from Hacker News

Saturn moon 'able to support life'

by interconnector on 4/13/17, 7:54 PM with 256 comments

• by _rpd on 4/13/17, 9:22 PM

  Here's the paper mentioned in the article ...

  Cassini finds molecular hydrogen in the Enceladus plume: Evidence for hydrothermal processes

  > Saturn's moon Enceladus has a subsurface ocean covered by a layer of ice. Some liquid escapes into space through cracks in the ice, which is the source of one of Saturn's rings. In October 2015, the Cassini spacecraft flew directly through the plume of escaping material and sampled its chemical composition. Waite et al. found that the plume contains molecular hydrogen, H2, a sign that the water in Enceladus' ocean is reacting with rocks through hydrothermal processes (see the Perspective by Seewald). This drives the ocean out of chemical equilibrium, in a similar way to water around Earth's hydrothermal vents, potentially providing a source of chemical energy.

  http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6334/155

• by nzonbi on 4/13/17, 9:20 PM

  If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, it would be dramatic. That would mean that our solar system, has life on at least two, out of nine planets. That would seem to indicate that life is a fairly common things on planets. It would allow to adjust the drake equation, to easily predict millions of planets with life. And that would mean a high probability of many advanced, intelligent civilizations on the universe.

• by smdz on 4/14/17, 2:15 PM

  I always had this question - Can life exist outside our perception of biological life?

  Intelligent life might be an anomaly, and rare in the universe - but is it possible that life exists outside our perception of biology? Afterall everything is just rules and actions that lead to predictable reactions (unless quantum physics says something else)

  I look at artificial life - that exists in virtual environments. It looks like life - but we know it isn't for real. It cannot replicate/grow outside its environment. But that argument could be used to for all non-human life on Earth, if humans never existed.

  Even stuff like mars rover could be engineered to mine, manufacture and duplicate - eventually creating a colony of rovers that populate the planet and consume the planet's resources. Well, that might look like semi-intelligent life - but we know it isn't - or is it life?

• by gonvaled on 4/14/17, 8:11 AM

  “able to support life“ ... as we know it.

  The universe being so vast and so diverse, most life forms will probably escape our comprehension: completely different chemistry, environments (pressures, temperatures), time scales, state of matter (plasma based life forms?), or even energy based ones.

  We are not even looking for such different life forms, since we have already concluded that:

  - life must be water based

  - life must be carbon based

  - life must be based on dna (or simillar)

  Which leads (given our limited knowledge of the chemistry of these substances) to the conclussion that life must be extremely similar to Earth's.

  I see a lack of imagination here.

• by PaulHoule on 4/13/17, 8:26 PM

  Not a huge surprise. Most likely our kind of environment is an unusual place for life, it might be much more normal for life outside the frost line to run on geothermal energy (where there are 10 or so bodies with liquid water) as opposed to the one small rock that didn't get all the water boiled away by the sun.

• by aphextron on 4/14/17, 2:15 AM

  The fact that Cassini is still out there doing groundbreaking science is just mind blowing to me. That thing launched when I was in middle school.

• by rbanffy on 4/14/17, 12:10 PM

  This makes Tethys and Rhea very tempting places for permanent occupation - they have abundant ice on the surface (easy to dig if you have a power source) and the delta-v's between them and the surface of Enceladus are between 1000 m/s and 3000 m/s, something chemical rockets can do easily.

• by pasbesoin on 4/13/17, 9:51 PM

  Just in the last day or so, reporting on some experiment supposedly demonstrating that asteroid impacts on Earth are/were capable of creating the amino acid precursors to RNA.

  Yeah, really, this demonstrates nothing, on its own. But, interesting to think about.

• by dave_ant on 4/14/17, 10:04 AM

  Is there tectonics on that moon ? Isn't it too small for that ? The same goes for Europa... Is there real tectonics there ?

  If there is no tectonics in place and you have a "closed" big bucket of water constantly filled up with chemicals from hydrothermal vents during billions of years, wouldn't the water become completely soaked and kind of slimy ? Not the best place for life, even for extremophiles...

  I also found an interesting article on the probable high acidity of Europa ocean, that would make it not suitable for harboring life : http://www.space.com/14757-europa-moon-ocean-acidic.html

  I guess it could also apply to Enceladus ocean. Can someone elaborate on that ?

  P.S.: English is not my native language, sorry for any grammatical incoherence :)

• by yomly on 4/14/17, 1:09 PM

  So here's an orthogonal question. In a field like space navigation, where your findings come back after an expedition planned 5-10+ years ago how do you be "agile"?

  What is the go to project management style? Can we learn from these disciplines for alternative practices to building software?

• by julienchastang on 4/14/17, 2:36 AM

  For those interested in this topic, I recommend "Astrobiology: A Very Short Introduction" by David Catling. Catling details nine celestial bodies in the solar system that could potentially harbor life, and discusses Enceladus is some detail.

• by troels on 4/14/17, 8:27 AM

  If it turns out that there is no life there, maybe we should try to transplant some?

• by ende on 4/14/17, 6:38 AM

    ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA.
    ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.
    USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.

• by AnimalMuppet on 4/13/17, 9:54 PM

  Well, Enceladus has an energy source that could perhaps be a source of energy for some kind of living organism. "Able" kind of says that all you need for life is some kind of available energy, which... let's just call that "unproven".

• by svisser on 4/13/17, 9:28 PM

  Coincidentally a book was written a few decades ago called "Ringmakers of Saturn" which discusses the presence of alien life around Saturn as well.

• by mavhc on 4/14/17, 7:44 PM

  The Ion Neutral Mass Spectrometer ion collector has an open-source mode, confused me for a moment, they mean open ion source of course.

• by SticksAndBreaks on 4/15/17, 7:26 AM

  Could we have a research station beneath the ice ?

• by known on 4/14/17, 11:02 AM

  If it supports life, why there is no life in that moon?