NASA announces possibility of life on Enceladus

[thaddeus6th]

Np, Phyrebrat. I knew of the Fermi Paradox already but (at the time) learnt from someone else about the Great Filter. It was quite an odd moment.

"We've found signs of potential life on Mars, hooray!"

"You do realise that, statistically, finding this makes the total annihilation of the human race more likely?"

"Don't be silly, how does... oh. Right. Bugger."

Nixie, I know where you're coming from. I'd guess that we can only use what we know for certain as a basis for predictions of life outside our own planet, and keep an open mind about the Giant Space Pig Monster.

On Earth being toxic, any species stupid enough to find water dangerous would never come here. Perhaps excepting a few hours in badly written Hollywood nonsense.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...

 

[Brian G Turner]

Following on from this, organic compounds have apparently been observed on Enceladus by the Cassini probe - but frustratingly, the BBC report doesn't mention which ones:

Saturn moon a step closer to hosting life

 

[Venusian Broon]

The Guardian writing up is slightly more detailed:

Ocean spray on Saturn moon contains crucial constituents for life

Highlights include:

"German and US scientists found tell-tale signs of organic molecules far more complex than amino acids and 10 times heavier than methane in data gathered by Nasa's Cassini probe"

and

"But a small proportion, about 1%, are rich in organic molecules containing carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and potentially nitrogen too. Some were made up of hundreds of atoms."

I believe only molecules with masses of 50 atomic mass units (amu) had been identified before. (Methane for example is ~16amu) The actual paper states they've found molecules now with masses over 200amu, so perhaps the journalists have got this confused, 'cause that doesn't mean 'hundreds of atoms'

However if you want to actually check what the researchers actually said - for full detail...

Macromolecular organic compounds from the depths of Enceladus | Nature

The main point I can glean from a very quick overview of the paper is that the instrument making the analysis uses time-of-flight to measure the mass of the cation or material falling in. So you can measure the total mass of the cation, but you have to make guesses at exactly what sort of cation is making the signal. You can't quite pinpoint what it is exactly, just a measurement of its mass.

 

[Vertigo]

One slightly worrying aspect to this is that the more the Enceladus ocean environment shows similarities to our own ocean environment (hydrothermal vents etc.) the more we will expect to find life which in turn would vastly increase the probability of finding life elsewhere. On the other hand if Enceladus proves to have an environment significantly similar to our oceans and we don't find any life then we have a second environment conducive to life that doesn't have any and that could put a big damper on the old argument that where there can be life there will be. One of the strongest arguments for the likelihood of life being common out there.

Remember that all those discussions we've being having in other threads about the probabilities of alien life are stalled because we only have one example; that is one example of life and one example of a life friendly environment.

So fingers crossed that we do eventually find microbes of some sort.

 

[Venusian Broon]

So fingers crossed that we do eventually find microbes of some sort.

Actually I think either answer - life/no life - would be fascinating and extremely interesting in it's own way.

However if I were a betting man, I'd put a fiver on them finding life of some sort*. I'm not sure exactly when they will be able to search for it, so I would probably lose that fiver no matter what.

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* I tried to have a look to see if the bookies have weird markets - such as odd on alien life being proven - apparently they do but I can't find them online

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I agree with VB.
We can't tell on no data!