What's lurking...?
By the appearance of the pic, I think that's the back of Ballmer's head (but I'm not sure how big the moon is, need scale).
ALIEN LIFE drenched in HOT FLUID on Jupiter's Ganymede – is that so?
The Hubble space telescope is usually eyeing up far away galaxies, but a novel technique has allowed it to peer inside the largest moon in our Solar System – and find signs of water. Jupiter's Ganymede is massive, about twice the size of Earth's moon, and has both an iron core and its own magnetosphere. Just as with Earth, …
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Friday 13th March 2015 05:30 GMT MacroRodent
Watery solar system
"Liquid water outside of Earth is very rare indeed, "
Not sure if we can say so any more. We now have strong evidence of three moons having ice-covered oceans (Europa, Ganymede and Enceladus), and there might be even more. Suppose we eventually find most of the liquid water in the solar system is not on Earth...
Several old sci-fi stories revolved around the idea that water is very rare outside Earth (like the TV series "V"(1983) where the aliens came to steal Earth's water). They seem quite dated now!
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Monday 16th March 2015 12:43 GMT cray74
Re: Watery solar system
" Find something to help solve our problems on earth.. like food distribution!!"
Food distribution is technologically and logistically solved. It is inexpensive to ship millions of tons of staples around the world, or deliver fresh fish affordably to the interior of continents. There's nothing for NASA and astronomers to contribute to food distribution, not even their research budgets.
The problems with food distribution waiting to be solved include, but are not limited to, the following non-technological issues:
1) Hungry nations refusing food aid (typically for inane reasons)
2) Rich nations refusing to provide direct food aid under the belief (right or wrong) that it will turn hungry nations into dependents
3) Hungry nations continuing to use low-productivity farming techniques because they can't afford mechanized farming, or can't support mechanized farming
4) Rich nations trying to avoid destroying local agricultural industry, the way the US destroyed Afghanistan's wheat farms with cheap food aid and drove the farmers to opium.
And so on.
Taking money from a scientist studying Ganymede to research a solved technological problem is a wasteful reinvention of the wheel, especially when the remaining issues are not technological.
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Friday 13th March 2015 11:42 GMT AbelSoul
Outstanding piece of boffinry
"If you observe the aurorae in an appropriate way, you learn something about the magnetic field. If you know the magnetic field, then you know something about the moon's interior."
Cap well and truly d'offed.
95 miles under the surface though? "Cat, are you drilling?"
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Friday 13th March 2015 13:40 GMT Ugotta B. Kiddingme
With apologies to The Police
"it's likely Ganymede's hot iron core, and the proximity to Jupiter, will keep the sea rather warm. Under such conditions life could be a possibility, although only in its most basic form."
Many miles away
Something crawls from the slime
At the bottom of a dark [Ganymedean] lake...
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Friday 13th March 2015 15:53 GMT et tu, brute?
Why?
"Under such conditions life could be a possibility, although only in its most basic form."
Why only in it's most basic form? Why couldn't it have developed/evolved in a totally different way than life as we know it, and be far from basic? Who defines the standard of what is considered "basic"?
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Friday 13th March 2015 16:31 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why?
The reasoning is probably that a lot of the complexity and diversity we see in life on Earth arose through there being a range of different environments here, with areas being temporary isolated from each other, and you presumably don't get that so much with an underground sea. However, it's an argument from lack of imagination, really, so not very convincing.
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Tuesday 17th March 2015 17:50 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Why?
How can anything complex grow in an environment that is buried below miles of ice? Where do all the other necessities of complex life come from?
From the same place that ocean-vent lifeforms on Earth get it - upwelling solutions chock-full of mineral ions and chemicals with stored energy. Even on this planet, with its tasty biosphere film in the easy-living zone of temperate-range surface and upper ocean level, has myriad extremophile organisms living far from solar radiation and the other goodies we enjoy.
Of course, "basic" and "complex" are not terms of art here; they're arbitrary and subjective labels. But hydrothermal-vent dwellers on Earth are pretty complex, compared to the whole range of organisms. Tubeworms, clams, etc - we're talking large multicellular critters with a good array of specialized organs and the like.
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Saturday 14th March 2015 05:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why?
Precisely the question I had. Fortunately, I read all the comments before popping off. One minor quibble is that due to the smaller size but liquid core, it's likely to have greater exposure to radioactivity thus, perhaps, having a higher rate of mutations. That's even before sorting out the tidal influences from Jupiter mixing things up. Until we go there and look, and robotics doesn't get you too far along here, we'll never know. So far, we have rather limited sample size of known life-bearing worlds to draw from and a larger sample of worlds that we 'believe' do not bear any life at all. I don't like mixing beliefs into science.
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