Finally... I've been waiting for this almost my entire adult life.
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.
I find Europa fascinating but unfortunately I think the lack of missions is less about interest and more about feasibility. On earth we rarely drill more than 2-3km down. The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica. With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. Not to mention the immense distance, time lags and hostility of the environment. Drilling on earth is dangerous and difficult and failure prone as it is. How do we learn to do this? How many missions and failures are required?
The value from a surface probe that can sample those brown stains is immeasurable. Imagine an HD video of the guysers, or an imaging spectrometer using refraction from the sun through a guyser (or whatever I'm not a scientist) and picking up strange amounts of something that can't be explained by just water and salt. Or even a detailed radar scan of the subsurface - are there pockets of warm water?
Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms of ice is short-sighted.
Yeah I think a mission to see whether we can scoop up stuff that's been blasted up to the surface or even into orbit (and probably picking up some data on the ice crust along the way) is a lot more promising.
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.
Well, what good is a naive misgiving if you don't even use it to haughtily dismiss genuine expertise? I can't tell you how many times I've had developers essentially manaplain my non-dev fields of expertise to me knowing that I was a credentialed professional and they were making stab-in-the-dark assumptions. Phrases like, "theoretically, it should be very simple," should usually be replaced by, "It would be ridiculous to assume everything I don't know about this is inconsequential, but here are some baselessly confident words about it:".
add to this the constant claims in the field of renewable energy and the energy transition. I've heard "energy storage is a solved problem" so many times that i cannot help but laugh.
Code & techbros are not the solution to everything.
Then, some will dust off that Larry Wall quote about hubris as if it's exculpatory... Well, I read that book too, and he was definitely talking about problem-solving approaches in software development, and not general-purpose personality traits for software developers.
What good is a professional credential if you don't use it as an appeal to authority to shut down any criticism of your opinions? /s
On a more serious note, it's a travesty that lawyers get all the hate and PEs get none.
You have to use more expensive radiation hardened fiber for Europa because the cheap stuff will literally go dark. It is likely there will also be a lower rate copper signaling path in case the umbilical tether is slightly damaged. Previous efforts to drill outside of Earth (mostly Mars) have proven difficult; there have been suggestions to instead "melt" through the ice with a radioisotope thermoelectric generator but this presents a different set of problems.
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 it truly is just ice it would likely be more effective to melt through and spool out power/comms behind it (think TOW missile) rather than drill through. Carrying spare energy is a less thorny problem than all the (literal) moving parts required to autonomously drill a few miles in the outer solar system.
That would be a lot of power required to prevent refreezing. If we're just throwing nonsensical ideas out, why not drop your probe down one of the geysers? Let the planet make the holes for you. You just need to make it so it doesn't get blown out each time the planet/moon sneezes. Of course, because I used the hand wavy word just means you automatically get to triple the cost estimate.
Would refreezing break the cable?
If you build the probe so that it has the spool of cable in it, then the probe has to be as large as the full load of cable. If you make the probe just big enough to do what it needs while pulling the cable from the lander then it can be much smaller. If using the smaller probe, then the cable will need to be fully movable as it melts deeper. The larger probe with the full length of cable will require much more energy as it needs to melt a much larger hole.
Where is all of this energy coming from?
I think our breakdown in understanding here is our concept of cables. When I say cable (and many others here) I mean fiber optic cable. Even with 25km of fiber optic cable it is rather small and light. Drones, missiles, and torpedoes are already doing this with many miles of cable in a tight space. The issue with this which I am not sure about is the dynamic of the ice on the fiber optic cable and how well it would hold up to refreezing of the ice.
Refreezing isn't the big issue; shifting of the ice (causing physical severing of the line) is. We don't have a great handle yet on how much it moves around.
Yes, I think we definitely have a gigantic misunderstanding of cable here. Mine is based in reality, while yours seems to be very unrealistic. How in the world is a fiber optic cable going to do what needs to be done? Where is the power coming from to heat the probe via a fiber optic cable? Even a fiber optic cable at a length of 25km is a very large spool. If you want the probe to hold the spool and unwind as it goes, it must be at least the size of the spool of cable. If you think this would work with an unsheathed piece of bare fiber cable, then your just not even trying to be serious.
I see another misunderstanding then. With this method the actual probe would use nuclear material to melt its way through the ice. In addition, the heat of the nuclear probe on one side and the ice on another (or melting ice) would make for the ideal conditions of a peltier (or just use a traditional RTG) device to power onboard sensors and electronics. The fiber optic cable is only for communication.
> use nuclear material to melt its way through the ice
All 300 watts of it? It's not going to even make an indentation, let alone through 10s of km of ice.
Simple reactors can be designed to be turned up and down according to need. A 300w RTG is more than enough to run all the necessary electronics. The ice-melting 30,000w+ heater can be a second rector that is spooled up only when ice needs melting.
we're attempting to search for life and the thing you want to do is use radioactive heaters? we deliberately crashed a satellite into the planet to avoid having it potentially contaminate the moons we are curious about, and yet you're thinking they'd just irradiate everything like this? it's really just not logical
In the outer solar system, under miles of ice, in total darkness and cold .. it is nuclear or nothing. Short of antimatter batteries, there is no other source of power that would be even theoretically suitable.
The concern is more spreading Earth life. NASA's Planetary Protection team (which is a delightful job title) is largely concerned with sterilizing stuff we send out so any discovery of microbes on Mars doesn't turn out to be hitchhikers.
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/
[dead]
> Where is all of this energy coming from?
A nuclear reactor, probably.
Really? To heat and melt sufficient ice around 25km of cabling? I don't know what temperature this ice is at, I think on the surface Europa averages around -300F, so it's probably at least that low. I guess a lot is going to depend on whether you're fine with the ice refreezing around the cable - if the ice shifts at all, the cable breaks. Keeping the whole thing heated continuously seems implausible
that would surely mess with any organics you might want to find
No, not really. Water is very effective shielding, and you could melt a base station through the ice and do exploration with subs it sends out if you want fairly pristine samples. In the Jupiter system, it's also hardly the biggest radiation source around.
The spool can be a long, thin "pipe" of wound cable that goes with one end of the "pipe" pointing to the rear (up). You can put an arbitrary amount of cable in a given hole diameter by making the spool taller.
(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)
>You can put an arbitrary amount of cable in a given hole diameter by making the spool taller.
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.
The probe bears on the ice below it and the cable gets held by the ice that's re-frozen above the hole.
What you have to worry about is the ice shifting and severing the cable.
I think there are still mechanics at play that would have to be considered.
>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.
Could you embed a series of metallic needles as you melted your way down, then communicate via radio waves that travel needle to needle? They would not need to be connected. Just close by.
Now I’m wondering whether you could fire sonar pings through the ice and transmit data using an acoustic sonar modem. Then the ice-melting probe could be completely untethered. It would be a profoundly unfriendly probe though: a hot radioactive ball emitting ultra-loud pulses. We would have to attach an apology note.
"Immeasurable" and "large" are not synonyms. I agree with you that it's immeasurable, but I disagree that it's large. It's likely that nothing is going to change if we know what those brown spots are today or if we know in 10-20 years. Sure, there will be some cool "I fucking love science" photos that come out of this, but if that's the "immeasurable" value you are anticipating, I would give that a value of less than $1 million.
If your claim is that it'd not be worth it to pay two million dollars for a surface lander that successfully samples and conducts experiments on Europa's ice in situ, returns HD video, etc, then I can't really agree with you or even see how we would reach agreement. A Europa lander was at least considered as a viable billion dollar mission when I left JPL.
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.
My claim is that the pictures themselves are probably only worth $100k or so, and you can read the comment again to see how that tracks semantically. The experiments, maybe ten million unless they can demonstrate that they have some sort of value.
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.
I think we're just interpreting each other's comments too narrowly. I'd be repeating myself to reply further.
YOu can just ctrl-i on the picture file and see how big it is, it's pretty easy to measure. Even if there are a lot of files you can select all, it's definitely not immesurable.
Hosting the photos costs money too, which I don't think GP is considering.
This is true of pictures here, but who knows with European pictures, they might be in alien or metric.
The value of something is whatever someone else is willing to pay for it. It does not matter that something is not valuable to you - I can guarantee that if you priced the mission as low as $1m/$10m/$100m dollars, some PHD, wealthy person, or even SV software developer would personally pay for it - and there would be no regrets.
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.
I'm very much if you: $5b would be in range of _naming-rights_ for a couple missions for a space project.
The record setting Kola Superdeep Borehole is no it Antarctica but close to the northern polar cycle on the northern edge of Asia:
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...
Did they do it with a remotely operated probe that can't be repaired or assisted?
It sounds like we don’t know enough to even consider landing a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I understand the article, will attempt to determine the depth of the surface, its constituency, and possibly the constituency of what’s below it. It may be that Europa is not geothermally active as we hope, and is made up entirely of ice and other simple inorganic compounds. That would likely shift our efforts to other, more promising targets of exploration in the solar system. Drilling is many steps ahead of where we are at.
I wish more people were passionate about space, and we had more funding available. Because you list all these difficulties and I just think "well we better get started! Who do I vote for so we can get started?"
There are certain things we can do on a afaraway planet and not at home, such as using an unshielded RTG to melt the ice with exposed plutonium. and just unrolling a cable while the probe sinks down like a torpedo. Assuming it's all ice and not rock after 20 meters down...
Dropping a lump of plutonium on the heads of the inhabitants of Europa might be seen as an unfriendly act! :)
Or we start a "worship the deadly warm thing" cult.
The liquid will freeze back behind the probe.
Europa is hard vacuum on the surface, so this is not actually intuitively obvious: i.e. if you built up a gaseous steam interface between the bore hole walls, then you might have quite a bit of trouble losing heat back into the surrounding ice.
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.
Correct, hence the need for the probe to unroll the cable as it goes down. If you had the roll on the surface, you would need to heat the whole cable to allow it to slip down.
Or design the cable along the same principles as one of these,
https://www.walmart.com/c/kp/water-wiggler-toy
So it can "slip down" by a continuous unrolling process!
Which would require much more power than a single RITEG.
Why - 25km of fibre isn't that large?
Back of the envelope feasibility check: assume the cable is a cylinder with diameter = 1cm, length = 25km. The area of the cylinder face is A = 2*pi*r*h = 785.4 m^2. The thermal conductivity of water ice is approx. 2.3 W / (m K). So to maintain a temperature difference of 10 K with the ice, you need 2.3 W/mK * 785 * 10 = approximately 18kW.
I was assuming something little thicker than optical fibre - the "probe" could be self powered using an RTG with the "waste" heat doing the melting?
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 mini nuclear-reactor-as-a-heat-source might be appropriate for a melt-drill. RTGs are a bit unfortunate as they'll exponentially decay from the time of manufacturing, and you'll need to both 1. deliver high enough power at Europa, and 2. radiate away that much power and a bit more when you're flying there.
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.
We send Bruce Willis and a ragtag team of lovable, drilling-expert misfits?
> I asked Michael [Bay] why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up. — Ben Affleck
Still one of my favorite movies though.
Although.. in defense of that mythical blue collar work ethic, I do know plumbers and machinists that have built their own planes and become aviators. Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber
You always need a license to fly your own plane. You don't always need a license to do your own plumbing. There might be many test pilots or double-phds fixing the plumbing on their houses without telling anyone.
> Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a plumber
Yeah, but if one of them had, he'd probably be too embarrassed to tell you!
The fuck else we gonna spend money on? Tamagotchis?
It is true that it is a lot of unknowns while drilling in Europa. But, the biggest problem with drilling on earth is the heat from the core itself, which we don't have on Europa (or Mars for the matte). Other problems like structural resistance and heavy equipment management can also be a lot easier in low gravity, although much of drilling on earth benefits from gravity "pulling" the drill.
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.
> With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with.
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...
> The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica.
You mean in the Arctic? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
They probably meant Vostok in the Antarctic Russians drilled a 3,720m deep hole in ice.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-glaciology...
Interesting! So probably a mix-up.
Researchers are not sure about the thickness of the ice on Europa. Some scientists believe on a thick shell of 20Km (like Pappalardo) others on a much thinner of even 1Km or less.
Well, good thing the probe is doing none of that!
The mission is: > 50 ice-skimming flybys, remotely probing the ocean in hopes of finding a chemistry that could support life.
I just imagine you saying this to a group of frustrated NASA engineers, then seeing a hard cut to a bunch of rough necks chasing each other around on an oil rig.
Yes it would be that easy in Hollywood. I’d be willing to bet my entire net worth that even 200 years from now it will still seem absurd to put a drilling rig with multiple living humans onto Europa. Too bad I have no way to collect, much less say “I told you so.”
finally, a valid use case for the block chain.. long future bets
If there is life in the ocean, I think there should be life signs in the surface ice.
Do the deep sea extremophiles on earth leave visible signs on the surface?
I don't know. I expect there is some organic material in the polar ice fields?
That’s what nukes are for yeah? You just let it melt its way down
My initial thought too, but on the odd chance there is life -- we might not want to come knocking that way :)
I think a major hurdle with NASA is that the American ~public~ political leadership does not accept failures (they barely accept success). Thus, NASA seems to only swing at pitches they know will be home runs. If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was. (of course, you'll never hear those same politicians complaining about how wasteful failed military engagements costing 10000x are).
It's unfortunate, because NASA is probably the only organization on earth capable of achieving such goals.
To be fair, this is a pretty rational approach to many low impact questions with no timeline. You can simply wait for cost to go down and chance of success to go up.
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.
> If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was.
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.
I agree, but this also means "investing in smaller chunks." We're stacking missions up to be so complicated that they're really expensive and the first try really has to succeed. We need to figure out how to get smaller chunks so that individual ones can fail.
Yes. A lot of the innovation in space recently has been about making space missions cheaper. NASA and JPL still do these huge multi-billion-dollar headliner missions, but the democratization of space is an underrepresented story in the public view of space. It's still hard to get far from orbit cheaply, though.
Yup. Actually, I'm advisor for a high school team that was selected by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative to put a satellite in LEO, mostly to do space technology development and demonstration. The growth of rideshare and dedicated small satellite launch missions has been impressive to watch in the past couple of decades.
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...
The American public was willing to pay for the Apollo project because the Soviet Union was embarrassing us, right?
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 think the biggest hurdle is the human condition. We're prepared to spend 10x to get a human into some version of outer space as basically cargo, but don't get the same emotional resonance with unmanned exploration even though that's were the valuable science happens.
Maybe there should be more emphasis on what IS accomplished during the building and engineering of those missions regardless of the final mission outcome. I think the PR spin needs to be in a direction that highlights the achievements along the way more.
Laughably, horribly dystopian how much we spend on the military vs. programs like NASA.
I want my Star Trek timeline back :(
> we need to send one that can get below the ice and look around.
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! :)
> 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"
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.
Spool goes on the descending module.
> 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.
Wire-guided torpedos[1] and missiles[2] are fairly common, and the wire pays out from the projectile-side so it's not progressively dragging more and more. The more recent DM2A4 Seehecht torpedo[3] has a fiber-optic link, probably to reduce EM emissions or the detectability of a km's-long wire/antenna, despite being underwater.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo
You'd need to take the cable spool down the hole, so the unspooled part above is already in place.
> I think your main issue will be that the hole freezes over behind you.
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.
Well, it's more viable than you might think. Putting a 300 degree sphere on the surface would eventually get somewhere. But getting anything useful back is pretty hard, since you'd have a probe that's boiling water below 25km of ice and probably far from the lat/lon it landed at.
You could make it buoyancy-neutral and have it float-melt its way back—heater pointed up.
I'd never considered the pressure under an ice cap... it would scale with depth, no?
So a water channel within the ice (going "up" from the sea below) would have a decreasing pressure gradient as it ascended?
I would imagine the water channel would re-freeze fairly rapidly, so you'd end up with a "bubble" of liquid water around the thing slowly melting itself down.
Point. Is ice sufficiently plastic to exert pressure with depth? I honestly don't know.
E.g. What would the pressure of a bubble of water under 1km of ice vs 15km of ice?
The ice clearly moves, as Europa's surface isn't just same as an airless, solid ball-of-rock's default: craters, but has all sorts of features that reshape the surface, so given enough time, it'll equilibrate. (What 'enough' means is left as an exercise to the reader). There are papers[1] that discuss the ice properties, but it's hard to get a specific answer out of them. There have to be tons of research papers out there about the design criteria for melt-drill probes like this, for Europa, Enceladus, and others.
[1]: https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/draft5.pdf
Maybe the main melt probe could leave behind little RTG powered relays as it descends. They'd get frozen in place as the main probe continues melting its way down.
From what I remember, They really wanted to find a way to do this without introducing organisms from earth. - e.g. drilling into the ice and the probe itself.
same. So to shortcut the big question "when"? April 2030
I feel the same way.
I’m calling it now. Compared to Hollywood fair, our first alien contact IRL is going to be underwhelming.
I fully expect that our first alien life will likely be microscopic life on a nearby planet. Followed by some simple organisms and/or plant life.
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.
If bacterial/some prokaryotic life is found in our solar system I’d see that as terrifying. That means it’s much more likely that the Great Filter is ahead of us.
or that the presence of nhi in relation to earth is way more likely than we previously thought
Our first "contact" with alien life has already happened. Once upon a time people thought that Mars was covered in canals, that a civilization lived there. Society did not collapse. People just accepted it and not much changed. Then there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria. Not much changed then either. Authoritative proof of life on Europa will not have a dissimilar impact. Until there is a critter in a video, a discernable radio message, or a saucer on the white house lawn, the general population will just shrug it off.
It has? I'm just quoting Wikipedia here: To date, no conclusive evidence of past or present life has been found on Mars.
That's what it says today. Had Wikipedia been around in the 1800s it would have said that canals on Mars indicated an agricultural civilization. The point is that society has already processed the concept of alien life. We know how people will react because we can look to how they reacted in the past when scientists told them about alien life.
Finding something that "indicated" something is very different than "We went digging in Europa and found these alive creatures that look like Dolphins under the surface that live on Ammonia"
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.
That's an interesting take, but I'm not sold. It sounds a bit like claiming to be a family of firefighters because your grandpa participated in a drill once, passing along empty buckets.
Yes I remember children’s books I had as a child saying exactly this.
My impression was that it seemed like a big intriguing maybe, not something like a verified fact.
A healthy chunk of the population believed, enough to impact national policies. Some of the first efforts at what we now call radio astronomy were attempts to listen for Mars signals. Just over a century ago "the big listen" saw large parts of the planet, including the military, turn off their transmitters in order to listen for Martians.
There is no conclusive evidence that life has existed on Mars. In fact Mars is one of the lesser candidates for life due to its weak atmosphere and lack of tectonic activity/magnetic field. (Though Mars was much more fertile directly after its formation, it seemed to have been a rather violent time for life to develop).
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.
The point the poster above was making is that we have already seen how society changes when we believe we've found basic proof of life, because we really believed we did a few times in the past: nothing changes.
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.
The only way life changes anything on earth (a few crack pots worshiping this new life as god doesn't count even if they get following) is if the life is intelligent enough to change something.
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.
I think the general vibe most people have would change if aliens were actually real
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
If we knew for a fact there was an alien society living lives similar to ours on some planet, sure, I agree.
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.
> Then there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria.
I can't figure out what you're referring to. Can you post a link?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001
>> 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.
Minor alien-encounter film trivia: That Bill Clinton speech is what Robert Zemeckis ripped off to create a news footage facsimile of a more dramatic discovery in Contact.
The speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHhZQWAtWyQ
White House lawn, wait: could orange skin color be somehow related to the ice color on Europa...
I look forward to a few months from now where I never have to immediately recognize this reference.
Most people believe in ghosts, if you get them to be honest. Aliens probably aren't far from that. We're just kind of hard-wired to believe that the further you get from our day-to-day life, the more likely monsters are there.
It's scientifically rational to believe in "aliens". There is plenty of evidence supporting a theory of abiogenesis. Even though we have not actually observed the process entirely, we are reasonably confident on some mechanisms by which it may occur.
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.
Ghosts as a phenomenon aren't really falsifiable, so there's not much point trying to make unequivocal scientific statements about them, if they exist. If there's something we can measure or some phenomenon that multiple people could elicit reliably then it would be an answerable question. But they're supernatural precisely because there is nothing to study scientifically. It's just some qualia that people interpret to be ghosts.
I have always wondered what kind of overlap there is in between people who believe in things like ghosts and also people who believe in a God.
The ghost claim is interesting. I'd have thought most people would be honest about NOT believing in them.
You don’t know how many people believe in ghosts, and you don’t know what they’re thinking when they listen to a ghost story. I ‘believe in’ ghosts as a non-supernatural construct we use in literature. A technique to embody and externalize voices in people’s heads.
It’s weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking for strangers so confidently.
Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?
On the other hand, we _were_ warned not to land on Europa. Could be interesting ...
I hope this question gets answered before I pass, which is probably no more than 25 years from now.
I’m from Europa. I can confirm there’s life here. Not sure for how long though.
The lore of secret space program insiders say that there are octopus/cephalopod species under that ice in that ocean. And, more so, that they are related to the ones on our planet. Wow.
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.
Please, less typing, more takey meds.
Hahaha! No. You should be on meds. So, you got scared, you don't know how to deal with it, and you wanna take it out on someone, be abusive, look down on them, internet crazy-diagnosis, is that right? Make you feel better?
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!
Very cool, but why Nazis?
Actual, historical Nazis in fact! - as the lore goes. Apparently, Hitler was very into the esoteric and exploring all avenues for advantage. Through proxies and commanders, this included tapping the Vril society psychics for their channelled alien designs, recovering downed or crashed UAPs, anti-gravity research and possibly more insanely, making deals with a negative group of ETs for even more technology. As the war loomed in their favor they doubled down on their research into anomalous super craft, but as it lurched against them, they, says the lore, transferred all their research down to their Antarctic bases, dug into the ice and also linking up with natural geothermally-cut caverns deep beneath the icesheet.
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.
Hey, that’s the plot to the game “Battlezone”!
Really? WOW!
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 :)
> 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.
Stepping on my soapbox once again to say that putting money towards science doesn't take away money from everything else. There's no shortage of money, or corporations that can be taxes, or people who didn't pay their fair share that can be taxed. Don't get upset with the science, get upset with the politicians who don't give a shit about the programs you care about or enforcing tax law.
> Stepping on my soapbox once again to say that putting money towards science doesn't take away money from everything else.
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.
Zero sum isn't quite true. I only work a 40 hour week and would like to cut back, but I could work more hours and I'd likely be more productive.
In all practical terms there is a shortage of money(and resources), since then entities you mention are powerful enough to stop the extra taxation.
By that logic the powers that be can arbitrarily decrease the amount of money for social or science programs at any time at their whim. Why do any science when you could be feeding the starving, and money could run out at any second?
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.
So you think we can always just tax them more, and they would accept that? That's equally absurd.
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.
Money is infinite but resources needed to send a probe outta space are quite limited
Then let's not spend any resources but instead spend time weeping. It's not like stockpiling plutonium, gold, iridium and other rare earths metals used in spaceships is gonna make the world any better.
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.
A big part of why this kind of space research is worth doing is weapons development. That is a big part of why huge money goes to space research - because it's more efficient to give that cash to JPL than to Raytheon in terms of developing certain kinds of rocketry and robotics technologies.
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.
You're right, we should get more kids into STEM!
It's the other way around. Money is finite and the curiosity we want to satisfy is infinite.
In our financial system money can be created at will
Printing money is not the same thing as creating value.
Everybody knows that but you’re the one who just said « money is finite »
> We need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war machine, we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change.
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.
We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities.
> 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.
You are falling into a false dichotomy of having to choose between one thing or the other. Dumping more money into one problem doesn't necessarily help solve it better. Analogous to adding more members to a team so more people can focus into the problem.
> Dumping more money into one problem doesn't necessarily help solve it better
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.
> 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.
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.
San Francisco spends that much on homelessness in a few years and doesn't make a dent. The problem is not money.
Maybe the problem is not enough space exploration. People need to be inspired. To live for a larger purpose
GP is what happens when you mix Protestantism with utilitarianism.
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".
It seems like so many people feel that $5 billion just evaporates after the government spends it. The government spent it, it's gone. Poof.
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?
Simply spending money is not an investment. An investment is something that provides positive return over time. It is tied to net positive productivity and economic exports.
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.
Some percentage of that spending does turn into actual economic investments in those local towns. Infrastructure gets built because of it. Homes are built. Shops are built. Tax revenues get collected to build schools to educate new generations of citizens. New technologies are made, new industries grown, etc. So even with your specific definition of investment that spending did spur some of it. Land is improved. Positive productivity, economic exports.
> 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 agree that this isnt a point that can be decisively proven.
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.
> When discussing investment in terms of money, and especially government spending, the connotation is typically positive economic returns
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.
Thats not the point I am making. I think you people can make a case for expenses without conflating them with economic investment. A swing set might not make money, but I can play with my kids there and have fun. I can buy a beer without it being an investment.
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
Money won’t solve that problem. Or it would have been solved before
It's 0.1% of the annual US revenue spread out over many years. So probably more like 0.01% per year. Picking on this one project, which is good science, is silly.
It's also only a little more than what Microsoft paid for Minecraft.
Priorities.
that's comparing shared money versus somebody else's money.
Why did you wrote this comment instead of spending time to fix those problems you’ve mentioned?
Assumption.
Yeah, don't try to convince others, go fix global climate change by yourself. Are you lazy?
I think we would be a lot further in addressing climate change and most social problems if people did more of the later and less of the former.
Without advocating ideas die with the first person getting them. It's obvious that we both need to act, and encourage others to act as well. We have no reason to belive OP don't act, and advocating for acting is a noble act (as it is both uncomfortable and necessary)
I wasnt speaking about OPs action, but the statement they made. I think advocating without acting is an ignoble action, shallow, lazy, and selfish, and destructive.
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.
I don't see the causal dependency between these things. Could a probe to Europa be sent while still having housing problems in some countries? And could it be sent after having those housing problems addressed? I think the answer to both of those questions is yes. And conversely, can the housing problems be addressed while sending a probe to Europa? And can they be addressed while not sending a probe? Again, i think the answers are both affirmative.
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.
If we survive climate change, I would argue that conquering space should be the top priority to ensure long-term human survival. Projects like this ultimately gather knowledge that can help that goal.
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.
What do you mean if we survive? We are already surviving and actually doing quite well.
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.
Well, I think we need to do all of it.
Explore space together or in competition, instead of war.
And climate change is a concern for everyone.
Worth noting that the ESA Juice mission will be at Jupiter at the same time as Clipper and the teams are already working together:
https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/...
Exactly, mankind has potentially amazing capacity to move into star working trekkish utopia within 1 century (not meaning warp fantasy but how society and individuals in it work). But so many stars would have to align, starting with dropping most religions and killing on spot most dictators that it won't happen.
But we should aim high, higher than we think our potential is, to actually get somewhere.
How about if we aim our compassion higher?
Aiming higher than the desire for all people to live in harmony with each other, with the freedom to pursue their needs and interests at the top of Maslow's pyramid without fear? Aiming higher than desiring peace for all mankind, where no one wants for anything, and those that are still struggling regardless receive help and compassion from their fellow humans? That seems like a tall order.
How do you force compassion on people? Religions tried for millennia and failed miserably, despite it being consistently among top rules in all of them. If something that cuts so deep can't win on its own 'just because I say so', I'd say lets move towards rationality, progress and smartness, with right eyes there lies tons of compassion too.
We cannot do all of it. The money and the manpower does not exist to do all of it.
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.
"Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? "
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.
The US spends more per capita on healthcare, then similar first world nations spend providing public healthcare to all their citizens.[1]
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...
The money does exist, and manpower isn't a problem considering how many people this planet has. The problem is the small monority that has most of the money, and doesn't like to pay their fair share of taxes.
"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 money and the manpower does not exist to do all of it.
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.
I see you channelling Conner O'Malley here: "we need, we need, we need, we need" - and as coherent as one of his rants.
„The Europa Report“ is IMO a pretty underrated movie: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/europa_report
A fun game game that takes place on Europa: https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/
Nothing like a good Europan handshake.
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 liked the film overall, but the talking heads style narration was tedious. It was a strange film as I loved parts, hated parts.
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.
A hidden gem in the sci-fi genre
One of my favorite hard-scifi movies ever.
This is a great low budget sci-fi film (and pretty scary at the end too).
"We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission."
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.
I'm not sure you truly appreciate just what a massive engineering challenge that would be. Try to do too many new things at once and you end up with the JWST being 2 decades late and costing 10x as much as originally projected.
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.
> An icy surface may have crevasses and such and you could potentially immediately lose your probe.
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?
Jesus the orbital injection alone wasn’t something I would have thought about. We rely a lot on the atmosphere to break our probes. Without that you need to burn just as much fuel slowing down as you did speeding up. Well, actually that isn’t true because your mass is way different so your fuel requirements are much, much less than that initial launch but still a non trivial amount.
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.
> We rely a lot on the atmosphere to break our probes.
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?
> immediately drown
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’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”
...Probably not.
You seem to have a very naive understanding of the dynamics here. Making it a life finder mission would have taken two times longer and cost three times more, assuming it wouldn't have been cancelled long before that.
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.
Because a close fly-by probe is something we know how to do, and is a much more affordable and achievable goal than a mission that would have the true goal of confirming life on Europa.
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.
NASA is absolutely looking for life in the Solar System. Many of the Mars missions have looked for signs of life.
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.
Searching for life to confirm would only be useful if you have lots of pocket change. We all know life exists outside the solar system, only the biggest ego maniacs will truly believe humans are the only life in the universe
I understand the view that life likely exists elsewhere in the universe, and I agree that, given the vast number of planets and galaxies, it's certainly a plausible idea. The sheer scale of the universe, coupled with our growing knowledge of exoplanets and extremophiles—organisms that thrive in conditions once thought inhospitable to life—makes it reasonable to think life could exist beyond Earth.
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. :)
in math they use a lot of approximations to do calculations like limits -> infinity. It's a good enough approximation that is almost unrefutable. Also, who has more ego, we are the winner of 1 in 10e30, or there is way more winners.
The mass in the observable universe is considered to be 10^53 kg. So nothing is going to infinity when it comes to life made from matter (or energy).
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.
We have a lot of really useful things to learn about life away from Earth even if you assume that life exists elsewhere.
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.
> We all know life exists outside the solar system, only the biggest ego maniacs will truly believe humans are the only life in the universe
That statement isn't remotely true and it all depends entirely on what you define "life" as being.
yes but do they have DNA or something like it? Are we their descendants? Are they ours? How much of that life is “intelligent” and how much of it is just microbes and stuff?
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.
You almost wonder if there's budget-politics at work if you admit you're looking for alien life to lawmakers tinged by Christian fundamentalism.
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE."
Pretty cool to actually be doing this.
Someone seems to have dropped the "EXCEPT EUROPA" part. ;)
Space is undeniably fascinating, and it's completely natural to be captivated by the search for extraterrestrial life. However, the key point I want to emphasize is this:
Our existence proves that life is possible.
If life independently started in two places in our solar system in fairly different places, then it would be reasonable to think that it is fairly common and we would expect it in most solar systems. If life only exists on Earth in our solar system, then it's more reasonable to think life is fairly rare.
Also no possible, there's life on Europa and it shares a common ancestor with life on Earth.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2011/08/22/22081/earth-ejec...
> Our existence proves that life is possible.
Obviously. But it would still be nice to know how probable or improbable it is.
Yes, and if that occurs during our lifetimes, that's the jackpot.
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.
I can bet $1000 that Europa at least has a life form that represents a virus or bacteria. It may not be similar, but it must have a biochemical form.
I’d bet it has more than that. Check out all the cool stuff they found swimming around in some subsurface lake/river in Antarctica… before they popped in a camera it was yet another “surely complex life couldn’t possibly survive in that”…
The more we look around the more wrong the “surely complex life couldn’t exist in that” crowd become.
Yes, but also, we don't know where complex life began on earth. It probably wasn't in extreme cold, but who knows. Certain extreme environments may be more amenable to adaptation than to abiogenesis. There are still just many many unknowns, which is why we need more missions like this!
You won't be able to collect on this for ~100yr
Maybe he can make the bet and let the grandchildren collect it.
How can we ensure not 1 of the quintillion spores it will pick up upon interaction with earth will not survive transport and contaminate Europa?
We can't any more so than any other lander/prob/rover we've sent. And will it really matter when we eventually (probably not in our lives) send people there anyway. All their body-biome and other contaminants will come with them, too.
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.
Human cells only account for half of the cells in your body. We are bioreactors.
Humans I'm not so sure, but fungi maybe.
The surface of Europa is hard vacuum and its not landing there, with several miles of ice to the ocean. It's as protected from contamination as it's ever going to get.
We do hydrogen peroxide rinses of everything, but there are some organisms that can survive even this. I worked with some of them like B. pumilus that came back from the space station and exposure to space. Incredible resistance to hydrogen peroxide.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22680694/
https://astrobiology.com/2014/05/space-station-research-stud...
If an organism can survive a hydrogen peroxide bath, all our other sterilization methods, then a multi-year space trip bathed in UV rays and general radiation, then re-entry into Europa, and then proceeds to colonize that world... it deserves to.
It might already be there hitching a ride on a rock. Saturn and Jupiter have so much gravity the center of mass of the solar system can be outside of the sun when their orbits align. Who knows where the debris of the K-T event ended up.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is this (panspermia) the justification given in the Star Trek canon of why all the aliens have two arms, two legs, can speak, and speak English?
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.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all that aliens that can do space travel are bipedal. It’s just a great way to manipulate things with arms. No manipulating equals no spacecraft. Speaking would be the same. I always thought the aliens in Star Trek spoke their own language but the universal translators translated it?
> 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.
Whatever your body plan, I suspect higher order intelligence is a sort of snowball effect from having dexterous appendages you can use while walking and making noises at the same time.
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.
There are creatures here on earth that would fit the bill if they evolved differently:
- 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.
My take is that fungi have built most of Nature. They are the first farmers. So if the right branch of the fungal kingdom and anything else lands on a planet, you’ll get the rest eventually.
If by "the rest" you mean complex life, sure. If you mean "aliens" that speak English with an accent but look suspiciously like human actors in funny hats... well, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
Star Trek is - I love it but still - kinda bullshit that way. The Hainish model is more likely.
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.
Star Trek canon says that humanoids were deliberately seeded across the galaxy by an ancient race, not random panspermia. It was established in the TNG episode "The Chase". It's mentioned in some other episodes but it's typically kept on the down low to prevent hurting/contradicting religious feelings/origin stories (in universe).
Follow the guidance of your Planetary Protection Officer:
https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection#pl...
I mean odds are good it already happened a long time ago. Some space crap crashed into earth, spewing some rock covered in microbes into space where it eventually collided with Europa. We have identified plenty of space crap from other planets and moons in our solar system that crashed into us.
Granted the environment on our space probes is a little different than a shattered rock sent from an impact event but still…
Random side note: it appears that the scientific journal publishing the relevant paper is also publishing this science journalism piece, which makes me wonder why I’ve never seen that before.
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!!
All these worlds are yours - except Europa
Attempt no landing there.
> Clipper is a pricey gamble. Even though it was scaled back from a design that included a lander
> Attempt no landing there.
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.
I think this message was sent after the landings happened and after Jupiter's ignition.
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.
Clarke's third book "2061" describes the attempts to land on Europa despite the forbidding alien message.
I remember finding this series greatly engrossing, including 2061 and 3001, when I read them at age 12 or so. I wonder now if I should attempt re-reading. My only worry is that it'll take me until the year 2061 at the amount of free time I have today :(
Mea culpa, you are right! I forgot about that.
> please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
IMO the title of the post should be "Ice Skater"
If we were to find DNA based life on Europa, would there be a way to tell if it came from Earth, seeded Earth or both came from an external source?
Should we bring life there - just in case we find none? Like some deep sea smoker sample of life, transported to another deep sea smoker?
"It's the spring of 2031"
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.
a fine excuse to listen to a top tune by the multi talented Thomas Dolby.
Thomas Dolby - Europa And The Pirate Twins
Tbh I think $5 billion is a reasonable amount of money for something cool like this. I wish we could shovel the billions of dollars we spend on war and destruction into science, and the betterment of all humanity. But, alas...
>But, alas...
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.
Now that SpaceX can blast cargo into space cheaply, what we need to do is send a probe to every planet and moon in the solar system.
Just because:
1. we can
2. we have no idea what we'll find
No excuses!
Oh, and 10 more James Webb telescopes, too!
The problem with probes, landers and satellites, especially what, is that the rocket isn't the limiting factor. Development of the payload is the vast majority of the cost & time
A lot of that is because getting something launched was so hard (time, money, dealing with government grants, etc.) that they made damn sure the thing was going to be robust and work. The prices SpaceX will be launching at allows us to just chuck some off-the-shelf hardware together and not care so much if half of the hundreds of probes we send out fail.
I believe a standardized, "mass producible" probe design where the engineering parts (propulsion, power, communications, etc) are the same from one to the next or easily swapped with modules of a common architecture when you need a different option, with several hardpoints that custom scientific instruments can be mounted is really the way to go. You build say 3 flyby probes and a lander every year and the only thing you're scheduling is where they're going. If a particular science instrument isn't ready for a launch, it'll go on the next one to that destination. The design doesn't need to be static, indeed it makes a lot of sense to be continually improving it, but instead of investing all that engineering time into a one off, you get 10 to 15 missions out of each iteration. There might be some missions that really need a completely custom architecture, but these can be limited in scope and highly optimized instead of a $10 billion dollar omnibus. With greater numbers you can both implement process improvements to reduce defects and costs, and also because individual missions are less critical you can lower standards and take greater risks. Further, budgeting becomes so much easier - you don't have things getting cancelled after 80% of the money has already been spent, or repeated delays that triple your program costs, to say nothing of project management not having to reinvent the wheel each time. And from a science perspective you can follow up interesting findings much more quickly.
Well, the more you make of something, the cheaper it gets. Things also get easier when you're less constrained for weight and volume. I imagine that Starship delivering a robot all the way to the Mars surface would make things significantly cheaper. Mars is also a difficult place to land on, as it's very big for its thin atmosphere. If we had a system that can successfully land on Mars, it could be fairly easily used on other planets and moons.
SpaceX plans on sending 5 starships to Mars in 2 years (optimistic) or 4 years (pessimistic). Wonder what sort of stuff they'll send in the payload. Just supplies for the astronauts who come 2 years later or will they allow for rideshare of scientific payloads?
We have a system that has landed successfully on Mars, several different ones.
We've already developed the JWST. Unless, of course, all the tooling and test equipment was thrown away.
We've been able to send probes to other planets for many decades. Cost of the actual rocket doesn't appear to be the obstacle.
I think indirectly it does. When your launch vehicle costs hundreds of millions of dollars to use once on a scientific mission you try to put as much engineering into the scientific payload to (1) make damn sure it works when you are paying $200 million for a launch and (2) make sure you can do as much science as possible.
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.
A billion dollars a launch is definitely an obstacle.
Part of the reason why the probes are expensive is the limitations on the size and mass imposed by existing rockets.
I guess there's very little chance of accidentally transferring earth-style life to Europa's oceans with this flyby kind of plan.. that's a plus!
Even if we did accidentally seed life on Europa, it would be a pretty interesting result.
I wonder if any organic matter from Earth has ever fallen on any other planets or moons?
I'd be surprised if this hadn't happened at some point. Rocks from Mars found their way over to Antarctica.
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.
Will the levels of radiation allow life to exist there?
There's no radiation in the subterranean oceans, which is what they are investigating.
(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).
Thanks a lot!
No matter how careful, I don't see how they don't accidentally introduce earth bacteria to other planets and moons?
We have life in practically every hostile location on earth and bacteria survive even the most constantly sterilized environments like hospitals and clean-rooms?
I already know what they'll find..
https://www.amazon.com/Hardness-Minds-Europan-First-Contact-...
Time to print JPL's poster about Europa
I wonder how many nat security council meetings there would be between a discovery of life on Europa and the public getting to hear about it, for cases:
1) the life is non-intelligent 2) the life is intelligent
Either way, it would force us to re-think our practice of broadcasting into space.
Perhaps, though I would think that finding life in our solar system does not necessarily mean life will be outside our solar system. As in did something happen in our solar system to spark life. Also, I think the ship has sailed on not broadcasting into space.
Kind of clickbait. It will just fly by and remotely probe the surface. "We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission".
I missed the A and read E on the end of "europa" and was like "ah yes I see you have met the French".
I applaud the author (andrews). The guy can write well. A great read, a great mission. Good luck NASA!!
Why do we need to drill every Km? Sonar is used everywhere in the sea and whales can sing toward 15 Km.
I really hope this mission is designed with VR in mind. Obviously any feed will be delayed, but it would be amazing if Nasa figured out a way to package the vessel approach and other key moments as a livestream VR experience. It should feel like the modern version of everyone watching the moon landing (not that i was there).
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!
If I had multi-millionaire or billionaire money I'd put a satellite in low earth orbit with high definition cameras just to livestream the view in VR.
>Not only is it closer to Earth and easier to visit than Enceladus, but evidence suggests its ocean may have existed for 4.5 billion years—longer than Earth’s oceans
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.
Radiation levels on Europa's surface are about 5 Sv in 24 hours, which is a massive dose; for reference, this is enough to kill 50% of humans exposed to it and make the survivors extremely ill.
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 found this table. I picked out a few data points
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
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosynthesis_(metabolism)
I do assume this extreme level of cold and vacuum can also be acclimated in those 4.x billion years
Right, this is a possibility—but complex life doing so, in vacuum, at 100K? All I'm saying is, knowing what we know about chemistry, it seems extremely unlikely.
I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong empirically, but it doesn't make sense to start our search there.
Implication being if life exists in oceans -> surface life must exist in ~4B years? That does seem to be true for Earth I guess.
I mean, all of Europa is covered with a thick layer of ice and conditions above the ice layer are far from favorable for life. I'm not sure why you would expect to see anything on the surface?
“We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission.
I'm still looking for intelligent life on this planet!
Reminds of the book by Brandon Q. Morris "Enceladus"
If there is no life, why not plant it?
LEO WiFi, international space stations testing alfalfa growing in zero-g, “space walks” and moon returns. Meh. It’s the robotics probes like this one, Cassini, and Voyagers that are the exciting missions. Far bigger return for science.
>LEO WiFi
I missed that one. What?
Probably Starlink. Some people seem to use WiFi as synonymous for Internet.
"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.
time to get back to playing Warframe
Anyone who grew up with artist impressions and scientific guesses about Pluto was quite surprised when the first close-up photos of Pluto were released. NASA was very wrong about how it looked and what it was made of.
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.
[dead]
Can you just please let us know when you actually find something worthy of our attention?
It's ironic that we are searching for life on other planets when we are eradicating the life right here on ours.
I don’t think we’re eradicating life, just most natural ecosystems and ecological diversity.
I meant life as in indiviudal lives. Saying what you said is like saying "Stalin didn't eradicate life. Just a few million people."
Not really. A small minority care about space life. A small minority care about conservation.
Allmost everyone cares about conservation .. but about conserving the immediate life around them, e.g. their life and the close people around them.
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.
> A small minority care about conservation.
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.
Just in case, let’s check if one of Jupiter’s moons, packed with salt and freezing near absolute zero, happens to have life. Sounds like a great way to spend public money.
From Wikipedia[0]:
"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
"near absolute zero" is not nearly correct. The temperature of Europa ocean is believed to be between 0 and -4 degrees Celsius.
Just one aircraft carrier less, and NASA can send probes to most of Jupiter‘s moons and still have money left for marketing…
Yeah but it won't be NASA sending them but CNSA.
Which is all the same for humanity.
Why would salt be a problem? There are single celled organisms known as halophiles that survive extreme salt. Do you know what range of concentrations are reasonable for life, or which salts might be present on Europa?
It might seem like a long shot, but exploring moons like Europa isn't just about finding life... It's about expanding our understanding of life's potential across the universe
I wouldn’t put it that way, but I’d rather space exploration money focus on colonization and improving life on earth. For example, asteroid mining has massive potential. What if rare metals suddenly were no longer rare? What could we make? What if we had outposts on other planets? How might that change perspectives and culture on earth? How might R&D to colonize Mars make life on Earth more resilient and sustainable?
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?
> asteroid mining has massive potential
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.)
> Searching for life elsewhere seems so empty and unsatisfying.
To me, finding any extra terrestrial life, or even just a fossil of past life, would be the most exciting find in the history.
It would answer humanity's longest open philosophical question. The religious and social consequences would likely change the course of human 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.
How do you think the discovery of extraterrestrial life would do that? I think most people would say “that’s neat” and continue living their life unchanged.
Yes, I guess new ideas have never contributed to any change in social dynamics ever. That's the course of history you know: the social psychology and accepted wisdom is exactly as it is now, unchanged from Roman times because no new thinking based on discovery or philosophy ever led to a shift in the structure and beliefs of society.
There could be immediate peace on Earth between all mankind once there is extra-terrestrial life to hate or fear instead.
We are perfectly capable of hating them and ourselves at the same time.
Yeah... I would go that far. Average human's life wouldn't change in short period. But on a larger scale of time, it could propel us to explore the universe.
We are brought into existence from dust, and marvel at the creation we find ourselves in. It looks like we're the only living things in this vast cosmos, how strange.
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.
> If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
There'd be a massive jump in the likelihood of finding a living snail.
> 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.
If you want to swallow something inedible, plenty is available here. Or elsewhere; you can eat a moon rock if you really want to.
What more important can we human beings do than exploring space and improve our tech?
> What more important can we human beings do than exploring space and improve our tech?
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?
nasa's budget is miniscule compared to the funds allocated to the military
They complete each other, first step is to explore other planets, then send the military to protect it and take the resources there before other nations.
> "We’re not a life search mission. We’re a habitability mission,” says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper’s project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission. But even Pappalardo, a cautious scientist who is constitutionally averse to hyperbole, says finding a hint of life is “not out of the question.”
"What an ignorant fool! There could totally be life there!"