IMO, I don't think it should be a surprise that we will eventually find signs of extraterrestial (but not necessarily intelligent) life in our solar system. The real question is: does it share any common building blocks with life on Earth or not? The answer to that question could dramatically change our understanding of our place in the universe as well as open up entire new fields of productive research in biochemistry.
Anyone who has tried to keep their culture plates sterile in a lab will probably appreciate panspermia more than regular people. I'll personally put all my money into life being found at least fossilized not just in Mars but in europa and anywhere with liquid water, and sharing the same fundamental dna-protein-genetic code makeup as us (but probably little else). The way I see it, once life forms on one planet, it probably starts spreading seeds on a cosmic scale quite promiscuously. The speed at which life arose in earth as soon as conditions were right suggests that there's always microbes floating into the planet ready to take advantage.
This also would mean that there's no opportunity for any other form of life to develop in the same conditions - dna based life probably has a monopoly on water based planets throughout the galaxy
Serious question here, but are there any concerns about potentially finding some type of non-intelligent life that could threaten us? Some kind of bacteria like organism that could wreak havoc on mankind? I’m sure there are a ton of strict processes around returning samples back to earth but I’ve never really read anything mentioning this threat when it comes to finding life outside our planet.
We know that if we apply an energy gradient through a soup of ammonia, methane, and water vapour, we get the fundamental building blocks of Earth life.
If we discovered these same blocks on another planet, that has all of these pre-conditions, what would it tell us?
So much of astronomy and planetary science focuses on water right now. Here are some more recent results about water:
- The bright, salty deposits that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet’s gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and subglacial lakes on Mars.
- Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of organic space-born molecules (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite chondrite meteorites (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been previously assumed.
- Juno took the first image of Ganymede’s north pole (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to have been altered by Jupiter’s intense radiation to become an amorphous material without crystalline structure.
The more we learn about our place in the universe, the more we realize how insignificant we are.
I'm now expecting life to be ubiquitous and intelligent life to be rare, yet not unusual.
If only 0.001% of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe contain intelligent life and moving from one galaxy to another is prohibitive, that would mean 1 million instances of intelligent life scattered across the universe.
We wouldn't be special, but we could hardly detect or even interact with other intelligent life.
You are looking only at one dimension: space. But you are forgetting time. Intelligent life on Earth has existed a minuscule amount of time in the span of the universe. You need also to take into the probabilities that we would overlap with another intelligent life on the timeline.
>The more we learn about our place in the universe, the more we realize how insignificant we are.
Insignificant and unremarkable in scale, position and effect certainly. Given that, it seems likely that the presence of life is also insignificant and unremarkable.
That said, it's pretty difficult to overstate the complexity of the mechanisms of life as we know them on Earth. Despite the vastness of space and time, it's also trivial to generate circumstances that are almost certainly unique across tremendous spans of both. So it's entirely probable that we're not alone, and it's also entirely possible that we are. In the latter case, we're still insignificant to a universe that doesn't know we're here, but we'd be sitting in a much more precious place in history.
The term "significant" stems from the person using it, from what they are trying to convey. There are many different ways to think about significance. Significant to whom? For what reason?
Another popular and yet abused argument is saying that human body is "mostly empty space", because the size of the atomic nucleus or an electron is so small compared to the space between them. But so what? It is the interaction between the atoms that matters, that produces all the results including our consciousness, not how much space is between the atoms.
What if we are one of the most significant phenomena and results of the universe, regardless of how little or much space we occupy? Or at the very least, what if the rare occurences of the conscious life are the most significant things in the universe, regardless of how many dead planets or galaxies or space is between them.
Is it really that hard to see that significance can easily be based on something much more interesting and useful than the banal notion of comparative linear space?
This definition of "significance" is not any more or less truthful by any objective standard, so I am wondering why did you choose to use your definition? What does thinking that way achieve for you in your life?
I think you're right but technically we haven't hit paydirt yet in terms of finding life off earth. Maybe the Venusian probe will be the big breakthrough
When they say "buried lakes" do they just mean region of sediment that is water saturated or brine saturated, like an aquifer? Or do they mean a volume of relatively pure continuous water? Very difficult to tell from the fuzzy language these releases use.
> It’s thought that any underground lakes on Mars must have a reasonably high salt content for the water to remain liquid.
This means that any lifeforms in that water are unlikely but is it possible that the water remains liquid through something other than salt? Because the other alternative would be a lifeform that isn't influenced by salt as much as any that we know.
Is anyone else concerned about the prime directive? I worry that our interference could inhibit the natural evolution process to the point that it doesn't happen. I guess that's not to say that some Prometheus-style, ancient alien civilization intervention didn't happen in our history; I don't think we'd ever know. But it seems to me that the genesis of mitochondria is an extremely rare and unlikely event and our interference on these extra-terrestrial bodies may put it all astray. Again, we'd never know... At least not for a few hundred million years.
I would be much more concerned about the 200-2000 species that we knowingly cause to go extinct right here on earth every year than I would be about the vanishingly remote possibility that we may be interfering with an evolutionary leap in a microorganism which may or may not exist.
Jokes aside, If there is any life on other celestial bodies, I wonder if there will be diseases that we carry/they have that would prove destructive to us/them. Or perhaps the biology would be different enough that there wouldn't be a risk.
If we ever plan to make a manned mission to that place, we better pack enough water filters and a nuclear reactor, else we solely rely on a mad man in a blue box.
[+] [-] woeirua|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ramraj07|5 years ago|reply
This also would mean that there's no opportunity for any other form of life to develop in the same conditions - dna based life probably has a monopoly on water based planets throughout the galaxy
[+] [-] tru3_power|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|5 years ago|reply
We know that if we apply an energy gradient through a soup of ammonia, methane, and water vapour, we get the fundamental building blocks of Earth life.
If we discovered these same blocks on another planet, that has all of these pre-conditions, what would it tell us?
[+] [-] bamboozled|5 years ago|reply
I mean we have a definition of life and it’s building blocks, and we don’t consider a rock having a life, even though it does have a lifecycle.
[+] [-] Ericson2314|5 years ago|reply
I hope it's really different. I don't want to be that special.
[+] [-] TLightful|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ionwake|5 years ago|reply
http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...
[+] [-] isoprophlex|5 years ago|reply
Edit: holy shit someone else commented that it's water ice. Amazing. I didn't know there was actual water on the surface!
[+] [-] invalidusernam3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heyitsguay|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SEJeff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tectonic|5 years ago|reply
- The bright, salty deposits that NASA’s Dawn spacecraft spotted on Ceres likely come from briny water escaping from a 418 km across underground reservoir 48 km below the surface (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-020-1138-8). Two reservoirs were spotted by analyzing the dwarf planet’s gravitational field. The salt deposits are young, suggesting that Ceres, the largest asteroid in the solar system, is still an active world. Ceres joins the growing list of solar system bodies that likely host hidden oceans: Enceladus (now with recently detected fresh interior ice), Europa, Ganymede, Pluto, and subglacial lakes on Mars.
- Some of Earth's water may have come from the breakdown of organic space-born molecules (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64815-6), while the rest could have come from hydrogen locked up in enstatite chondrite meteorites (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6507/1110), instead of being delivered by comets and carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that formed beyond the snow line, as has been previously assumed.
- Juno took the first image of Ganymede’s north pole (https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/news/nasa-juno-takes-first-...). Ganymede, a moon larger than the planet Mercury, is made mostly of water ice. The ice near its north pole appears to have been altered by Jupiter’s intense radiation to become an amorphous material without crystalline structure.
Oh, and here's a recently-released mission poster for NASA’s upcoming Europa Clipper mission to study the Jovian moon’s icy shell and liquid saltwater ocean: https://europa.nasa.gov/resources/173/europa-clipper-journey...
Our next issue of Orbital Index (https://orbitalindex.com) is coincidentally all about water.
[+] [-] reaperducer|5 years ago|reply
As long as it stays in orbit. I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to land on Europa. Some monolith mentioned it.
[+] [-] tectonic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YarickR2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tepix|5 years ago|reply
I'm now expecting life to be ubiquitous and intelligent life to be rare, yet not unusual. If only 0.001% of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe contain intelligent life and moving from one galaxy to another is prohibitive, that would mean 1 million instances of intelligent life scattered across the universe. We wouldn't be special, but we could hardly detect or even interact with other intelligent life.
[+] [-] thecopy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcims|5 years ago|reply
Insignificant and unremarkable in scale, position and effect certainly. Given that, it seems likely that the presence of life is also insignificant and unremarkable.
That said, it's pretty difficult to overstate the complexity of the mechanisms of life as we know them on Earth. Despite the vastness of space and time, it's also trivial to generate circumstances that are almost certainly unique across tremendous spans of both. So it's entirely probable that we're not alone, and it's also entirely possible that we are. In the latter case, we're still insignificant to a universe that doesn't know we're here, but we'd be sitting in a much more precious place in history.
[+] [-] Erlich_Bachman|5 years ago|reply
The term "significant" stems from the person using it, from what they are trying to convey. There are many different ways to think about significance. Significant to whom? For what reason?
Another popular and yet abused argument is saying that human body is "mostly empty space", because the size of the atomic nucleus or an electron is so small compared to the space between them. But so what? It is the interaction between the atoms that matters, that produces all the results including our consciousness, not how much space is between the atoms.
What if we are one of the most significant phenomena and results of the universe, regardless of how little or much space we occupy? Or at the very least, what if the rare occurences of the conscious life are the most significant things in the universe, regardless of how many dead planets or galaxies or space is between them.
Is it really that hard to see that significance can easily be based on something much more interesting and useful than the banal notion of comparative linear space?
This definition of "significance" is not any more or less truthful by any objective standard, so I am wondering why did you choose to use your definition? What does thinking that way achieve for you in your life?
[+] [-] s1artibartfast|5 years ago|reply
I hear this a lot, but it always seems like an incomplete thought. What is the measure of significance here? uniqueness? Mass? Space?
[+] [-] darepublic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordymoop|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BelleOfTheBall|5 years ago|reply
This means that any lifeforms in that water are unlikely but is it possible that the water remains liquid through something other than salt? Because the other alternative would be a lifeform that isn't influenced by salt as much as any that we know.
[+] [-] koeng|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SCNP|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RhodesianHunter|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notsuoh|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanrasmussen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Shared404|5 years ago|reply
Jokes aside, If there is any life on other celestial bodies, I wonder if there will be diseases that we carry/they have that would prove destructive to us/them. Or perhaps the biology would be different enough that there wouldn't be a risk.
[+] [-] phoenixdblack|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noncoml|5 years ago|reply
Wouldn't it be possible to have life that is not based on carbon, water, etc..?
[+] [-] calmworm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jula432vdf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hikerclimber|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] bregma|5 years ago|reply
See what a little competition in the space race can do?
[+] [-] phoenixdblack|5 years ago|reply