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Astrobiology

Enticing Ocean World News and Vapid NASA Commentary

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 13, 2017
Filed under
Enticing Ocean World News and Vapid NASA Commentary

New Insights into Ocean Worlds Enceladus and Europa
“Two veteran NASA missions are providing new details about icy, ocean-bearing moons of Jupiter and Saturn, further heightening the scientific interest of these and other “ocean worlds” in our solar system and beyond. The findings are presented in papers published Thursday by researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn and Hubble Space Telescope. In the papers, Cassini scientists announce that a form of chemical energy that life can feed on appears to exist on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, and Hubble researchers report additional evidence of plumes erupting from Jupiter’s moon Europa.”

Keith’s note: correction – “Linda” who made the shrimp comment is not from PAO – she is Dr. Linda Spilker the Cassini Project Scientist. NASA gets all upset when newspapers start to make things up about these upcoming announcements – especially when they start speculating on all sorts of alien life forms that might be on the verge of being announced. NASA PAO constantly complains that they have to shoot down all of the loony speculation. Then someone at NASA starts asking about shrimp on Enceladus in an official capacity at a NASA press event.

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

8 responses to “Enticing Ocean World News and Vapid NASA Commentary”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    All right! Something that will really benefit humanity, a new source of shrimp!

    I wonder how long before Bubba Gump will be able to offer “Space Shrimp” on its menu 🙂

  2. fcrary says:
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    In Linda’s defense, people do sometimes say something that sounds stupid by accident.

    • ThomasLMatula says:
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      True, and it is a good question in its essence, what are the odds of complex life being found on these worlds?

      In terms of Earth bacteria appeared to have emerged within a few hundred millions of Earth’s formation, but complex life didn’t emerge until 3 to 3.5 billions of years later. Why the long delay is to me perhaps as important an question as the first emergence of life, especially in terms of the abundance of complex life in the Universe.

      If the stability of the environment is an important factor for the emergence of complex life then these worlds may well have complex life forms, including invertebrates like shrimp. It will be interesting to see what future research reveals. But the possible presence of hydrothermal vents on these ice worlds, which many biologists believe is where life emerged on Earth, is intriguing.

  3. Eric says:
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    So how did they answer the question?

  4. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Thinking about it, I see the presence or absence of life on these ice worlds as really the measure of abundance of life in the Universe. As we see in our Solar System they are very abundant. They seem to have the basic elements needed and one more, stability, the ice insulating from impact events and excessive radiation events. If there is no life on at least one of them (and this includes Ceres and Pluto) astrobiologists will really need to rethink their models.

    However, IF they don’t have life, the oceans on these ice worlds would seem to be the ideal environment for terraforming into Earth style oceans with genetically engineered life from Earth.

    Indeed, if we are able to adapt humans to reproduce in low gravity environments they may well be very suitable for human settlement with communities being built under the ice to provide shielding from radiation.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      I follow your argument to a point- the point being that as we look at the many sites around the solar system perhaps we see are seeing upper and lower bounds for life being defined.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        That of course is one of the issues, what is life? Viruses for example were not regarded as life when I took biology years ago, but bacteria were.

        But what about the archaea? Are they really a form of life? They were considered bacteria then but not any longer. Yet they are the form of “life” mostly to be found on these worlds.