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Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

phys.org

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Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#21

Post by throwanem »

foota wrote: post #9
Animats wrote: post #6

So there's this big hydrogen vent in a moon of Saturn. Where's the energy coming from to drive that? Too far from the sun. Enceladus is tidally locked to Saturn, so there are no tidal forces. Enceladus has very low orbital eccentricity, a near-circular orbit, so there are very low tidal forces from that. Some phenomenon must provide energy for the hydrogen jet.

Couldn't it just be pressurised hydrogen?

Pressurized by what, though?

Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#22

Post by throwanem »

ancarda wrote: post #3

I couldn't read this on iOS as I kept being forcibly thrown into the App Store by some advert. If anyone else is having trouble, you can read the article here: https://archive.is/tPvTT

Purify is an excellent ad blocker for Safari on iOS. I recommend it without reservation.

Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#25

Post by ekianjo »

shimon_e wrote: post #18
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #17

HN needs to adopt a [clickbait] tag to flag articles like this with misleading titles.

Even better, HN should hide the real title until hover to reduce the number of clicks clickbait articles get.

Even better, ban newsweek which is nothing but a tabloid these days.

Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#27

Post by Cthulhu_ »

Numberwang wrote: post #7

"Update: An earlier headline read that signs of life were found on Enceladus. We regret any misunderstanding this headline may have caused. NASA has discovered that Enceladus is habitable, not inhabited. " Wow. Maybe basic transport is not the first area where intelligent machines will make their human counterpart superfluous. I'm sure machines can do better than this.

Nope, machines would optimize for number of views / clicks, not for correctness.

Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#28

Post by ekianjo »

speps wrote: post #5

Better link : https://phys.org/news/2017-04-scientists-evidence-habitable-... By the way, it's already a month old, there's nothing new since Cassini's last trip. Also, can't believe Newsweek did a mistake like that if not for clicks... "Update: An earlier headline read that signs of life were found on Enceladus. We regret any misunderstanding this headline may have caused. NASA has discovered that Enceladus is habit…

Yeah well you cant trust nothIng out of newsweek anyway. Its been as reliable as reading the Daily Mail for most of it.

Re: Scientists discover evidence for a habitable region on Saturn’s moon Enceladus

#30

Post by dmitrygr »

A lot of articles like this overlook a lot of physics that actually matter a lot. Not only would it be incredibly difficult to get humans up there, much more so than Mars, but even once we get there we have serious problems. Just like Mars, we can solve many problems with electricity. We can create water and many chemicals, provide shelter and even ways to grow food. On Mars you can get electricity vs solar, which is perfectly doable. You can take some solar panels with you, over provision for damage, and build-out capacity over time. Saturn is too far for solar to be of any use. The only power source there is probably geothermal, unfortunately there's no lightweight way to convert geothermal energy into electricity. At least there isn't any that I'm aware of. This is quite a problem, as without electricity most modern conveniences cannot be bought. In fact, modern human life might be very difficult without electricity on a place that is not earth.
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