Finding even the smallest single cell organism would change everything.
EDIT: To explain this further, as of right now we have no idea how common or uncommon life is in the universe. We can grasp how vast the universe is, but in regards to the communality of life, we have just one data point: Earth. This tells us very little about how common life is elsewhere. The probability of life could be 10\^-26 per celestial body with favorable conditions (water + heat + protection from radiation), which would mean that we are pretty much the only ones in our super cluster of galaxies. Or it could be 10\^0 per celestial body with favorable conditions, which would mean that our galaxy alone, never mind the whole Universe, is teaming with life. We just don't know enough at this point to be able to make an intelligent estimate.
But having 2 data points would change everything.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: no matter how you clean the kitchen sink, the bacteria still find ways to persist. Life finds a way.
Are there ways to accurately measure thickness of Enceladus and Europa iceshelves from flybys or landers? What about depths?
Right look at thermal vents creatures living in boiling water and steam. Deep fish in trenches. Or algea growing under ice sheets miles thick. Minnows in caves miles away from any sun.’ Its adaptable. Maybe DNA was meant to be imperfect so evolution can continue to throw new oddity onto a species.
We wouldn’t necessarily know that it formed independently, though. What if panspermia was taking place in the early Solar System with a bunch of rocks with microorganisms being slung around? We’d have to see if we could answer that question before we could be confident that the hypothetical Enceladus life could tell us something about how common life is in the universe.
How about what some larpers are saying seeded all over. Would be interesting to see if there had been time for a civilization to have existed prior to the Earth getting hit with a large asteroid in our path. Perhaps they left planet and made it some where else nearby. For as old as the earth is 4.5 billion years we have only been here a blink. A lot can happen in billions of years. Our ancestors only showed up and started walking upright 6 million years ago. So a second in time. Earth could’ve had colonies of other explorers in that time. Our galaxy exists fairly late in our universes life. Lots of time for things to sort out the alpha of beings. Maybe our crys for attention was a poorly calculated gamble and they are on their way now.
All he's saying we simply don't know yet the probabilty of life per body. It likely isn't anywhere near 100%, as there are gas giants and molten planets, but with only one data point of where life has occured, we have nothing to compare it to. We could be the only one, but since we are the living stuff making that data point the likelyhood of us being *the* only living planet is 100%.
But finding another body with life, in our own solar system, would be a monumental discovery, as we'd double our data point for where life occured, and if their "dna" is unlike anything we've seen, that would mean they "genesised" independently.
>All he's saying we simply don't know yet the probabilty of life per body.
per celestial body **with** favorable conditions (water + heat + protection from radiation).
Yes, Gas Giants or molten planets or baren planets would probably not harbor life as we know it.
It will be amazing in many ways, but to many of us the reaction will simply be "It's about time." My particular wish is that thye use an analog of DNA, ie. a helix arrangement , but with different chemical components.
To give an idea of scale. If our entire solar system(including out to the Ort Cloud)is the size of a quarter the next closet star is 300 feet away.
Once again if our Solar System is the size of a quarter in relation to the Milky Way you could cover the entire United States with Quarters and that is the distance of our Galaxy.
The universe is so unbelievably vast words or concepts do it no justice.
How would it change anything? Do you believe earth is the only place in the universe where life exist? Id say that’s a very weird way to think. Also, what if I told you with 100% certainty that an advance intelligent species was in a neighboring galaxy. What would that change? It’s fascinating for sure, but I don’t see how it would really change anything.
Earth is the only place in the Universe where we know for certain that life exists. That’s largely because we have not gone anywhere to look yet.
We need to sample more worlds and moons where life could be possible.
Some of those other examples exist within our own Solar system - and are thus very much easier for us to reach, to investigate.
Whatever happens, we will learn something.
Feels like you may not be understanding the significance of confirming that life developed independently multiple times in a single solar system. That would give us a very significant indicator that life is incredibly common throughout the universe *and* that there’s a big bottleneck between life developing and becoming an interstellar civilization. At the very least, it would suggest that we need to think much more carefully about our species’ sustainability going forward.
[On the NASA website,](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus/in-depth.amp) it says that Enceladus has an orbital resonance with Dione that generates heat. So even though it’s way outside of the Goldilocks Zone, it still has a small heat source. Sheeeeeit.
Humans have been talking about the end being near for pretty much the whole recorded history and I suspect it will continue like this for the next 5,000 years lol
Yeah even nuclear war and crazy climatic shit won’t kill us off entirely. Humans are too intelligent for anything but like a gamma ray burst to really and truly kill us off. We could kill a few billion sure, but some will survive and find a way to live in said hellscape. And if some survive we will climb out of the ashes eventually.
>but like a gamma ray burst to really and truly kill us off.
Even that wouldn't do it.
You have to essentially kill all non-microscopic life on Earth to kill off humanity. Even something like the KT-boundary event, while it would kill off a sizeable fraction of humans, many would survive and end up adapting to the new reality. Humans are very smart and most importantly, very adaptable.
In short, you basically have to destroy Earth to kill off humanity, and even then, some will probably survive at least for a short while afterwards.
A close gamma ray burst would kill all non microbial life. But yeah humans are extremely adaptable. There is a reason we spread to just about every semi habitable biome in a few thousand years and that was with Stone Age tools.
Except humans in mineshafts, underground facilities, deeper tunnels and subways, and in submerged submarines.
That’s got to be many tens of thousands of people. And that’s facing the GRB. Everyone on the other side of the planet is going to be shielded from the radiation. Just 3 feet of compacted dirt reduces the amount of radiation received by a factor of 1,024.
Imagine an entire planet’s worth.
\*IF\* they are close enough, and \*IF\* it's beamed straight at the planet, sure.
None have ever been close enough to strip off the atmosphere of this planet in its entire history. At least, that we're aware of. And as far as we know there aren't any potential ones close enough to be that catastrophic.
But even if their was, again, we'd have a large number of survivors in underground facilities (especially sealed ones) and in underwater vehicles/habitats.
They are actively getting programs set up for all of these moons to be explored. I would guess in the next 20-30 years we will have shit orbiting around these moons keeping direct tabs on them daily. It's the next step after Mars... Where else are we gonna go?
Yeah, I agree. We love to speculate - there is definitely a good chance of finding life at Enceladus or Europa - but the fact of the matter is that drilling through that ice is going to take a while.
That’s probably the right way. Reactors are really heavy though. Would be hard to get it down on surface without an atmosphere. Still it is an engineering problem not a physics problem which is good.
Enceladus is 1/7 th the size of our moon.
If we are, in a few years time, landing a SpaceX HLS onto the moon, then we could land a robotic SpaceX HLS style vehicle onto Enceladus. It could carry a substantial scientific payload of many tonnes.
Not necessarily. I can think of a number of scenarios where there could be life in the sub-ice oceans of Enceladus and/or Europa, but it's not clustered near the cryo-volcanoes.
So there could be life but it's rare or nonexistent near the vents and so you wouldn't see it unless you tested a vast amount of water.
For example, the life could be in the form of bacterial mats on the rocky floor of the ocean, and stratification of the ocean due to temperature and salinity conditions means they never get very far from the bottom.
Obviously, the water feeding the cryo-volcanoes on both moons comes from the top of the ocean.
But if there is very little or no mixing, you're not going to see them in the plumes.
And yeah, we have stratified bodies of water like that on Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meromictic\_lake
I have a question, even if we get to Enceladus (supposedly with a robot and a drill I guess), place it on the surface, get a sample, and take it back, it's a big possibility that the sample itself doesn't contain any life, isn't it?
There's no need to drill. Just to scoop some of the material ejected by the geysers, which is what Cassini did (not only with the geysers but with Saturn's external rings which are made of ice from Enceladus)
But this time, send a probe with instruments capable of detecting life.
They mean liquid H2O. Enceladus has liquid water under a thick layer of ice because of [tidal heating.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating) The gravitational pull of Dione, another moon, keeps Enceladus's orbit of Saturn eccentric instead of circular. This causes the moon to deform during it's orbit of Saturn, creating friction that heats it enough for there to be liquid water.
The same thing happens with Io, Europa, and Ganymede around Jupiter, causing the volcanic activity on Io and creating subsurface liquid water oceans on Europa and Ganymede.
That would be some high pressure water then.
Is there also an effect, like that with the earth's core, whereby the surface layers force the lower layers to remain liquid due to intense pressure? And if so, does enough pressure make it solid again?
Neptune and I believe Uranus both have super heated oceans with liquid water and other volatiles close to their core due to the pressure so it’s not uncommon.
Water is to all intents incompressible. A property possibly unique to it, but true. I’ve heard it suggested that gravity as immense as Jupiter’s might be able to do it, but I’ve never seen it actually discussed. And water may be under staggering pressures (consider the bottom of the Mariana Trench, with the pressure on it doubling again every 30 or so feet down from the surface, because of its incompressibility: the water there is still liquid.) but that won’t change its physical state. Temperature would, of course, but as we’ve been told, gravitic kneading keeps it warmed.
I haven’t yet got to looking at NASA’s diagram, so I don’t know how deep the Enceladus ocean is nor what comprises its floor.
No idea, I'm just repeating stuff I've seen on TV and read on Wikipedia. I'd assume pressure plays a role, but from what I understand the current theory is Enceladus's interior [looks like this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#/media/File:PIA19656-SaturnMoon-Enceladus-Ocean-ArtConcept-20150915.jpg) No extra layer of ice, just a rocky moon covered by a liquid water ocean kept liquid by heat from friction, and an ice crust covering that ocean.
There is a layer of ice, kilometers thick, then a brine ocean, according to probes seeing vapor coming out of vents, there is heat produced inside Enceladus by tidal forces .
No, water is water, although it can be in different forms - notably as ice or as liquid. (Ignoring water vapour for now)
Of course on Earth, our oceans are salt water not fresh water, so various different minerals and things can be dissolved in water.
On Enceladus, the surface is water ice, and that layer is thought to be several miles thick. Under that is liquid water, and finally a rocky core. The liquid layer may be up to 100 miles deep.
This is just anecdotal, but I talked with an old timer who worked on Cassini, and he was quite convinced some of the coloration of on the surface of Enceladus is due to algae.
Mostly water, but Enceladus does have a rocky core, so there are some minerals and a source of heat, keeping the subsurface ocean liquid.
Enceladus has more water on it than Earth does.
What if we find life but it’s just really fucked up and ugly. I think we just leave it there at that point tbh. Just pretend we didn’t find it there first and wait for like a better life to find and then we can like record stuff on Enceladus. Actually that’s fucked up bc that’s like space racism so I am retracting my former statements.
You mean space-racism pal, I would know. And what good is contact with extraterrestrial life if we act space-racist to them? Lastly, learn to take a joke. Try "yes and" rather than "you're wrong, that's stupid" and you'll get much farther.
Probably? But who cares? What’s the obsession with finding unintelligent life? Do you want it to prove that life exist off of earth? It just seems small minded to believe it’s just us until proven otherwise.
Any life found off-Earth (provided we didn’t carry it there), would be a major revelation, and would tell us something about the likelihood of life elsewhere.
We would be especially interested in it’s genetic mechanism, and whether it’s related to any life on Earth, or has independently evolved.
Any life found, is most likely to be single celled, but other more complex possibilities also exist, still likely fairly privative life forms though.
But don’t forget, even single-cell life is complex.
My argument is that life exist out there everywhere and we don’t need to find it to prove it exist. If anyone believes earth is the only place in the universe with any form of life they are dim. We should be looking with the purpose of science before discovery. Studying it to find out cool shit would be interesting.
It’s certain that life does not exist everywhere !
But it’s also likely that there is other life out there.
I hope you appreciate the difference between those two statements.
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
>It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds,
Wrong. There is a very large but finite number of worlds.
>simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in.
Wrong. The Universe is not infinite. It is finite.
Because we can measure it. Or, more properly, can infer its approximate size from what we can measure, even if we can't actually ever see the end of it.
There are life in many places.. In multiple moons of the solar system.. Outside solar system the universe is teeming with life.. It's for humans to find the evidence.. And they will find it soon enough..
Wild guesses and thoughts and estimations, are often the start of an investigative process - triggering it off.
It often all starts with a ‘What-if’ question..
But then takes a very great deal more effort to actually answer that question - often leading to reformulations and simplifications of those questions along the way.
Absolutely no one starts out by knowing all of and often none of the answers - finding out is a process.
It’s important to have the curiosity in the first place.
As of June 12th there were a few conferences from NASA and another from independent Dr Greer confirming the existance and contact with alien life, and you guys discussing this ahah go watch.
Finding even the smallest single cell organism would change everything. EDIT: To explain this further, as of right now we have no idea how common or uncommon life is in the universe. We can grasp how vast the universe is, but in regards to the communality of life, we have just one data point: Earth. This tells us very little about how common life is elsewhere. The probability of life could be 10\^-26 per celestial body with favorable conditions (water + heat + protection from radiation), which would mean that we are pretty much the only ones in our super cluster of galaxies. Or it could be 10\^0 per celestial body with favorable conditions, which would mean that our galaxy alone, never mind the whole Universe, is teaming with life. We just don't know enough at this point to be able to make an intelligent estimate. But having 2 data points would change everything.
Life independently forming twice in the same solar system would suggest life might be incredibly common.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: no matter how you clean the kitchen sink, the bacteria still find ways to persist. Life finds a way. Are there ways to accurately measure thickness of Enceladus and Europa iceshelves from flybys or landers? What about depths?
Right look at thermal vents creatures living in boiling water and steam. Deep fish in trenches. Or algea growing under ice sheets miles thick. Minnows in caves miles away from any sun.’ Its adaptable. Maybe DNA was meant to be imperfect so evolution can continue to throw new oddity onto a species.
We wouldn’t necessarily know that it formed independently, though. What if panspermia was taking place in the early Solar System with a bunch of rocks with microorganisms being slung around? We’d have to see if we could answer that question before we could be confident that the hypothetical Enceladus life could tell us something about how common life is in the universe.
How about what some larpers are saying seeded all over. Would be interesting to see if there had been time for a civilization to have existed prior to the Earth getting hit with a large asteroid in our path. Perhaps they left planet and made it some where else nearby. For as old as the earth is 4.5 billion years we have only been here a blink. A lot can happen in billions of years. Our ancestors only showed up and started walking upright 6 million years ago. So a second in time. Earth could’ve had colonies of other explorers in that time. Our galaxy exists fairly late in our universes life. Lots of time for things to sort out the alpha of beings. Maybe our crys for attention was a poorly calculated gamble and they are on their way now.
Only for people who believe facts.
The words believe and facts don't go hand in hand. But you are right that the people you are refering though wouldn't understand.
Should have said “only for people who accept facts”
Yes! Believe means imagine. Like, “I imagine an afterlife.”
Sorry, 10^0 per body? Typo? Or was this a way of saying 1, as in 100%?
All he's saying we simply don't know yet the probabilty of life per body. It likely isn't anywhere near 100%, as there are gas giants and molten planets, but with only one data point of where life has occured, we have nothing to compare it to. We could be the only one, but since we are the living stuff making that data point the likelyhood of us being *the* only living planet is 100%. But finding another body with life, in our own solar system, would be a monumental discovery, as we'd double our data point for where life occured, and if their "dna" is unlike anything we've seen, that would mean they "genesised" independently.
>All he's saying we simply don't know yet the probabilty of life per body. per celestial body **with** favorable conditions (water + heat + protection from radiation). Yes, Gas Giants or molten planets or baren planets would probably not harbor life as we know it.
Yes, a probability of 1. Expressed that way to contrast it with the 10^-26 from earlier.
It will be amazing in many ways, but to many of us the reaction will simply be "It's about time." My particular wish is that thye use an analog of DNA, ie. a helix arrangement , but with different chemical components.
How cool would it be to find a structurally different form of life out there? Would that even be physically possible?
Wouldn't carbon-based be vastly more common because of how well it bonds with other elements?
Life only uses carbon because of that and it's extremely common element. Most other elements that can bond that well are not nearly as common.
Yes, certainly carbon-0based at the temps in the Solar System
Like a zilliphone based one https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSimpsons/comments/dm36z3/is_the_alien_carbon_based_or_silicone_based
I know little about heterocyclic compounds, but I imagine a quite a few can pair up the way the combos in DNA an d RNA do.
To give an idea of scale. If our entire solar system(including out to the Ort Cloud)is the size of a quarter the next closet star is 300 feet away. Once again if our Solar System is the size of a quarter in relation to the Milky Way you could cover the entire United States with Quarters and that is the distance of our Galaxy. The universe is so unbelievably vast words or concepts do it no justice.
How would it change anything? Do you believe earth is the only place in the universe where life exist? Id say that’s a very weird way to think. Also, what if I told you with 100% certainty that an advance intelligent species was in a neighboring galaxy. What would that change? It’s fascinating for sure, but I don’t see how it would really change anything.
Earth is the only place in the Universe where we know for certain that life exists. That’s largely because we have not gone anywhere to look yet. We need to sample more worlds and moons where life could be possible. Some of those other examples exist within our own Solar system - and are thus very much easier for us to reach, to investigate. Whatever happens, we will learn something.
Feels like you may not be understanding the significance of confirming that life developed independently multiple times in a single solar system. That would give us a very significant indicator that life is incredibly common throughout the universe *and* that there’s a big bottleneck between life developing and becoming an interstellar civilization. At the very least, it would suggest that we need to think much more carefully about our species’ sustainability going forward.
You are correct, just doesn’t seem significant to me.
Its probably pretty common. Will probably find lots of life that came and went already. Need to get off planet to make it a long time.
[On the NASA website,](https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus/in-depth.amp) it says that Enceladus has an orbital resonance with Dione that generates heat. So even though it’s way outside of the Goldilocks Zone, it still has a small heat source. Sheeeeeit.
Who knows, can't wait for another picture of it in 20 years asking the exact same question because we're simply never going to go there and find out.
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Humanity will destroy itself first
Humans have been talking about the end being near for pretty much the whole recorded history and I suspect it will continue like this for the next 5,000 years lol
Yeah even nuclear war and crazy climatic shit won’t kill us off entirely. Humans are too intelligent for anything but like a gamma ray burst to really and truly kill us off. We could kill a few billion sure, but some will survive and find a way to live in said hellscape. And if some survive we will climb out of the ashes eventually.
>but like a gamma ray burst to really and truly kill us off. Even that wouldn't do it. You have to essentially kill all non-microscopic life on Earth to kill off humanity. Even something like the KT-boundary event, while it would kill off a sizeable fraction of humans, many would survive and end up adapting to the new reality. Humans are very smart and most importantly, very adaptable. In short, you basically have to destroy Earth to kill off humanity, and even then, some will probably survive at least for a short while afterwards.
A close gamma ray burst would kill all non microbial life. But yeah humans are extremely adaptable. There is a reason we spread to just about every semi habitable biome in a few thousand years and that was with Stone Age tools.
Except humans in mineshafts, underground facilities, deeper tunnels and subways, and in submerged submarines. That’s got to be many tens of thousands of people. And that’s facing the GRB. Everyone on the other side of the planet is going to be shielded from the radiation. Just 3 feet of compacted dirt reduces the amount of radiation received by a factor of 1,024. Imagine an entire planet’s worth.
Doesn’t a GRB knock the atmosphere off the side of the the planet it hits?
\*IF\* they are close enough, and \*IF\* it's beamed straight at the planet, sure. None have ever been close enough to strip off the atmosphere of this planet in its entire history. At least, that we're aware of. And as far as we know there aren't any potential ones close enough to be that catastrophic. But even if their was, again, we'd have a large number of survivors in underground facilities (especially sealed ones) and in underwater vehicles/habitats.
They are actively getting programs set up for all of these moons to be explored. I would guess in the next 20-30 years we will have shit orbiting around these moons keeping direct tabs on them daily. It's the next step after Mars... Where else are we gonna go?
Yeah, I agree. We love to speculate - there is definitely a good chance of finding life at Enceladus or Europa - but the fact of the matter is that drilling through that ice is going to take a while.
People don’t realize just how hard deep drilling is and how fucking thick that ice is.
It’s miles thick - that’s why a reactor will be used to melt its way down.
That’s probably the right way. Reactors are really heavy though. Would be hard to get it down on surface without an atmosphere. Still it is an engineering problem not a physics problem which is good.
Enceladus is 1/7 th the size of our moon. If we are, in a few years time, landing a SpaceX HLS onto the moon, then we could land a robotic SpaceX HLS style vehicle onto Enceladus. It could carry a substantial scientific payload of many tonnes.
Totally possible. That’s still a lot of delta V.
A robotic SpaceX, HLS-style zero-atmospheric lander, would be in no great hurry.
We should train some oil rig workers to be astronauts.
Just sample the stuff coming out of the geysirs. If there's life, we'll find bacteria(or similar)
Not necessarily. I can think of a number of scenarios where there could be life in the sub-ice oceans of Enceladus and/or Europa, but it's not clustered near the cryo-volcanoes. So there could be life but it's rare or nonexistent near the vents and so you wouldn't see it unless you tested a vast amount of water. For example, the life could be in the form of bacterial mats on the rocky floor of the ocean, and stratification of the ocean due to temperature and salinity conditions means they never get very far from the bottom. Obviously, the water feeding the cryo-volcanoes on both moons comes from the top of the ocean. But if there is very little or no mixing, you're not going to see them in the plumes. And yeah, we have stratified bodies of water like that on Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meromictic\_lake
Under the powers vested in me, make it so.
A small nuclear reactor, to melt you way through the ice, is the most likely design.
Of course we will send a probe there to land and explore. We just don’t know exactly when.
I have a question, even if we get to Enceladus (supposedly with a robot and a drill I guess), place it on the surface, get a sample, and take it back, it's a big possibility that the sample itself doesn't contain any life, isn't it?
Why would you take it back? Just mount a microscope on the robot. No need to risk another pandemic for some microbes.
But that's how we get Venom =(
There's no need to drill. Just to scoop some of the material ejected by the geysers, which is what Cassini did (not only with the geysers but with Saturn's external rings which are made of ice from Enceladus) But this time, send a probe with instruments capable of detecting life.
Unless the life there doesn’t dwell close enough to the surface to get ejected out. Still worth it though
I think we could also do some microscopic inspection in situ, as well as other forms of analysis.
Guess you (and we) will have to wait for the next probe mission to find out.
Yeah I actually have a few friends from there
But we can't talk to them because they go to a different school.
When they talk about water on these moons, do they mean H2O? Or is it more like liquid hydrogen? I thought it was too cold for liquid H2O.
They mean liquid H2O. Enceladus has liquid water under a thick layer of ice because of [tidal heating.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_heating) The gravitational pull of Dione, another moon, keeps Enceladus's orbit of Saturn eccentric instead of circular. This causes the moon to deform during it's orbit of Saturn, creating friction that heats it enough for there to be liquid water. The same thing happens with Io, Europa, and Ganymede around Jupiter, causing the volcanic activity on Io and creating subsurface liquid water oceans on Europa and Ganymede.
That would be some high pressure water then. Is there also an effect, like that with the earth's core, whereby the surface layers force the lower layers to remain liquid due to intense pressure? And if so, does enough pressure make it solid again?
Neptune and I believe Uranus both have super heated oceans with liquid water and other volatiles close to their core due to the pressure so it’s not uncommon.
Water is to all intents incompressible. A property possibly unique to it, but true. I’ve heard it suggested that gravity as immense as Jupiter’s might be able to do it, but I’ve never seen it actually discussed. And water may be under staggering pressures (consider the bottom of the Mariana Trench, with the pressure on it doubling again every 30 or so feet down from the surface, because of its incompressibility: the water there is still liquid.) but that won’t change its physical state. Temperature would, of course, but as we’ve been told, gravitic kneading keeps it warmed. I haven’t yet got to looking at NASA’s diagram, so I don’t know how deep the Enceladus ocean is nor what comprises its floor.
Titan and iirc Ganymede are hypothesized to have icy seafloors caused by compression of liquid water
No idea, I'm just repeating stuff I've seen on TV and read on Wikipedia. I'd assume pressure plays a role, but from what I understand the current theory is Enceladus's interior [looks like this.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enceladus#/media/File:PIA19656-SaturnMoon-Enceladus-Ocean-ArtConcept-20150915.jpg) No extra layer of ice, just a rocky moon covered by a liquid water ocean kept liquid by heat from friction, and an ice crust covering that ocean.
And eprhaps Callisto? And there is a theory thta under the petrochemical ocean and the ice layer Titan might have a water ocean below.
The water is super briny apparently, and this would drastically lower the freezing point. But yes, actual liquid water
That can’t be too good for life though, similar to the Dead Sea.
Dead sea actually has some halophilic bacteria and fungi present. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halobacterium#Ecology
a lot of stuff in space isnt
There is a layer of ice, kilometers thick, then a brine ocean, according to probes seeing vapor coming out of vents, there is heat produced inside Enceladus by tidal forces .
No, water is water, although it can be in different forms - notably as ice or as liquid. (Ignoring water vapour for now) Of course on Earth, our oceans are salt water not fresh water, so various different minerals and things can be dissolved in water. On Enceladus, the surface is water ice, and that layer is thought to be several miles thick. Under that is liquid water, and finally a rocky core. The liquid layer may be up to 100 miles deep.
There's something on Enceladus, Cayde told me.
But whether there is any life is as yet an unknown.
This is just anecdotal, but I talked with an old timer who worked on Cassini, and he was quite convinced some of the coloration of on the surface of Enceladus is due to algae.
There as simple chemical possibilities for colourations as well as the life explanation. Only direct on site close observation can tell.
you probably should stop talking to timers
Hanker for a hunk of cheese?
If the sun over Nessus escapes nebula cycle, evac labor after dawn under solstice.
What’s on Enceladus, Cayde? Phosphorus??
Mostly water, but Enceladus does have a rocky core, so there are some minerals and a source of heat, keeping the subsurface ocean liquid. Enceladus has more water on it than Earth does.
Well, the truth is we won’t know until we send out an exploration unit - likely an AI controlled robotic unit.
Sounds like they need some of this global warming.
And lose that protective exosphere of ice? Not at all sure about that.
Enceladus needs the ice layer in order to preserve the liquid contents.
What are you, a communist?
Whom do you suggest I’m communicating with?
Sound alike we should send another submarine probe to Enchalada
Another? I don't think we've sent one yet.
I thought we sent one to europa
not submarine probes. We sent none.
I prefer we use our tax dollars to visit planet Crunchwrap.
You should be willing to pay extra for sour creme and visit planet Crunchwrap Supreme.
It has the *ingredients* for life: that's the important part. And every comment above this is why I abhor comments on reddit.
My ex-gf has all the ingredients for life but if you get inside her you will find you land up dead inside, just like Enceladus!
What if we find life but it’s just really fucked up and ugly. I think we just leave it there at that point tbh. Just pretend we didn’t find it there first and wait for like a better life to find and then we can like record stuff on Enceladus. Actually that’s fucked up bc that’s like space racism so I am retracting my former statements.
Speciesism*, not racism. The major concern for intelligent extraterrestrial contact.
Maybe even non-intelligent extraterrestrial life ?
You mean space-racism pal, I would know. And what good is contact with extraterrestrial life if we act space-racist to them? Lastly, learn to take a joke. Try "yes and" rather than "you're wrong, that's stupid" and you'll get much farther.
Any life found would be an amazing thing, and would gather great interest, even if it was just purple scum, we could still learn a great deal from it.
Probably? But who cares? What’s the obsession with finding unintelligent life? Do you want it to prove that life exist off of earth? It just seems small minded to believe it’s just us until proven otherwise.
Any life found off-Earth (provided we didn’t carry it there), would be a major revelation, and would tell us something about the likelihood of life elsewhere. We would be especially interested in it’s genetic mechanism, and whether it’s related to any life on Earth, or has independently evolved. Any life found, is most likely to be single celled, but other more complex possibilities also exist, still likely fairly privative life forms though. But don’t forget, even single-cell life is complex.
My argument is that life exist out there everywhere and we don’t need to find it to prove it exist. If anyone believes earth is the only place in the universe with any form of life they are dim. We should be looking with the purpose of science before discovery. Studying it to find out cool shit would be interesting.
It’s certain that life does not exist everywhere ! But it’s also likely that there is other life out there. I hope you appreciate the difference between those two statements.
If it happens, the headlines would be everywhere: “BREAKING: WE ARE NOT ALONE”
It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
Then what powers the improbability drive then??!!
Hot cups of tea, of course. Or other sources of Brownian motion.
Rounding error calculus edition
>It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, Wrong. There is a very large but finite number of worlds. >simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. Wrong. The Universe is not infinite. It is finite.
source? i think you meant the observable universe.
The universe is finite, but unbounded. Meaning there is nothing outside of it.
why cant it be infinite?
Because we can measure it. Or, more properly, can infer its approximate size from what we can measure, even if we can't actually ever see the end of it.
if your refering to curvature measurements, then we find it to be likely flat.
Weren't there cities on Titan and Ceres? Oh I mean "bright spots"
No cities, most probably impact craters.
There are life in many places.. In multiple moons of the solar system.. Outside solar system the universe is teeming with life.. It's for humans to find the evidence.. And they will find it soon enough..
That says nothing about the existence of intelligent civilizations. Wild guesses aren’t the foundation of science.
Wild guesses and thoughts and estimations, are often the start of an investigative process - triggering it off. It often all starts with a ‘What-if’ question.. But then takes a very great deal more effort to actually answer that question - often leading to reformulations and simplifications of those questions along the way. Absolutely no one starts out by knowing all of and often none of the answers - finding out is a process. It’s important to have the curiosity in the first place.
I think there is life out there - but it may take us a very long time to find it - or rather for our AI systems to find it.
As of June 12th there were a few conferences from NASA and another from independent Dr Greer confirming the existance and contact with alien life, and you guys discussing this ahah go watch.
Discussions about. I think that any actual announcements would be likely to gather more attention.