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NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

webbtelescope.org

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Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#111

Post by kcarter80 »

jychang wrote: post #108
dmix wrote: post #87

> 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…

Every once in a while, I get reminded that people don’t necessarily have a scientific background. 1. Water molecules are not indivisible, of course. Many biological processes will rip apart hydrogen and oxygen, or combine them back together, and have been doing so for billions of years. Industrial processes do the same. So there’s plenty of “new water” from oxygen in the air, etc. 2. New water/oxygen/hydrogen land on…

As a percentage of total water on earth, how many of the H2O molecules do you speculate came from comets or industrial processes?

Same question for the biological processes you mention.

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#112

Post by oh_come_on »

bilsbie wrote: post #104
dmix wrote: post #87

> 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…

Hydrolox rockets have been making millions of gallons of new water on earth. Even burning gasoline creates some new water.

Burning gasoline releases more h2o than co2 - think about that for scale

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#113

Post by staplung »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #65
monlockandkey wrote: post #21

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?

From an Arthur C. Clarke novel: > ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA. > ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. So yes. Clarke thought it was special also.

Well, kinda, eventually. The book of 2001 points Discovery 1 at Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Evidently, the special effects crew for the movie couldn't do a convincing job of faking Saturn because of the rings so they did Jupiter instead.

Then when Clarke did the book for 2010 he retcon'd it to match the movie.

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#114

Post by laurencerowe »

tantalor wrote: post #106
tracedddd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t commercial hydrogen fuel cells create water as a byproduct?

Yeah, but you make hydrogen fuel out of water, so you're kinda just playing accounting games with the water.

Hydrogen is mostly made by steam reforming methane, with half the hydrogen coming from the water and half from the methane.

But then the fossil methane was made by bacteria decomposing carbohydrates and the carbohydrates were made by plants photosynthesising water and carbon dioxide.

So it all comes from water in the end, but some of it has not been water for hundreds of millions of years!

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#115

Post by ghayes »

frogulis wrote: post #103
tredre3 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The water on our Earth today is the same water that’s been here for nearly 5 billion years. We create tons of water as a byproduct of many industrial processes, that's "new" water. Of course in the grand scheme of things the quantities are inconsequential, so the statement is probably still generally true...

Is it truer to say "the hydrogen and oxygen on our Earth today are the same [...] 5 billion years"?

If those hydrogen and oxygen atoms had not previously been bonded into H2O, you would have to say this is “new” water, right?

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#116

Post by rz2k »

v4dok wrote: post #86
ekaryotic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure, I think they would be called Europaeans.

To solve your dillema as a Greek. Both the continent and the planet have the same name. Europeans it is.

That doesn't seem like a very Greek spelling of dilēmma.

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#117

Post by tzot »

v4dok wrote: post #86
ekaryotic wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure, I think they would be called Europaeans.

To solve your dillema as a Greek. Both the continent and the planet have the same name. Europeans it is.

While on the subject of etymology, spelling the Greek word “dilemma” (δι+ληπ+μα) incorrectly does not help with providing a definitive answer as a Greek. I'm not starting a flame war, I just make an observation (and as it happens, I'm a fellow Greek).

Yes, the word “European” (inhabitant of Europe) is rooted on the Greek word Europē, Zeus' mythical mistress (one of many), after whom both the continent and the satellite were named, but is the “-ean” a proper transcription from Greek?

Perhaps “Europaean” could be the better answer to the question we discuss; after all, in English the continent's name is a modernized “Europe” while the satellite stays closer to the intermediate Latin as “Europa”, and since this discussion is in English, I feel that the difference in suffix justifies a different label for the inhabitants of the satellite.

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#119

Post by jgtrosh »

jl6 wrote: post #28
slg wrote: post #14

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…

The relevant sci-fi is the planet of Krikkit from the 3rd Hitch-Hikers book, Life, the Universe, and Everything . On that world, life evolved under a permanent blanket of cloud. At no point did they ever see the stars, or think that there might be something of interest above them. Until one day they sent up a rocket which penetrated the dust cloud, and for the first time they became aware of the rest of the universe.…

*Until one day a rocket crash landed on their planet (which caused them to create one in the first place)

Re: NASA’s Webb finds carbon source on surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa

#120

Post by eep_social »

jonathankoren wrote: post #74
slg wrote: post #14

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…

> there’s no obvious reason to do that

I think the reason would be that they’d realize they were in the middle layer of a multilayer ball.

My assumption is that at some point they would explore the entire ocean-floor habitat, discover the world is an oblique spheroid, and wonder what’s up. As soon as that happens the impetus becomes “obvious” and it’s a problem of technology.

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