here, which have also had 4.5B years to evolve into uncontested niches, could barely survive a limited exposure to these factors.
I do assume this extreme level of cold and vacuum can also be acclimated in those 4.x billion years
I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong empirically, but it doesn't make sense to start our search there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples
5–10 μSv: One set of dental radiographs
10–30 mSv: Single full-body CT scan
80 mSv: 6-month stay on the International Space Station
1 Sv: Maximum allowed radiation exposure for NASA astronauts over their career
5 Sv: Calculated dose from the neutron and gamma ray flash, 1.2 km from ground zero of the Little Boy fission bomb, air burst at 600 m
5.1 Sv: Fatal acute dose to Harry Daghlian in 1945 criticality accident
He died 25 days later
54 Sv: Fatal acute dose to Boris Korchilov in 1961 after a reactor cooling system failed on the Soviet submarine K-19 which required work in the reactor with no shielding
He died 6 days later
I missed that one. What?
"We must split the wifi bill"
"I don't have wifi at home"
are things I've heard. So, to them, Starlink is a wifi provider.
The blue we all thought it was came from its atmosphere as seen from far away, not because it was an icy world reflecting blue light through ice and snow - the ice and snow on its planetary surface is a lot more red and brown like Titan because it's methane (like on Titan, and presumably by the color of Europa, on Europa too).
I know we have high fidelity photos of [a reddish brown] Europa, but when I was younger seeing those documentaries of the "oceans under the surface" they were always depicted as blue with alien-looking dolphins swimming through them. To this day they claim it's composed of "water ice", despite being that color in the newer high definition photos.
Another commenter here said "it's an awful odd color for ice" - it's probably methane, like Pluto and Titan, not water ice. Maybe I'm overly skeptical, but just connecting dots.
A small minority care, until it is too late. The everybody cares. It is the job of the scientists and governments to help us understand why we should care. But both are captured by oligarchs and people looking for their own power and prestige.
Climate change is still too abstract for most people to be a real concern. If they are cold, coal makes them warm now.
I more and more find truth in the simplified statement: "we are little more than confused apes after all"
We are capable of so much more .. but it takes time and whether we have the time to evolve some collective consciouss about the bigger problems concerning us all, remains to be seen.
"The scientific consensus is that a layer of liquid water exists beneath Europa's surface, and that heat from tidal flexing allows the subsurface ocean to remain liquid."
Liquid water is hardly "freezing near absolute zero".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Subsurface_ocean
This is a value statement. Every answer from heroin to petting my cat is technically a valid answer.
OP's question is written obnoxiously. But it raises a valid point: why should we do these things, and why should it matter to people who don't find it inherently valuable?
Searching for life elsewhere seems so empty and unsatisfying. Almost like a religious quest for enlightenment or something. If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
To me, finding any extra terrestrial life, or even just a fossil of past life, would be the most exciting find in the history.
Imagine humans no longer fighting each other, but rather working together towards a goal. I can think of nothing that would catalyze such a change more than the discovery of extra terrestrial life. Even climate change isn't doing it.
Europa Clipper "is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever developed for a planetary mission" [1]. If you want to mine asteroids, learning to send big spacecraft to the far end of the asteroid belt seems like a no brainer.
> If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
Depends on what we find. Think about the density of medical knowledge we extract from the Amazon basin every year. New biochemistries could be game changing in ways we can't predict. (We have enough trouble predicting how known organic chemistries behave. It is overwhelmingly likely, if alien biochemistries exist, that they show us new science.)
If it's similar to terrestrial biochemistry, on the other hand, that suggests our bodies might do better extraterrestrially than we've assumed. That, in turn, could catalyse the investment and support needed to mobilise a multi-generational effort towards colonising space. (Their morphology could also give us hints on how to survive in that environment. Biomimicry on a whole new level.)
There'd be a massive jump in the likelihood of finding a living snail.
And there would be an ever bigger jump in the likelihood of some billionaire being the first to eat extraterrestrial escargot.
But sure, we could just focus all our attention on increasing our industrial capacity and expansion. Although that also seems so empty and unsatisfying to me.