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Saturn moon 'able to support life'

bbc.com

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Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#61

Post by milquetoastaf »

zeroer wrote: post #46
milquetoastaf wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And yet, somehow Humans are in a completely different category than all other life. Lol no we are not. We share 98 percent of our DNA with various simians. We share 97 percent of our DNA with mice. Are we the only species to communicate? No. Are we the only species to communicate symbolically ? No. Great Apes use hand gestures. Are we the only species to recognize themselves? No. Plenty of animals do. In fact, even…

Recursive grammar.

Being able to live six years without food. Humans can't even come close to that, yet a tiny tick can outlast the so-called smartest species on earth.

See, species tit-for-tat is easy. What's your point?

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#62

Post by kahoon »

Cyph0n wrote: post #24
nostrademons wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…

How do we know that 65 million years is long enough for a species with a human-like intelligence to evolve? What if our evolution was merely a biological fluke that took much less time than usual?

Certainly possible. Dinosaurs were around longer than mammals and their intelligence did not reach human-level. Makes sense if we consider that evolution is a blind process which does not "aim" for creating higher intelligence, and may only happen by chance if it suits the given environment better than other traits.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#63

Post by adekok »

nzonbi wrote: post #4

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…

> If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life,

IIRC (I can't find the reference now), the "dinosaur killer" asteroid would put rocks from Earth into space. With sufficient velocity that they could reach nearby solar systems within 100M years.

So from a strictly physical point of view, I would argue that the odds of Earth "infecting" Europa with life in the past 3 billion years are pretty much 100%.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#64

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nostrademons wrote: post #17
charles-salvia wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the developments in exo-planet research along with discoveries like this over the past couple of years, I would conjecture that life is ridiculously common. But by life, I mean microbial life. I would imagine that multi-cellular life is much rarer, and life capable of reaching human-level intelligence and beyond is probably absurdly rare, on the level of something like one species per galaxy. It's all worthl…

I'm kinda curious if there's any evidence that would support or rule out intelligent life having existed on earth before. I mean, if humanity goes extinct and it's another 65 million years before another intelligent species evolves, what evidence would they have of our existence? All our buildings would've long since crumbled into dust or been crushed by plate tectonics. Metal will corrode and rust away after a few t…

> All our buildings would've...been crushed by plate tectonics

Our buildings are on dry land. Dry land is dry because it's predominantly made of continental crust [1]. It's lighter than oceanic crust [2]. When oceanic and continental crusts meet, the oceanic tends to get driven under the continental crust, which floats on top. Keep in mind that we still have fossil shells feom 65 million years ago.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_crust

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_crust

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#65

Post by JumpCrisscross »

milquetoastaf wrote: post #59
ams6110 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biology notwithstanding, no other species has deliberately transformed its environment and improved it longevity and standard of living like humans have. Not even slightly.

Animals transform their environments all the time, deliberately (I don't get why people act as if animals don't do deliberate things?). What of the great honey fungus in the Blue Mountains of Oregon, a living organism whose size is measured in miles - it deliberately transformed its environment in a way we, the species Aristotle put at the top, can barely even comprehend. The difference is in degree, not of kind.

> The difference is in degree, not of kind

Everything is a difference of degree. At a certain point, a difference of degree becomes a difference of kind. There is a difference of kind between a fungus altering its environment through enzymes it produces from its genetic programming and people inventing steam engines.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#66

Post by theparanoid »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #44
moomin wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd guess that microbial life would evolve into cellular life almost anywhere there was enough heat.

Multicellular? Most organisms on earth are unicellular[1] even now. My impression is that multicellular organisms evolved because the 'easy' evolutionary niches were already occupied by single-celled species, and it took new tricks to compete for new niches. 1: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-biomass-of-bacteria-What-i...

It's not known exactly how multicellular life came to be. It's happened only once in the history of the earth. Nuclear dna is from Archaea and Mitochondrial dna is from bateria. Lynn Margulis was the first to propose and substantiate symbiogenesis for this.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#67

Post by civilian »

outworlder wrote: post #56
civilian wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So-- there are caveats. A lot of deep sea life are able to see, and it's because deep sea life also generates their own light. It's a way to communicate to mates, and a way to notice prey, and a way to bait smaller predators. I also think that echolocation has potential to be equal or better to eyesight! Bats and dolphins do great with it, and I think that it's easy to think of echolocation as being a _visual_ stimul…

On the other hand, imagine the neat tricks they could come up with using magnesium alone. Would they have to be underwater, though? They could use the sea surface, provided the atmosphere is not toxic to them.

Yeah the sea surface is a glacier. There might be air pockets though? But it would also be near-freezing there, whereas the core would be much warmer, and would also have more pressure.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#68

Post by LrnByTeach »

civilian wrote: post #16
marktangotango wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, deep sea, thermal vent life is predominantly blind on earth at least. One may postulate this form of life is much less likely to form technological civilizations thus moderating such. Thoughts?

So-- there are caveats. A lot of deep sea life are able to see, and it's because deep sea life also generates their own light. It's a way to communicate to mates, and a way to notice prey, and a way to bait smaller predators. I also think that echolocation has potential to be equal or better to eyesight! Bats and dolphins do great with it, and I think that it's easy to think of echolocation as being a _visual_ stimul…

I was thinking very same issue for some time. Underwater species will have limitation to advance their Intelligence due to not having access to LAND to make all kind of TOOLS which led to Human Spices advancement . It seems we have a kind of proof at this time planet Earth. 'Long-finned pilot whale' have '37 Billion' Cerebral cortex Neurons , where as Human Spices have 21 Billion .

I think due to their Water environment WHALE did not become the dominant spices on EARTH but Humans became .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animals_by_number_of_n...

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#69

Post by scoofy »

adekok wrote: post #63
nzonbi wrote: post #4

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…

> If life is there, completely disconnected from earth life, IIRC (I can't find the reference now), the "dinosaur killer" asteroid would put rocks from Earth into space. With sufficient velocity that they could reach nearby solar systems within 100M years. So from a strictly physical point of view, I would argue that the odds of Earth "infecting" Europa with life in the past 3 billion years are pretty much 100%.

>So from a strictly physical point of view, I would argue that the odds of Earth "infecting" Europa with life in the past 3 billion years are pretty much 100%.

This is exactly why europa is so important. It's that the gravity well of jupiter is so great, that infection of europa is extremely unlikely, rather than being extremely likely. Europa would be a vastly better case for arguing separate origins of life than any other place in our solar system.

Since earth has only existed for a short time in the grand scheme of things, and supposing that life indeed sprung here on its own, the odds of a random rock from a random few impacts landed on europa, rather than jupiter, in such a way to get to survive is absurdly small.

Re: Saturn moon 'able to support life'

#70

Post by azernik »

nostrademons wrote: post #37
jerf wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've thought about this and my conclusion is that we will likely leave behind a very strange pattern of certain natural resources. "Oh, look, here's a vein of copper! It's getting better, and better, and, that's weird, it's gone now and there's a complete break in the strata for some reason." Over time new mountains may form some new deposits, but it may be noticeable in the older mountains (that are today the younge…

Curious if anyone's ever observed something similar to this? It'd be super easy to detect if you're looking for it, but most miners aren't thinking "Hmm, I wonder if a previous intelligent species existed on earth millions of years before us."

Mining companies generally hire very smart geologists who care a lot about the processes that shape resource deposits, in order to predict where new deposits will be found. If there were any pattern that didn't fit with natural processes people would notice
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