Promising discoveries about the potential for life on one of Saturn’s icy moons
fu-berlin.de
fu-berlin.de
Life starts deep in the Enceladus ocean, gets jettisoned by the plume, parks on Saturn's rings which becomes a huge distribution mechanism. If one extremophile reaches there, it means we could find not only a source of life but a mechanism for panspermia.
It is believed that the giant planets all develop and lose their rings over time, each time a moon is eaten. If the plumes are caused by Saturn's gravity perturbing the planet, it makes this mechanism highly plausible in all sorts of systems that have giants (and we know there's a lot of them).
Truth is, we don't know enough to take any filter hypothesis seriously.
This will not be in 10 or 30 years. But in 70-100. Maybe robots are the future life form the universe "sees" here so something finally can reach outer space from here.
And I think its very likely that other civilizations aslo killed themself by inventing AI some day in their time.
Though, Claude is the best tool ever for me :)
Im in the middle of my 40s, so maybe I will see the first "steps" into that direction. But even if I dont: The idea that robots are taking over, built by us, is just insane: If they reach a level of "self improvement and self repair/care", humans will be just finished - not in a "sense of bad will" like "kill-all-those-dumb-humans", but in a sense of: Their technosphere will last longer and is very much more likely to survive climate change than the thin & vulnerable bio sphere we humans need?
Though, maybe there is some type of equilibrium in the future with much less humans at a stable rate, really stable lake just enough kids that mankind doesnt grow,and a large set of robots assisting us. But this is too far "positive sci fi", Id say?
Life has 4.5B years. Predicting silicon would last more is doubling down on what I said: you went for 100 years to a roughly 5 billion years prediction.
Let me remind you that a single unlucky CME can fry 80% of comms satellites and electrical grid, effectively crippling the entire technosphere you mention in a matter of hours.
One small war that disrupts the silicon supply chain can set back the development of AI for a whole decade. One company (ASML) having issues could do that. It is a very fragile system.
Climate change is a deep concern mostly because it would cause unimaginable suffering and massive loss of population, but it's likely humanity would survive it. We survived worse: supervolcanos, ice ages, multi-decade droughts, etc. It would be preferable to avoid it though.
That was absolutely terrifying.
However, it is also likely that the places where living beings can evolve into something more complex than bacteria are only a very small fraction of those where life exists.
There are chances that life might exist on one or more of the satellites of Jupiter or Saturn, but it is pretty certain that it cannot be more complex than bacteria or at most protozoa, because on Earth the evolution of big multicellular living beings was conditioned by the development of the ability to extract energy from solar light.
Without solar light, the maximum rate of energy production is from methanogenesis, which would not sustain any big living being.
Solar light is too weak at that distance anyway, and life, if it exists, is burrowed at depths where the temperature is high enough, where any light is likely to be completely attenuated.
It might not evolve into something very complex, though.
Because it could then tell us if it's related to us or not, potentially we could get to see how life unrelated to us looks like, how life in general is originally formed, how likely in the universe it is...
I honestly struggle to imagine how it can be considered unimportant, unless your stating position is that said life is completely unreachable to current and future tech, which I don't find likely.
From a non-economic standpoint: Aside from ensuring we don't destroy this planet, what is more important than finding out if we're alone in the universe? Not much, if you ask me.
(I realize finding algae on Saturn's moon doesn't definitively answer that question but it's certainly a uh... pretty big data point)
After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.
In reality the existential crisis will be used as a means for control, exploitation, and corruption ...
c.f. USA, Israel, UAE as spring-to-mind obvious examples for hints and tips as to how this plays out.
It's also interesting that your mind goes immediately to common enemy instead of some alternative.
You can see it right now with AI barreling forward. If we don’t develop it, someone else will, so we will ensuring it happens.
Of course we can never prove or disprove their claim of “someone else will” because they went ahead and did it.
We've never seen a case where some government in some country doesn't work as hard as possible to ensure that they have the biggest possible weapon. So you should believe someone is doing that. (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)
You can check out why scientists use this same philosophy in modern discovery and belief systems by catching up on the subject of "the philosophy of science." You'll find some 5,000 years of scientific debate and conclusions that roughly culminate in the above system of belief.
So, if someone else is going to develop something very harmful, is the best solution to develop something equally or more harmful? Or are there maybe other better solutions to this problem?
So, it might be worth entertaining whether you can convince everyone in your culture to be subservient?
Here again, historically that's never happened, so it's not worth believing. And that's just to check if there's a better solution. You might arrive at an even worse outcome.
Revolutions require even bigger weapons, despite sometimes having better long term outcomes. How many people have to die to test our theory?
Genghis Khan created centuries of peace horrifically with bigger guns. The Ottoman Turks similarly did. The US, now. And many more cases that we know of. All of these examples coincidentally allowed multiculturalism, and even more, they enforced it as a matter of law. Just as an interesting side point.
Life is terrible in all cases in history where it's not clear who has the biggest guns. That's always been the demarcation of the beginning of a new regime at the cost of millions of lives.
Revolutions are horrible. That's what we know for sure.
I want to clarify that because I could see someone taking that statement to mean that multiculturalism is inherently wrong, which is the opposite of what I'm saying.
Sadam Hussein? IRGC? United States?
When?
It's never happened. The US itself doesn't abide by Geneva convention. Let alone other UN members.
You're living in pretense, I'm sorry to point out.
The world is run by terrorists. The only question is which terror group you want to retain power.
Personally, I like the multiculturalism that the US champions, and the Turks used to, and the Khan dynasty used to, and Persia used to. And only because it's the most likely recipe for the longest track record for peace.
Like it or not, history doesn't agree with your optimism as much as you and I wish it did.
Developing the more heinous weapons before the other guy is the pragmatic thing to do, but it doesn’t give you the moral high ground.
> (Point in fact, we know of several governments currently trying to achieve nuclear, aerial, and AI superiority today.)
And why are they doing that? To get it first since others will do it anyway.
I think making seemingly moral short term decisions that result in maximum casualties is not actually moral. It's stupid, and wrong.
Creating an arms race by letting someone who isn't the current leader gain an advantage ensures that a power struggle will ensue. It implies revolution in all known cases in history.
The moral high ground you're referring to should result in the best outcome. It doesn't arise from a guy standing at the top of a hill by himself shouting that he's the most moral guy while getting us all killed in the course of violent revolution. That's just megalomania.
They're very similar. One relies on rational thinking about actual expected outcomes, the other relies on one's own opinion about right and wrong.
You have to be careful because it's deceivingly easy to be the latter and end up an accidental megalomaniac that kills us all.
See history for countless examples.
You mentioned your feelings. I'm glad you did. Your feelings are nearly always a guide to bad outcomes. I'd trust you more as a leader if you instead relied on your rational faculties to guide us to good and moral decisions and outcomes.
And I'm confident that you'd find that your self doubt is diminished when you can self reflect on your decisions and find in all cases that they were made using the best information at the time, instead of how you felt about them at the time.
It's not a cool concept to write scifi books about, but it may still be the reality we live in.
The most likely situation (by many orders of magnitude) is that the only practical way of getting to another star system, even in the far far future, is a generation ship travelling 50+ years one way with a significant risk of people dying from organ failure or cancer along the route. This would represent a 1000x speed improvement over current tech and is only a factor of 10x slower than lightspeed.
It is entirely unfeasible for any company or even government to spend money on such a project. Even if the ground on the other planet is strewn with diamonds and gold and the elixir of eternal life, you are looking at ~200 years before any ROI can be realised.
1) The first mission would almost certainly be a set of robotic probes (especially in light of recent developments)
2) As controversial as it may be, we could genetically engineer descendants who are better suited for space travel
3) Cybernetics hold the potential to preserve the biological human 'essence' (brain and nervous system) while minimizing the amount of living material requiring maintenance
4) Hibernation is still a possibility, or at least we haven't ruled it out yet
When you're looking at long enough time spans - which we should have available if we manage to avoid extincting ourselves - many more possibilities emerge beyond simply "put a bunch of regular humans as we currently are into a tin can".
This does not extrapolate to a dark forest scenario.
History is full of monuments and art who's only purpose was to be cool. And sending humans to another solar system would be a pretty cool monument to humanity.
It is more of a PR problem really to convince people to contribute.
Do that first. It has huge medical benefits too, so it’s dual use not just for space flight.
there's far too much unknown about the origins of life to say we even have a basic guess as to the probabilities of life
> Seriously want to know what people really think...
> find "life". So? Why is this important to people?
Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.
I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I do think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.
I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.
Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?
I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?
It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.
Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.
Thanks to the 2nd most hated man alive, it doesn't cost nearly this much to get to space anymore.
People can simultaneously be terrible humans and accomplish positive things while doing it.
It doesn't make them a better human.
He was not; he managed to kill off the style, but it's from the 19th century and was actually somewhat popular at one point.
Why are you yourself important to people? Certainly nothing I care about relies on your existence. The answer isn't anything you do, even the things you do for other people, because why do they matter either? You don't need any utilitarian justification.
We don't spend $x to attain any specific goal like buying an acre of land or a lathe. We spend $x to find out whatever is the reality. It doesn't matter what we find, whether it has some obvious immediate "can I eat it or F it?" application or not. The goal was to find out whatever the facts are.
The utility of that knowledge is unknown but infinite. For the infinite rest of time it will be part of whatever infinite humans want to do.
You can contrive infinite possible infinitely valuable utilitarian uses but that misses the point and dignifies an assumption that was invalid to begin with.
We spend $x to explore the nature of reality because we are not incurious ants merely following just enough programming to perpetuate.
The only value of utility itself is that it empowers us to pursue whatever goals we may want. Not merely the power to continue existing. We don't need any knowledge or tools or materials at all for that. Utterly brainless plants continue to exist without knowing or posessing anything.
Nothing that you do find useful, like presumably an accessible mineral deposit, is any different than something like this that you don't find useful.
Serious answer: on a yearly 130T$ GDP at least a good third is spent on destroying this planet. 50$B which ends up paying phds is barely one peanut.
* If we find life on another planet it provides a realignment for most of our world religions. That's important to several billion people. It might even create a new religion. We haven't had one of those in awhile, how exciting is that?
* If we spent $50 Billion to find algae on Enceladus we'd definitely spend 200x that to put said algae on a billionaire's plate for them to eat. That would fuel hard sciences and the economy in numerous ways, similar to how the space race gave us Nike Air shoes and the Dustbuster [1]. Like you say a human would probably never dip their toe in the water of Enceladus but we would get a lot better at drilling holes and extracting.
* We need more enemies and aliens would be great, even if they are single-celled. It would probably result in a global defense system within 50 years which would once again have several ancillary benefits for technology and warfare.
[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/20-inventions-we-would...
Where are you getting 50bn from? There are currently two large probes on their way to study Jupiter's moons, JUICE (costing 1.5bn EUR) and Europa Clipper (costing 5bn USD). Saturn's _somewhat_ more difficult, but not enough to take the cost to 50bn!
But there's no reason to think that it does.
What Makes Enceladus so Attractive in the Search for Life in Space?
Enceladus is considered to be one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Researchers suspect that under the moon’s icy crust there is a global ocean of liquid water and a rocky core further below. Due to cryovolcanic activity, gigantic plumes break through cracks in the crust at the moon’s south pole, ejecting ice particles hundreds of kilometers into space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed through these plumes multiple times to analyze its composition. Enceladus’s ocean is the only extraterrestrial “body of water” from which scientists have been able to directly analyze samples. The samples revealed traces of various salts and organic compounds. Furthermore, previous analyses conducted by Cassini gave indications of hydrothermal processes on the seafloor and other conditions that are significant in supporting life.
> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)
And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:
> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe. That was absolutely terrifying.
Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.
Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.
https://sales.bigmachine.io/curious-moon
This book teaches how use PostgreSQL to crunch real data from the Cassini probe, which shows a "smoking gun" for life on Enceladus.