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Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

While it's unlikely this really moves the needle in terms of other life in the solar system (which seems like a pretty hard "no" to me as a lay person), it perhaps does have an impact on "rest if the galaxy".

Of course the ingredients are "necessary but not sufficient ". However being "abundant" increases the chance of them being present when the other necessary conditions are met.

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At least wait for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper

> other life in the solar system (which seems like a pretty hard "no" to me as a lay person),

There’s so much we don’t know about the solar system, little bacteria crawling around deep under the crust of a moon or swirling about in a gassy giant doesn’t seem too far fetched.

Wormy fishy creatures (or even more complex than that) under the ice of Europa is a bit more of a stretch, but even then I don’t think we’re aware of anything that would outright refute that possibility as of now.

Yeah, ruling anything out when we’re still finding new muscles (https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/medical-adva...) and weird structures (https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-s-obelisk-any...) in humans - to which we have plenty of access - seems deeply premature.

The traditional way to demonstrate this is how little we know about the ocean floor and the types, styles, and varieties of life therein.

Every time we look we find a textbook's worth of new types of creatures, and usually break at least one minor "rule" of how life works, for example, "dark oxygen".

And people tend to forget about time. There might have been bacterias somewhere 1b years ago or in 1b years.

Space is big as fuck but when you add time in the mix it's as close to infinite as you can get.

Life arose on Earth shockingly quickly on Earth as best as we can tell from the fossil record. Especially compared to apparently much more difficult innovations like photosynthesis, mitochondria, or multi-cellularity. I wouldn't at all be surprised if bodies in the solar system with liquid water and active enough geologies to produce consumable chemicals have primitive life.

One of the inputs to this that has shifted recently is that scientists are finding it difficult to locate a core sample of solid rock, anywhere, that is completely sterile. It seems like ecology percolates through almost anything in the crust with pore spaces and a temperature under or at 100C or so.

That shift from "Opportunities for life" being measured based on surface area to volume is dramatic.

Let’s wait for the Europa lander and nuclear submarine to make sure. Chances are slim but not zero.

We have no plans for anything like that. Few proposals, but nothing concrete. Europa Clipper is what we've got for now.

> We have no plans for anything like that.

That's kinda my point... I'm pretty sure I won't live long enough to see it happen, but I hope we plan and launch a mission like that!

Yeah

I'm thinking this definitely pushes the start of life in the bigger universe some billion years before the start of life on Earth. Possibly a lot of billion years.

(though you still need a couple of generations of stars to get carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus)

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