81–90 of 278 posts
Is the significance of CO2's presence 1) it's necessary ingredient for (our) life, 2) it's a likely biproduct of life, or both?
Europa is definitely the most exciting part of the solar system that sparks imagination. Literally 100s of miles of pitch black ocean with thermal vents, ripe for life. Getting kiddy thinking about the leviathan sized aliens roaming the deep ocean of Europa. Does anyone else feel this way?
This is obviously a ginormous leap from this announcement and just a tangent sparked by it. The possibility of intelligent life developing on a world like Europa encrusted with what is effectively a miles think solid atmosphere has always been one of my favorite feasible sci-fi hypotheticals. Could you imagine how that would impact their culture? Would they even know there is anything on the other side of the ice? Th…
Apparently the ring builders in The Expanse books were supposedly squids from an ice encrusted planet/moon. It is an odd idea of how they’d even discover it. Assuming their natural habitat is a thermal vent on the ocean floor, they’d need pressure suits or probes to travel up to shell. Then they’d need to essentially create a Kola Superdeep Borehole in the sky, and there’s no obvious reason to do that, especially sin…
Really they'd only do it if they managed indefinite population growth without poisoning their biosphere with waste products, and had to mine out the ice shell just for more living space. That would be tough: the equivalent would be if every square meter of the Earth's surface, including oceans, was as densely populated as Manhattan. That gets us up to 14 trillion people. Now make every building 10 km tall.
Can Webb image Europa?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's less clear than I'd expected. Is that image deliberately downscaled so as to not reveal the true capabilities of the telescope optics?
No, they're quite open about the capabilities of the optics (see https://webb.nasa.gov/content/forScientists/faqScientists.ht... ). It's just that Europa is very far away. Webb's mirror system has an angular resolution of about 0.1 arcseconds. Earth is currently about 630 million km from Europa (Webb is only 1.5 million km away from earth). Because the sine of theta is approximately equal to theta for values of theta…
If we brought water back a container of water from Europa would this be the largest amount of new water entering the earth since planets struck it billions of years ago?
I briefly googled it (I dont know much about this stuff tbh):
> The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years. So far, we haven’t managed to create any new water, and just a tiny fraction of our water has managed to escape out into space. The only thing that changes is the form that water takes as it travels through the water cycle.
Anyway interesting thought experiment.
> a fascinating world with a salty, subsurface ocean of liquid water—possibly twice as much as in all of Earth’s oceans combined. If we brought water back a container of water from Europa would this be the largest amount of new water entering the earth since planets struck it billions of years ago? I briefly googled it (I dont know much about this stuff tbh): > The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, the only thing I wish to see before I die is a submarine mission to Europa or Ganymede. It would be even more mind blowing and an amazing achievement for humanity, and the search for extraterrestrial life. That, and the dragonfly-helicopter-thing on Titan. Have you ever seen the Sun set on a methane lake? It's time for a rewatch of Europa Report (2013).
A Europa submarine mission is a good bucket list, but don't sell us too short. * Humans on Mars * Room temperature Superconductors and their effects on humanity. * Sustained Fusion Power for the masses. * General Artificial Intelligence * Human brain-computer interface. * Full reversal of climate change. * Extended human lifespan. * Curing all forms of cancer. * Universal translator for all human languages. * Discove…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
although last time I brought this up on HN someone explained to me it'd be very expensive, need to be huge, and it'd likely only point at one planet per lens, and the image would still be pretty blurry :(
> 2020, NASA physicist Slava Turyshev presented his idea of direct multi-pixel imaging and spectroscopy of an exoplanet with a solar gravitational lens mission. The lens could reconstruct the exoplanet image with ~25 km-scale surface resolution in 6 months of integration time, enough to see surface features and signs of habitability. His proposal was selected for the Phase III of the NIAC 2020 (NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts). Turyshev proposes to use realistic-sized solar sails (~16 vanes of 103 m2) to achieve the needed high velocity at perihelion (~150 km/sec), reaching 547 AU in 17 years.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2020_Phase_...
> a fascinating world with a salty, subsurface ocean of liquid water—possibly twice as much as in all of Earth’s oceans combined. If we brought water back a container of water from Europa would this be the largest amount of new water entering the earth since planets struck it billions of years ago? I briefly googled it (I dont know much about this stuff tbh): > The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s be…