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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

#231

Post by [deleted] »

adzm wrote: post #77
mikeInAlaska wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Universal translator for all human languages. We are pretty much already there, though there is room to improve, it's an amazing accomplishment though that I think we take for granted.

[deleted]

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

#232

Post by omnicognate »

whimsicalism wrote: post #180
omnicognate wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

> The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there That’s not true at all - simple assumptions would make it likely we would have encountered intelligent life if it evolved in the past in this galaxy.

We don't have the technology to detect signals similar to our own from the distance of even the nearest stars [1], and there is no reason to assume that more technologically advanced civilisations will generate vastly larger signals. Therefore the absence of detection to date tells us nothing, except to place an extremely generous upper bound on the power of signals they generate.

[1] https://www.seti.org/press-release/can-et-detect-us - where a SETI researcher concludes an alien civilisation around a nearby star would require technology much more advanced than ours to detect us. (And what technology we do have has been pointed at a vanishingly small fraction of the planets in the galaxy.)

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

#233

Post by NotSuspicious »

omnicognate wrote: post #178
whimsicalism wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or terrible news a la great filter arguments

Except those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

It's also utter nonsense because we have already detected UAP NHIs and are gradually beginning to understand them as the stigma fades away.

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

#234

Post by bilsbie »

ben_w wrote: post #218
coderenegade wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact all fossil fuels! When you split the carbon parts from the hydrocarbon, most of hydrogen parts end up as water. For every tonne of CO2 that's ever been emitted, there's a corresponding mass of water for which the hydrogen part was previously sequestered.

All fossil fuels except coal, which is a pretty big one.

Why not coal?

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

#235

Post by uoaei »

bmitc wrote: post #193
uoaei wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> detracts from it I think you're assigning a moral quality to certain kinds of knowledge that isn't warranted.

I don't know what that means. The statement just wasn't useful and comes across as sassy and arrogant.

Do you think it's belittling to point out that someone may not have scientific knowledge? Ie, is the statement something beyond mere fact? What makes having scientific knowledge good, that you may infer that someone may think not having it is bad?

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

#236

Post by buffington »

globular-toast wrote: post #190
buffington wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except water is H2O where the oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again I'm not a chemist, so I may be totally wrong here, but does a water molecule "care" where the source of its oxygen and hydrogen come from? If you brought oxygen from space, and hydrogen from space, couldn't you then create new water on Earth?

[flagged]

Perhaps I misunderstood your original comment. I interpreted what you said as meaning that the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up an H2O molecule had to be derived from H2O molecules.

After all, your words were:

> oxygen comes from plants and plants get it from water and the hydrogen comes from hydrocarbon fuels where the hydrogen comes from water again

Then:

> technically you can never create new water on Earth

I asked the questions in good faith, even while knowing that the origin of the individual atoms has no bearing on whether an H2O molecule is H2O or not. I wanted to give you an opportunity to perhaps share something that the rest of us didn't know.

Your response was to ask about my education and how old I was, two data points that I can confidently claim have zero relevance on how water molecules are formed.

> technically you can never create new water on Earth

This is absolutely incorrect. Water can be created on Earth and is being created constantly from various processes. One of those processes: burning any hydrocarbon based fuels (aka, fossil fuels). You can see it for yourself - run any internal combustion engine and you'll see water dripping from the exhaust pipe.

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

#238

Post by Firaxus »

BurningFrog wrote: post #129
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…

This is why I roll my eyes at alarmist talk of various processes "consuming X zillion gallons of water". Water is much stronger than that. It just passes through our processes and will outlast us all.

You’re entirely missing the context of what you call “alarmist talk”.

The issue isn’t that the water will cease to exist, or that the planet will literally be destroyed. It is that our way of life is unsustainable and actively degrades the future quality of life for us in the future (and our children).

You can compare our mindless pumping of water from the ground to the ignorant farming practices that lead to the dust bowl. If we don’t use our knowledge to take steps to avoid running out of usable water by using it less and more intelligently now, we will come to a hard point in the future.

Which takes cooperation and empathy for everyone’s situations and the overall reality in front of us.

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

#239

Post by Firaxus »

wddkcs wrote: post #182
squeaky-clean wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like it's beyond optimum into foolishness. I could possibly win the lottery one day, but I'm not going to live my life as if it's guaranteed.

Your analogy is an extreme example of the principle I'm referencing. Taken to a similar extreme, your argument is that we should choose who lives and who dies, through the limitation of the resources required for growth.

They are just being realistic, their example isn’t extreme (though yours is).

It is entirely possible with our current level of technology to adjust to the realities of the physical limitations in the world as we know it, without needing to resort to picking “who lives and dies”.

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

#240

Post by Firaxus »

wddkcs wrote: post #181
redundantly wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying there might be fixes for this in the future is also disingenuous. It's like saying military burn pits are okay because there may be medical advancements in the future that can be used to treat afflicted soldiers.

Arguing against optimism is arguing against the history of science. We have cures to diseases that were declared unavoidable divine judgements, we have achieved feats of engineering that would be unimaginable a century ago. I am not arguing for the deapoilation of the planet. We should preserve our resources as best we can. But future growth requires the usage of what resources we do have, in to achieve outcomes and…

Technological advances are nice, but you can’t just assume they will happen. There’s no law or axiom that says we will discover something new, and certainly not on any time scale that we could plan against to avoid problems we predict today.
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