Moon of Jupiter prime candidate for alien life after water blast found

[Harpo]

Don't forget, those billions of typing monkeys are also producing "Don Quixote" and "The Complete Goon Show Scripts" and "Where's My Cow?" and all our Christmas shopping lists, in the original Klingon.

 

[RJM Corbet]

In terms of the scale of the solar system (both in terms of scale and time), let alone the galaxy and the universe, mere billions don't really amount to much at all.

I quite understand. Although most estimates of spontaneous abiogenesis are of the order of one to several times all the atoms in the universe. It's obviously not impossible for a chocolate cake to make and bake itself. But it's much more likely to happen to an intelligent chef who has studied and assembles the ingredients, in perfect baking conditions?

The point is that whatever the circumstances and coincidences, carbon based life isn't really LIKELY anywhere? Let alone virtually inevitable? Especially some place like Europa?

 

[RJM Corbet]

Well, I've been waiting for someone to correct me: that the spontaneous abiogenesis of life didnt happen all at once, in a single flash, but evolved in stages: from self-replicating inorganic polymer via 'protocell' to eventual bacteria. Because I've been waiting to counter that the 'protocell' is just a proposition -- like the extra dimensions string-theory depends upon. There's no evidence of such, although it's a handy theoretical fix. For the explanation of an absolute minimum 4.25 X 10 to the power 40 unliklihood, that's really a bit of a stretch?

 

[Stephen Palmer]

RJM, I think you'd enjoy reading this: The Vital Question.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

It's obviously not impossible for a chocolate cake to make and bake itself. But it's much more likely to happen to an intelligent chef who has studied and assembles the ingredients, in perfect baking conditions?

So what you're saying is - god did it? I ask out of curiosity, as that's what I take from your reply.

 

[Vertigo]

Well, I've been waiting for someone to correct me: that the spontaneous abiogenesis of life didnt happen all at once, in a single flash, but evolved in stages: from self-replicating inorganic polymer via 'protocell' to eventual bacteria. Because I've been waiting to counter that the 'protocell' is just a proposition -- like the extra dimensions string-theory depends upon. There's no evidence of such, although it's a handy theoretical fix. For the explanation of an absolute minimum 4.25 X 10 to the power 40 unliklihood, that's really a bit of a stretch?

RJM, I think you'd enjoy reading this: The Vital Question.

I'd second that recommendation!

 

[Venusian Broon]

You are clearly strawmanning hard here in this discussion

Well, yes. We now have complete knowledge of the ingredients,.

No we don't. No scientist would say that. As you point out a bit later, it's clear that DNA-bacteria world was not near the start of abiogenesis. Most of the many hypothesises posit some sort of precursor world or even multi-stage precursors that eventually lead to the formation of the first life that we would recognise.

Problem is that the arrival of Prokaryotes effectively wiped out this precursor world as they would use the material floating about in their own ways and they directly changed the environment.

The only evidence we have of what this precursor may have been is now trying to find rocks from the precursor time period and analysing the chemical composition. Perhaps then we can possibly make inferences. Unfortunately in geological terms this period of time is tiny - Prokaryotes arrived pretty quickly in Earth's history. It is possible that we may never have enough evidence to correctly ascertain this.

perfectly controlled conditions in which to combine them, but somehow can't get them to come to 'life'.

Irrelevant as we have little idea of what the actual conditions were of Earth at the time, nor do we have any idea of the precursor pathway that was taken. There's a lot of interesting theories, whether it's hydrothermal vents, radioactive beaches, via clay, on a comet etc...

The conditions that we might prefer in the lab, or what we imagine were there, may be nothing like what actually happened.

Also I'd take Ursa's point about time and space. What if it was a process that needed a reasonably specific set of circumstances - perhaps it needed a large hydrothermal vent to provide catalysers, with the right ingredients and a good 1000 years to 'cook'. Ever tried to get a grant for an experiment, that needs a thousand years?

Yet it's expected to happen purely by chance everywhere there's liquid water, even in the most inhospitable environment.

I can't really speak for the scientific community that look at these topics, but I've not seen anyone make such a comment.

What is clear is that for carbon based life to survive and thrive it requires liquid water. Hence, as the articles states, the detection of water increases the potential for Europa to have life.

We do not know what the chances are of abiogenesis are - having a look at Europa will hopefully give us a better answer at this front. Perhaps it's barren, perhaps there are interesting new life forms in its ocean. That will, no matter what is discovered, tell us something about our own abiogenesis.

As for 'inhospitable environments'. Any environment that has liquid water is, by definition, pretty hospitable for carbon based life. In fact the more we discover on earth of extremophiles the more we see how life can adapt to very varied and conditions once deemed 'inhospitable'. We have bacteria about 2km in the Earth's crust that rely solely on radioactive decay for their energy, we have bacteria that thrive (slowly!) in ice and are perpetually below freezing, we have others in almost boiling water and very toxic environments. (at least toxic to virtually all other plants and animals). If Europa does have a large underground ocean of liquid water, a deep thermal vent would be a lovely hospitable place for some bacteria.

As for my beliefs, as someone who is very comfortable with the Copernican principle and therefore our place in the universe that entails, I would be much happier if they did indeed find life deep in the Europian ocean, just to show us that, yep, in the grand scheme of things we're not that special.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

now that's a reply.

 

[Alexa]

now that's a reply.

Yeah, he scared me too. Let's watch for the reply !

 

[RJM Corbet]

Please delete. Repeat posting ...

 

[RJM Corbet]

RJM, I think you'd enjoy reading this: The Vital Question.

Thank you.

So what you're saying is - god did it? I ask out of curiosity, as that's what I take from your reply.

No I didn't. I meant that, while 'establishment' biology is so certain of its abiogenesis and anthropic principles, that still a 21st century biology facility, with all the available resources and computer equipment etc, can't get close to even the first most basic parts of the assembly -- yet dictates with 'divine authority' to lesser mortals how 'life' is almost certain to just happen by chance -- hugely remote chance -- everywhere there's water?

Life may have been seeded, etc. There are other alternative throries to the dogma of abiogenesis on Earth. And it IS just a theory. Will that do?

However if anyone did rashly suggest that in all these considerations perhaps even the tiniest and most remote possibility that the influence of some as yet unproveable higher intelligence might be included as also a consideration, they would be burned at the stake of the new inquisition?

EDIT: I do apologise for all the edits to this post. Let's go with this as final version, lol ...

I'd second that recommendation!

I'll look it up, bro.

You are clearly strawmanning hard here in this discussion



No we don't. No scientist would say that. As you point out a bit later, it's clear that DNA-bacteria world was not near the start of abiogenesis. Most of the many hypothesises posit some sort of precursor world or even multi-stage precursors that eventually lead to the formation of the first life that we would recognise.

Problem is that the arrival of Prokaryotes effectively wiped out this precursor world as they would use the material floating about in their own ways and they directly changed the environment.

The only evidence we have of what this precursor may have been is now trying to find rocks from the precursor time period and analysing the chemical composition. Perhaps then we can possibly make inferences. Unfortunately in geological terms this period of time is tiny - Prokaryotes arrived pretty quickly in Earth's history. It is possible that we may never have enough evidence to correctly ascertain this.




Irrelevant as we have little idea of what the actual conditions were of Earth at the time, nor do we have any idea of the precursor pathway that was taken. There's a lot of interesting theories, whether it's hydrothermal vents, radioactive beaches, via clay, on a comet etc...

The conditions that we might prefer in the lab, or what we imagine were there, may be nothing like what actually happened.

Also I'd take Ursa's point about time and space. What if it was a process that needed a reasonably specific set of circumstances - perhaps it needed a large hydrothermal vent to provide catalysers, with the right ingredients and a good 1000 years to 'cook'. Ever tried to get a grant for an experiment, that needs a thousand years?



I can't really speak for the scientific community that look at these topics, but I've not seen anyone make such a comment.

What is clear is that for carbon based life to survive and thrive it requires liquid water. Hence, as the articles states, the detection of water increases the potential for Europa to have life.

We do not know what the chances are of abiogenesis are - having a look at Europa will hopefully give us a better answer at this front. Perhaps it's barren, perhaps there are interesting new life forms in its ocean. That will, no matter what is discovered, tell us something about our own abiogenesis.

As for 'inhospitable environments'. Any environment that has liquid water is, by definition, pretty hospitable for carbon based life. In fact the more we discover on earth of extremophiles the more we see how life can adapt to very varied and conditions once deemed 'inhospitable'. We have bacteria about 2km in the Earth's crust that rely solely on radioactive decay for their energy, we have bacteria that thrive (slowly!) in ice and are perpetually below freezing, we have others in almost boiling water and very toxic environments. (at least toxic to virtually all other plants and animals). If Europa does have a large underground ocean of liquid water, a deep thermal vent would be a lovely hospitable place for some bacteria.

As for my beliefs, as someone who is very comfortable with the Copernican principle and therefore our place in the universe that entails, I would be much happier if they did indeed find life deep in the Europian ocean, just to show us that, yep, in the grand scheme of things we're not that special.

As with all your highly perceptive and knowledgeable responses, I will need to read this through several times and think about it for some time, before rushing in (or not) with a response, VB ...

EDIT: however at this stage I have to comment that the tenacity of life on Earth in extreme conditions isn't at all relevant to its origination elsewhere under extreme conditions?

 

[RJM Corbet]

...Irrelevant as we have little idea of what the actual conditions were of Earth at the time, nor do we have any idea of the precursor pathway that was taken. There's a lot of interesting theories, whether it's hydrothermal vents, radioactive beaches, via clay, on a comet etc...

The conditions that we might prefer in the lab, or what we imagine were there, may be nothing like what actually happened.

Also I'd take Ursa's point about time and space. What if it was a process that needed a reasonably specific set of circumstances - perhaps it needed a large hydrothermal vent to provide catalysers, with the right ingredients and a good 1000 years to 'cook'. Ever tried to get a grant for an experiment, that needs a thousand years? ...

Ok, thanks VB. So all said we have string-theorists proposing hidden dimensions and super-symmetry to prop-up up their idea. And we have abiogenesists proposing protobionts and mega hydrothermal vents to prop-up up theirs? It's all feasible. It's of course attractive. But it could just as easilly be quite wrong? I don't know what's more to say?

Perhaps we'll live long enough to find extra-terrestrial carbon-based abiogenetically (!) generated life. It's as good a reason as any for new scientific exploration and progress ...

 

[Vertigo]

Here's a thought for the panspermia advocates (leaving out the fact that panspermia merely pushes the mystery back one (or more) steps):

Supposing for the moment that abiogenesis is actually very rare, in such a scenario and assuming when I say very rare I mean seriously very rare, then what if life on Earth was the first (at least in our arm of the Milky Way) and that since then volcanic eruptions have been blasting spores/microbes out of our atmosphere where the solar wind blows them off into interstellar space. After all 4 billion plus years is an awful long time....

 

[RJM Corbet]

Here's a thought for the panspermia advocates (leaving out the fact that panspermia merely pushes the mystery back one (or more) steps):

Supposing for the moment that abiogenesis is actually very rare, in such a scenario and assuming when I say very rare I mean seriously very rare, then what if life on Earth was the first (at least in our arm of the Milky Way) and that since then volcanic eruptions have been blasting spores/microbes out of our atmosphere where the solar wind blows them off into interstellar space. After all 4 billion plus years is an awful long time....

THAT'S a thought!

 

[RJM Corbet]

RJM, I think you'd enjoy reading this: The Vital Question.

(... alkaline hydrothermal vents which create geological formations full of microscopically tiny pores. He then shows how these inorganic volumes, if in the presence of warm water (energy), carbon dioxide, hydrogen and naturally occurring catalysts – essentially compounds of iron and sulphur – can easily and inevitably create proton gradients across membranes. From these first principles all the later inventions of prokaryotic life can be deduced: the use of hydrogen/sodium antiporters (essentially chemical ion movers that actively work across phospholipid membranes); the use of lipid membranes; energy requirements, motion away from the pores, and so on ...)

From your review, because I obviously haven't read the book yet, lol.

I'm really sorry to labour the point, but if all this is so easy and obvious and actually 'inevitable' why can no part of it be recreated and tested under laboratory conditions? Or at least the first two sentences? What am I missing, here?

 

[Vertigo]

(... alkaline hydrothermal vents which create geological formations full of microscopically tiny pores. He then shows how these inorganic volumes, if in the presence of warm water (energy), carbon dioxide, hydrogen and naturally occurring catalysts – essentially compounds of iron and sulphur – can easily and inevitably create proton gradients across membranes. From these first principles all the later inventions of prokaryotic life can be deduced: the use of hydrogen/sodium antiporters (essentially chemical ion movers that actively work across phospholipid membranes); the use of lipid membranes; energy requirements, motion away from the pores, and so on ...)

From your review, because I obviously haven't read the book yet, lol.

I'm really sorry to labour the point, but if all this is so easy and obvious and actually 'inevitable' why can no part of it be recreated and tested under laboratory conditions? Or at least the first two sentences? What am I missing, here?

Easy is a relative term. I'd recommend reading the book; he talks in it about just how much has been done experimentally and how much hasn't and addresses many of the different theories out there. I think one of the problems is the first stages of life don't happen on the sort of timescales we are used to seeing life grow in. Even Lichens, which grow pretty darn slowly, are cheetahs compared to the time spans required for what he is describing. Those vents have to cook for a long long time before those early molecules can evolve sufficiently to be able to move away from the vents. As Simon says even if it is inevitable it can still take longer than any reasonable contemporary experiment is likely to last.

 

[Onyx]

I'm really sorry to labour the point, but if all this is so easy and obvious and actually 'inevitable' why can no part of it be recreated and tested under laboratory conditions? Or at least the first two sentences? What am I missing, here?

It's not what you are missing, it is what you prefer to ignore. Several people have pointed out to you that no amount of laboratory work can come close to the scale of running the "life experiment" in 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water for 500 million years. If abiogenesis is truly the result of trillions of trillions of random "dice rolls", how could a laboratory even begin to run an experiment on that scale?


Regardless of the likelihood of life given certain conditions over a useful time period, one thing the Drake Equation doesn't take into account is the survivability of life. The stuff might be popping up all the time, only to be wiped out by the next eruption, solar flair, poisoning in its own waste matter. Life may have started and died off millions of times on earth before the stuff we're related to stuck around. Early 'us' probably ate several other kinds of life - some of which might have had much better qualities for eventually producing intelligence, but were bad at being single cell Pac-men.

Overall, we judge life to be likely because there is so much water in the universe running very similar experiments to earth on roughly the same time and volume scale. So if it isn't happening anywhere, there needs to be an X factor that we are completely unaware of that is preventing life.

 

[Venusian Broon]

Ok, thanks VB. So all said we have string-theorists proposing hidden dimensions and super-symmetry to prop-up up their idea. And we have abiogenesists proposing protobionts and mega hydrothermal vents to prop-up up theirs? It's all feasible. It's of course attractive. But it could just as easilly be quite wrong? I don't know what's more to say?

Perhaps we'll live long enough to find extra-terrestrial carbon-based abiogenetically (!) generated life. It's as good a reason as any for new scientific exploration and progress ...

I think we might actually live long enough as a species to find evidence of other abiogenesis' occurring...whereas I am less certain there is enough time left in the universe for us to prove anything to do with string theory (And I say that as a physicist!)

At least we have other habitats in the neighbourhood that actually stand out as candidates, that with a bit of effort we can actually reach and explore. As you say, a very worthy goal of scientific exploration.

[Note - perhaps we find something on Europa, and something still alive deep buried in Mars...but perhaps there was a form of panspermia within the planets of this solar system. That it did originate on one place and was transported by large meteorite impact throughout the system??? We'll only know if we get there and take some samples...]

I think the difference in our views is that I think you believe abiogenesis is highly implausible and improbable. Whereas I just don't know. Your position might be true. Perhaps, even, there was some sort of 'higher being' that was involved in seeding life on a barren, just cooling, Earth. (Although saying something like that, with no evidence, is 'propping' up your theory even worse than the abiogenists who at least can do some biochemical experiments...but, hey, that's my own opinion!)

But we have hypothesis and theories - and let's try them out by looking for fossils on mars, clouds of bacteria on Venus or ocean dwellers on Europa. At least these are reachable goals.

 

[RJM Corbet]

It's not what you are missing, it is what you prefer to ignore. Several people have pointed out to you that no amount of laboratory work can come close to the scale of running the "life experiment" in 1.3 billion cubic kilometers of water for 500 million years. If abiogenesis is truly the result of trillions of trillions of random "dice rolls", how could a laboratory even begin to run an experiment on that scale?

[Quoted text deleted by a Moderator]

Regardless of the likelihood of life given certain conditions over a useful time period, one thing the Drake Equation doesn't take into account is the survivability of life. The stuff might be popping up all the time, only to be wiped out by the next eruption, solar flair, poisoning in its own waste matter. Life may have started and died off millions of times on earth before the stuff we're related to stuck around. Early 'us' probably ate several other kinds of life - some of which might have had much better qualities for eventually producing intelligence, but were bad at being single cell Pac-men.

Overall, we judge life to be likely because there is so much water in the universe running very similar experiments to earth on roughly the same time and volume scale. So if it isn't happening anywhere, there needs to be an X factor that we are completely unaware of that is preventing life.

I'm not going to get into discussing what I'm deliberately missing. You're not smarter than me just because you are a physicist. Perhaps it's you missing the point: it took the universe billions of years to create salt. But now we know what it is, we can reproduce it. So if you're going to be so all knowing about 'life' why are you avoiding the obvious: if it's so simple, why is it so impossibly difficult? I'm not continuing with this discussion.

EDIT: Why should I have to accept it just because you and a bunch of other prople say it? Where's your EVIDENCE?

Goodbye

 

[Onyx]

I'm not going to get into discussing what I'm deliberately missing. You're not smarter than me just because you are a physicist. Perhaps it's you missing the point: it took the universe billions of years to create salt. But now we know what it is, we can reproduce it. So if you're going to be so all knowing about 'life' why are you avoiding the obvious: if it's so simple, why is it so impossibly difficult. I'm not continuing with this discussion. Goodbye

What you are missing is that making salt out of chlorine and sodium is like factoring the product of two digit primes - something you could do in your head in a few minutes. Duplicating the chemical evolution of life is more complex - like factoring the product of two 128 digit primes. A supercomputer doing the same math you did in your head would take 1 billion years to factor the product of two 128 bit numbers, despite us understanding all the math.

Given what a supercomputer can't do fast with pure math, why do you believe a laboratory can recreate millions of years of parallel chemical processing in a few years?