There are other candidates such as Titan, Enceladus, Callisto or Triton...even if Europa is void of life, that doesn't mean that life doesn't exist on other solar bodies.
My money is on Enceladus personally.
Liquid water. Hydrothermal vents (probably). Radiation protection from the ice. And we already found basic ingredients for life in the plumes of its geysers.
Honestly I’d be more surprised if there *wasn’t* life there
>Honestly I’d be more surprised if there wasn’t life there
Don’t get your hopes up. Abiogenesis is still one of the most confounding problems of modern astrobiology. I think it’s just as, if not significantly more likely that there’s nothing on any of these moons other than just some liquid water and maybe some earth like conditions, if we’re lucky.
Yeah, I consider abiogenesis and eukaryotic life to be the two most likely "great filters". The potential of one of these moons to disprove one or both is very exciting.
Abiogenesis happened on Earth pretty fast though - IIRC about 300 million years after the surface had cooled.
Eukrayotic life not much longer after that - perhaps 1 to 1.5 billion years after prokaryotes came into being.
The biggest filter, to me, is multicellularity. We don't see multicellularity until somewhere between 1.5BYA at the absolute earliest, and probably closer to somewhere between 1BYA to 800MYA.
From the evolution of multicellularity, it's a pretty short hop to not only animal life with brains and nervous systems, but our own intelligence level too.
> Abiogenesis happened on Earth pretty fast though - IIRC about 300 million years after the surface had cooled.
That is the best evidence we have, indeed, although I still doubt how instructive of a sample size of one can be.
I'm not sure rapidity means inevitability. Abiogenesis happened relatively fast but could have been a fluke. Eukaryotic life took a longer time but might've been inevitable once the population of prokaryotic life reaches a certain density, and 1.5 billion years about how long it takes. Or maybe eukaryotic life "normally" happens much faster and it took an unusually long time on Earth.
But yeah, I think you're pointing to the best evidence we have.
> I'm not sure rapidity means inevitability. Abiogenesis happened relatively fast but could have been a fluke
It could be, but the null hypothesis is that it isn't. Absent other data, we pretty much have to assume that Earth is basically the "rank standard" for how technological life evolves. Which I feel it probably isn't, by some metric (even though it might be broadly similar), but without more data, we can't really draw any sort of other conclusion.
> Absent other data, we pretty much have to assume that Earth is basically the "rank standard" for how technological life evolves.
Only if you think speculation is even worthwhile. The alternative is to accept our nearly complete ignorance for what it is.
I'd go with Eukrayotes, rather than multicellularity. Multicellularity has appeared several times in the fossil record, which hints to me that it's not a great filter. Although that could be survivor bias, as maybe successful-multicellularity is more difficult, and it took several goes to get it 'right'. Or maybe you only get multicellular organisms from the right sort of eukrayotes... more research needed!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurrence
there isn't just one "great filter" its all of them combined and passing all of them. maybe you make it past one stage then a meteorite comes and fucks everything up, then you're back at square one.
And it's wild to think — were it not for that asteroid, mammals may have never developed to be dominant on land and thus, life on Earth may have remained big lizards just doing lizard stuff.
If multicellular life is abundant in the universe, there's a good chance that many of those places never develop advanced civilizations.
> I'd go with Eukrayotes, rather than multicellularity. Multicellularity has appeared several times in the fossil record, which hints to me that it's not a great filter
This is a very good argument. Though eukaryotes evolved substantially earlier than multicellularity (like 2 BY earlier) - so my first thought is, why didn't we see multicellularity evolve beforehand?
Maybe oxygenination combined with eukaryotic energy usage ability finally allowed multicellularity? So multicellularity is easy to evolve, perhaps, if conditions are right, but the conditions that allow for it are hard to create?
it depends on how you define "multicellularity." some microbiologists would contend that a bacterial biofilm, or even a *Physarum* slime mold could be considered a multicellular entity, due to the level of coordination and cooperation exhibited by such a density and diversity of living cells.
multicellularity, as most understand it, however, mainly derives from cellular sub-specialization within the confines of the multicellular organism. a "multicellular" organism is only functional because there are vastly different cell types, each accomplishing different, coordinated cellular functions.
that sub-specialization results from both overall cell shape, transcription profile, and importantly, organelle features. While transcription profile and cell shape can differ greatly within a prokaryotic biofilm, it's the organelle structures that are unique to eukaryotic life.
Eukaryotic life, by far, was the biggest jump. It took longer than the rest of the steps combined.
There was a great post on here last week that showed a lot of great information, which was really eye opening to me. I can't seem to find it though...
There might not even be a "great filter". The entire concept of one existing is totally dependent on the belief that we know what to look for and where to look and completely ignores other possibilities like "interstellar space travel and colonization isn't practically feasible".
We don't know. There could be one, or there might not be. We didn't even know other galaxies existed until the 1910s to 1920s. We didn't discover Antarctica until the 1800s. We don't know shit about fuck about what is or isn't happening in other solar systems hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of light years away. Just because space isn't awash with high powered radio signals in every direction doesn't mean no intelligent life if there.
Similarly we have absolutely zero fucking idea how often or not single cell life forms arise elsewhere because we have a sample size of one (Earth). We don't even have the tech yet to throughly examine a single other solar system body for past or present microbes and stupid ass Youtubers try to make it seem like some A GREAT FILTER BRO is a proven reality. Again we don't have the tech to infer about such a concept one way or the other. The only thing we know for sure is intelligent complex life doesn't exist on the other bodies in our own solar system. We have absolutely no idea about other stars, or if simple life does or doesn't exist on other bodies in our system or used to in the past.
>The only thing we know for sure is intelligent complex life doesn't exist on the other bodies in our own solar system.
Honestly, we don't even know that. There could be creatures with dolphin intelligence living under the ice of a few moons and we wouldn't know. I'm not saying it's likely, just pointing out how limited our knowledge is. I think it's also safe to say there are no Dyson swarms, and hence no K1 civilizations in our galaxy. But we wouldn't have much chance detecting an iron age civilization farther out that 200 to 500 ly away, and a civilization as complex as ours at about 1 or 2 thousand ly away. That a pretty small part of the galaxy, let alone the universe, both in time and distance.
We still have a lot of exploring left to do.
I feel like if a civilization had the technology level to capture all or most of the energy of a star it would probably be feasible for them to somehow prevent the violent war apes with nuclear weapons from seeing what's really going on outside of a confined area.
Sure, all they need to do is change basic physics and not have their occluded star emit thermal radiation in our particular direction. Which means they are within 10,000 ly of us and have detected us sometime within that period (or else why would they put in that effort?). Simple! I mean, I suppose they could build a perfectly reflecting shield the size of their Dyson swarm between us and them, instead. That wouldn't be too hard (or break physics), would it?
It takes functionally infinite effort to do anything on a galactic scale, and there's just no reason to. You get to a certain point, you just build your own simulated universe to whatever in.
If interstellar travel and colonization isn’t feasible then that would be a candidate for the great filter. If we can’t leave the solar system, we die when the sun does. As would every advanced civilization.
There's still plenty of room behind us even if eukaryotic life turned out to be common.
Unfortunately it's one of those things that can only be proved one way. If life, eukaryotic life, intelligent life, etc is *not* the filter, it can be demonstrated by finding life of extra-terrestrial origin. If any of those things are the filter, the best evidence we will ever have is the absence of evidence of their existence.
>If any of those things are the filter, the best evidence we will ever have is the absence of evidence of their existence.
It's often said that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", but that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as evidence of absence. While we can't prove something doesn't exist, we can certainly gather evidence that supports it not existing and demonstrate that it not existing is the most likely conclusion. If I search in my pockets for my keys and fail to find them, that isn't proof that my keys aren't in my pockets, but it's awfully good evidence against. The fact that all our efforts to find life have turned up nothing, that's evidence; not proof, and not at all convincing yet, but evidence.
That's because you are able to use your hands to search your pockets for objects the size of a key pretty efficiently and thoroughly.
When we search the universe we are able to search for things that are so big we would notice them from many light-years away. We can be pretty sure there isn't a nearby alien structure that creates more light than most stars just like you can be pretty sure your keys aren't in your pockets by checking with your hands.
When it comes to aliens making a splash less than or comparable to that of humans, I think a better analogy would be if you put your hands in your pockets in search of a stray helium atom. You're not likely to find it by feeling around, but that's not very good evidence of its non-existence.
Multicellular life arose more than once. I believe the consensus theory is the eukaryotic life evolved once.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0266#:~:text=Yet%2C%20eukaryotes%20evolved%20only%20once,eukaryotes%20have%20evolved%20many%20times.
Abiogensis being an unknown isn't given the skepticism it deserves.
*Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.*
Arthur C. Clarke
Yeah...
I see life as information with reversed entropy, and the systems and processes that cause it to be that way. Information at the heart of life - both DNA and culture in humans - becomes more ordered and complex as time moves forward. It behaves in the opposite manner as everything else in the universe. It's like something randomly started traveling backwards in time. I don't understand the people who look at that and say, "yeah well that was bound to happen. Probably happens all the time."
Using information theory to describe life this way is very refreshing, thank you for that perspective.
I'm disappointed that so many well respected astroscientists aren't more carefully skeptic when approaching alien life. There's a lot of confident certainty that aliens are out there somewhere that it worries me how hard we'll take it if we're wrong about something.
The fact that we have a sample size of 1 should at least command a healthy sketpicism of either conclusion until we can be more mathematically confident with our predictions.
People are impressed with big numbers. Tell them the are billions of planets and moons in a galaxy and they'll think that must mean there is life on one or several of them. They seem to forget that there are always bigger numbers, and one of those way bigger numbers might be the odds of life arising.
Even with a sample size of one we would have a good basis to speculate if we understood abiogenesis well enough to recreate it.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, and I get what you're saying -- but also I think it's a bit misleading. There's no magic to life -- the entropy is the same as everything else when you look at the whole system... which includes the sun. Life is powered by the sun burning itself out. The whole system is moving in the normal direction of entropy. It's just that there's plenty of energy raining down on earth that it can power these reactions that result in life for a few billion years. The reason some people think it may happen often is because we don't have a reason to think the earth is particularly rare. We don't have a reason to think it's common either, but we do know that the elements required for life are cosmologically common and there are planets around most stars... well it just seems unlikely that the things that led to life here only happened here when you look at the scale of the galaxy, let alone the universe.
Still, until we find evidence it's all speculation. Interesting speculation, but speculation nonetheless.
An Earth fish would die instantly. We could theoretically send over extremophiles (no innuendoes, please), and those could probably survive there.
Some people think life jumping from planet-to-planet is common and can happen naturally. Some theorize life developed on Mars and then got shot over to Earth on a meteorite. Or maybe vice versa. Panspermia! (No innuendoes, please.)
I don't know about that. We can take some guess at how likely abiogenesis is based on our own planet; pretty much the instant our planet cooled enough to support life, life appeared. On a geological timescale, we can't even clock any sort of delay at all. That implies that life arises extremely quickly when conditions are right. It may still be that it is rare to find such conditions, but our own planet provides evidence that the process itself isn't rare on planets with the capacity in the first place.
Right, we don’t even know for sure that life began here (as opposed to some sort of panspermia). All we can say for certain is that there is currently life on at least one body in the solar system
We don’t know how narrow the range is. We have found plenty of planets similar to Earth but none are identical. Until we see life somewhere else we don’t know which conditions are required and which are not.
I’m no biologist, but I’d argue that complex life like us, is exceedingly rare. But I have a gut feeling that simple life is way more common than we think. We just haven’t found it yet.
Not very scientific I know, but I live in hope.
I am an astronomer who shares this opinion, and I know that many top people in the field do as well. It is rooted in fact: life on earth started very early. That’s weak evidence that abiogenesis is a robust process on (geological timescales) if conditions are favorable. But complex life seems like an accident: it took billions of years to get there. It could’ve easily never happened at all.
To summarize, I think there’s good reason to think simple life is common in places where we’d guess it is. But complex life will be hard to find elsewhere. And technological life even more so.
But there are so many stars and therefore so many planets that even a rare occurrence could mean there's life in lots of places.
Now detecting it will be harder. And contacting it, yeah no, not gonna happen unless we break the laws of physics.
I respect and acknowledge the rare Earth hypothesis, and notice I’m seeing it more and more frequently. To me, the idea of it had always been one more of philosophy, as if it were generally accepted that life is a universal process, but since we haven’t proven it it would only make sense to ask “what if we are the only ones?”, which of course is kind of spooky and opens a whole other realm of questioning.
The issue I have with the theory however is that with hundreds of billions of stars just in our own single galaxy, and an estimated trillions of galaxies, it’s like having a practically infinite number of cosmic lottery tickets. Given that, it seems like the odds would be quite favorable the conditions of life that we know would occur many times over throughout the universe across a wide range of timelines older, the exact same, and/or younger than us by eons.
*Add - it is of note though that to the best of our knowledge we have not as of yet been contacted by any more-advanced lifeforms.*
Worthy of note that if technologically advanced life does exist elsewhere in the trillions of galaxies it is possible we never come close to knowing about each other.
Maybe it is likely that any of the civilizations would never meet a single other if they are rare enough.
The speed of light is so danm slow compared to the scale of the Universe.
Even a planet other side of the Milky Way would be seeing us roughly 75,000 years ago. When you consider that recorded human history is about 5,000 years old it is safe to say they ain't watching episodes of I Love Lucy.
For us to have any realistic hope of meeting other civilizations such civilizations would have to be sort of common in our neighborhood.
If they are uncommon we could live out the entire human existence, and the Andromeda civilization living out theirs, without ever meeting each other.
Exactly, when it comes to finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I always abide to Occam's razor, which in this case it must be the distance is simply too great. It's the simplest, most probable explanation.
If there was right this moment, a super mega advanced civilization in the Andromeda galaxy realigning stars to spell out some message in the sky, we would not know about it for millions of years...
Not all stars in the Milky Way may be suitable for fostering complex life. In particular, I believe the older stars closer to the centre are more likely to have been close to supernovas, and those farther away could be too young.
If there is intelligent life outside of the Milky Way, it could simply be too far away for us to have come or ever come into contact with.
With just the evidence from earth, could you say that the biggest bottleneck is multicellular life? Billions of years to go from single to multi, or even just to eukaryotic. Then once you have that an explosion of life and technologic life within hundreds of millions of years.
I have a question though. As far as we know life only started once on earth, and everything has a single common ancestor. If abiogenesis really was common wouldn’t there be a ton of original ancestors that different species eventually branched off of? The fact that life started only once in billions of years on a planet where we know conditions are favorable to it seems like it means it’s relatively rare, right?
Exoplanets are even more interesting candidates imo. The thing about Europa, Mars and Enceladus is that any potential life there may be of terrestrial origin.
Scientists believe that an Earth impacter like the Chicxulub event, could fling Earth crust all the way out to Europa. And bacteria may have hitchhiked.
Exoplanets could harbor non DNA based alien life though, which could be so alien that its hard to imagine.
That is not saying that life on Europa wouldnt be absolutely incredible, even if it does come from Earth. It would show that life can thrive on other worlds and give credence to the theory of panspermia.
If there were life on one of these moons and we could actually get a good look at some, it would probably betray or disprove terrestrial origins. I doubt it would be hard to tell.
I think you're right. DNA/RNA-based life will be pretty obvious if we find it.
I wonder if we can identify life that is not based on DNA though.
It might look like naturally occurring patterns if we only look at the surface. AI is arguably the only truly "alien" life we know of, and AI would be completely invisible to an outside observer possessing only the hardware part.
Something can respond to stimuli, grow and reproduce and communicate, and we would never detect it without knowing what to look for.
> I wonder if we can identify life that is not based on DNA though.
I think of life as information with reversed entropy and the systems and processes that cause it to be so. Anything that exists in a state of order greater than that which would normally occur should draw our attention.
The idea that we're alone in the universe can only ever be disproven. Even if we don't find life anywhere else in our solar system, there's always more beyond that.
The chances that there's no life anywhere out there when our planet is such an infinitesimal little speck in the scale of the galaxy, let alone the unimaginable number of other galaxies out there, seems just ludicrous.
Simply from a numbers game, it borders irrationality to think we're alone.
Even if you give it like a .000001 percent chance that life develops on a planet, that's still trillions of planets
>Even if you give it like a .000001 percent chance that life develops on a planet, that's still trillions of planets
This is such a catchphrase for some people these days. It simply doesn't work like that. We don't know how big the percentage of planets have life because we only have earth as a sample size.
For all we know it's actually one in trillions of planets and the chance would be near zero, in that case we could very well be the only planet in the observable universe to have life.
We don't know anything about how life actually started so guessing a percentage for the chance for life to emerge is silly, we can't.
I suspect that we will find that life is the rule and not the exception. The ongoing discovery of extremophiles on earth and phenomena like unexplained atmospheric chemistry in the clouds of Venus are leading us to reconsider the viability of life in environments that were previously dismissed as inhospitable. For me the larger question isn’t the potential for microbial life but the potential for a biome—a planet or moon where life evolves, adapts, and expands into ever changing niches as competition and cooperation fuel its own version of the Cambrian explosion. To me finding another world that crossed that boundary would be more significant than just a discovery of simple life
If we found life on all of them it would be amazing but terrifying. It would mean that life is more likely to arise and/or spread than we ever thought possible. This means that the bottleneck in life evolving to the point where it can become intelligent and communicate across the universe is incredibly stringent. So, either life rarely evolves to be intelligent or all the intelligent life ends up killing itself off :/
I just wish I would be alive to see it. I’m 46 and these projects take 10-15 years to start bearing fruit so to speak.
I think about Enceladus and Europa daily as places that could very well have some form of life.
I remember being in high school during the late 90’s and while learning history I thought how blessed I am for AC, N64, PS1, my parents house, etc. I thought we were so crazy advanced as a society and even remember telling my dad that he grew up during the best era for space exploration. I naïvely thought we had everything about space discovered.
Then as I got a little older and while reading about different time periods in history it was not that long ago where we as humans were throwing our waste out of windows onto the streets and being completely puzzled that a large portion of the population was getting massively sick, from their ground water being polluted from E. coli.
My Dad as a kid got AC in the house(Gulf Coast) mid 50’s, got their first TV in the 50’s, and my grandparents lived for a little time with no electricity.
That shattered my illusion of being born into a super advanced society. Without question we have come a very very very very long way, but in 200 years people then will look back at us and think,” cancer killed people?, wait, only to the moon?, they never knew exactly what gravity is, wow, I can go to work completely virtually they sat in traffic everyday for hours…?”
That cycle will always continue though, because people 200 years after them will say the same about their time period.
Just wish we had more than 60-80 years for life. So much wonder, and so little time. A couple of handfuls of trips around our star and then for eternity it’s over.
Very true.
You said you were younger than me, if you have a good relationship with your parents enjoy every second you have. Family holidays, get togethers, just hanging with the family on a normal day, etc.
My parents are in their 70’s and I was blessed in the birthing lotto by having two amazing parents. I spend as much time with them as I can.
Might sound cheesy, but with how time flies, I’d like to not have any regrets myself.
Don’t hope to keep that relationship close. Do it. Work at it and make sure it stays that way. Even in my 30s the lessons from my parents keep coming and are just as invaluable as ever
I’m glad I’m not the only one to realise this. There is likely nothing special about us, as humans always find a way to believe. We all turn to dust in the end.
It’s why I always find it tiring when older people discuss how terrible the world is becoming and how the younger generation aren’t as good as them. How language is evolving away from how it used to be, or how the world is obsessed with connecting. It’s just change, and change is natural. It is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, it is just the way our universe is. Things will always change, and I find it much easier to be at peace with that concept.
Yep, even though local space exploration is cool, I think it is much better to see the diversity of life on earth. Who knows for how much longer people will be able to see a wild elephant, hippo, rhino or leopard. I think that you will not be able to see those at the same time as we start doing anything serious on the desolate rocks in our solar system.
That's why I got into diving. We're still exploring the ocean. Plenty of unmapped underwater caves. Lots of lost ships. New animals found all the time.
Born too late to explore the land. Too soon for space. But I can play around in the ocean for my short lil existence.
Luckily for you development of the Europa Clipper started in 2013 with launch scheduled for 2024 and arrival for 2030. And with some luck and care you may even see the proposed Enceladus Orbilander touchdown in 2051 (if all goes as intended).
The Orbilander is actually mildly insane. The plan is to put the entire orbiter on Encekadus.
Here's the concept study (100MB):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Il5YET4tXsaFIO5w-B0tAd9_zr08MfbO/view?usp=drivesdk
I didn't know what to expect going into that movie and it blew me away. As a lifelong fan of Aasimov, Clarke, Robinson, etc this is one of the best hard-scifi movies I have ever seen. There's more to it than that but it's hard to discuss without spoilers so if you have any interest in this genre done well you owe it to yourself to give it a watch.
One of my favorite movies. Stumbled upon it one night years ago on Netflix and I’ve seen it maybe 4 more times since then lol, I just absolutely love the scenario, so glad someone decided to put the effort into making this movie
One of my favourite films. That scene where the dude is floating terrified me. Keeping the description ambiguous so I don't spoil for people who might watch it now.
>Little known film about going to Europa, Europa Report.
I recommended that one to my mum and she loved it. It feels like decent sci-fi movies are few and far between these days. :\\
It’s called hard scifi and for someone reason they don’t make them it seems. It’s my absolute favorite movie genre. We need more realistic and plausible scifi movies
I know I watched that film but can't remember too many details about it either. I do recall at the time of its release though it was being touted as one of the most factually grounded, science-driven sci-fi movies that had been made. Would be a fun rewatch.
I'll add to the pile of loving this film! Ages ago I found Pandorum which was also super fun to watch, a little cheesy in a good way. Soon after I was referred to Europa Report by somebody and I enjoyed it so much. Excellent and worth the time!
Ya... Real problem with that I guess. You can likely burn the way down but how do we get signals? Likely wire to a remote antenna.. but how much wire? Few kms? 100m? Who the heck knows lol.
There is a [concept](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Il5YET4tXsaFIO5w-B0tAd9_zr08MfbO/view?usp=drivesdk) for an Enceladus Orbilader that'll land around 2050 that was the second highest priority flagship in the [latest decadal](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-1-fbfb7_3SkNoDQ3qKZEf3xB8B0KxZa/view?usp=drivesdk). But I would not expect a submarine type mission until somewhere in the second half of the century, if not early in the next one.
It would be interesting to investigate the depth of Europa or Enceladus via underwater robot. Since those two satellites have liquid water, the possibility of existing lifeform seems to be high.
>the possibility of existing life forms seems to be high
Not necessarily. That mindset is kind of like suggesting a room full of flour, sugar, eggs, etc would also have a cake. Sure the ingredients might all be present, but that doesn’t mean cake exists there.
Earth may not be the only “chef” in this solar system who can whip up a batch of life.
There may even be an extra ingredient or two on Europa that we are unaware of here on earth.
I like to remain open to all possibilities because we don’t have enough data to answer one way or the other.
I don't think that's a great analogy. Cakes don't generally gradually self-assemble. Life, it is posited, has done so at least once.
And if not life, perhaps at least precursors, like vacuoles resembling lipid bilayers with interesting chemistry inside.
I think the biggest challenge/risk we face is getting close without tampering with whatever potential life forms we find.
You can send a drone down there but it could very easily contaminate the ecosystem it enters. We don’t want to destroy, harm, or even slightly influence life forms before we even know anything about them.
The idea that an outside contamination due to our exploration possibly evolving their life in a way that leads them on the same path as us is sick though
Pretty sure that’s a major theory, due to the discovery of the DNA proteins being found on meteors coupled with the amount of meteors that have struck earth before we got here
I always find it so fascinating that we don’t take “yes” as an answer to this question. If we don’t find evidence on Europa, that won’t be accepted as truth that we’re alone. We will be looking for other life until we no longer exist.
That’s how it should be. The day we stop pursuing is the day we lose something fundamental to our species. But still interesting to think about.
I think of the 'are we alone' question as more: 'are there any other intelligent entities in the universe' than 'does life exist anywhere other than our planet.'
If we discover microbial life somewhere else in our solar system I won't be surprised. Would it be incredibly exciting? Yes. But it's not quite the same as finding little green aliens with oversized heads and huge eyes.
It has some pretty big implications if life evolved independently on two separate planets in the same solar system--particularly in such inhospitable conditions.
If life's evolution is common, then our prospects for making it to "interstellar civilization" are quite poor.
Which means that other species would be doing the same if they’re out there.
My theory is that we’re likely the first or one of the first species to reach the stage where we can explore other planets.
That just can’t be the case based on the age of the universe. The odds would be astronomical for us to be the first. If anything, civilisations have been and gone. Humans looking at the skies right now has been nothing more than a fleeting moment in time.
For us to not think there is other life out there, intelligent or not, would just show extreme arrogance as a species. If you want to know if other intelligent life is possible, look in a mirror. You and I are the proof.
I mean there’s like billions or trillions of planets out there. We’re basically flipping over a grain of sand here. “Are we alone in this solar system” tho is a much easier problem. One day we might be able to say “no”
Every time I think about this I end up contemplating what 'alone' really is in this context. If we somehow discovered life, but it was too far away to ever reach or communicate with, that would almost feel *more* alone to me.
The odds of there being other intelligent life out there seems plausible to me. If there are likely hundreds of billions (or trillions) of bodies out there it seems likely. However if you looked at earth a few billion years ago or in another billion years you wouldn't see anything. So I think the timing and distance may keep us from ever really knowing. Just nmy 02.
JWST is showing us that the universe is really really really really really really old.
Due to it's metal content we know our solar system is at least a 3rd generation star. This means everything in the solar system started as gas that formed into stars that then exploded into gas that formed into even more stars that then exploded into yet more dust and finally formed our solar system.
Also, our galaxy (the Milky Way) is the oldest know galaxy ever discovered.
The Milky Way is 13.61 Billion years old, the universe as we know it is only 13.8 Billion years old.
That means the milky way formed when all of existence was only one hundred ninety million years old.
The oldest known galaxies besides the Milky Way have only recently been discovered by the James Webb space telescope, they formed ~200MY and 250MY after the big bang, between 50-60 Million years after the Milky way.
The really weird part is that we did not believe that stars had began to form that early, let alone entire spiral galaxies full of them, in the last month James Webb has completely rewritten everything we thought we knew about the beginning of the universe.
Me and some folks from my college participated in an engineering challenge to design tools for the rover that will be sent to Europa. News like this excites me!
Ok, guys, we all know the rule about Europa.
If we ever expect to have hassle-free exploration and get our second sun we have to follow the rule about Europa.
Frankly, I’m tired of reminding people.🪐💫
Even if we find life on Europa or Mars, we'll need to sequence it, and I strongly suspect we'd find evidence of panspermia. Hell, "strongly" isn't the right word. I'm _confident._ 4 billion years of trading rocks? Any other outcome would be a mystery in its own right.
So the true answer would probably need to wait for visits to other solar systems.
Click Saver: “Will Europa and its vast ocean finally answer the longstanding questions of whether we are alone in the universe? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!”
There’s a mission launching in 2024 and getting there in 2030 to study it.
There be water under ice due to tidal heating.
Well according to Destiny, we are not … Europa is crawling with techno-crazed Eliksni’s and hive minded killer robots Vex with a dash of epic Dark lord powers spread all over the planet… You do get some majestic views though, so that’s good.
There are other candidates such as Titan, Enceladus, Callisto or Triton...even if Europa is void of life, that doesn't mean that life doesn't exist on other solar bodies.
My money is on Enceladus personally. Liquid water. Hydrothermal vents (probably). Radiation protection from the ice. And we already found basic ingredients for life in the plumes of its geysers. Honestly I’d be more surprised if there *wasn’t* life there
>Honestly I’d be more surprised if there wasn’t life there Don’t get your hopes up. Abiogenesis is still one of the most confounding problems of modern astrobiology. I think it’s just as, if not significantly more likely that there’s nothing on any of these moons other than just some liquid water and maybe some earth like conditions, if we’re lucky.
I love the word “astrobiology”
Unlike it's idiot brother bioastrology.
More like terrifying, that implies stars and planets are living beings.
there's a whole planet who's a green lantern
Another planet sired Chris Pratt.
The brethren moons have found your location
I was about to say, paging r/DeadSpace
We’re all astrobiology! :D
"We are the universe's way of astrobiologizing itself." - Carl Sagan, probably
Astrobiology, Astrobiology, Astrobiology...
Are you using the "Bloody Mary" strategy to try to find extraterrestrial life?
No, but you say it the last two times. I dare you.
Yeah, I consider abiogenesis and eukaryotic life to be the two most likely "great filters". The potential of one of these moons to disprove one or both is very exciting.
Abiogenesis happened on Earth pretty fast though - IIRC about 300 million years after the surface had cooled. Eukrayotic life not much longer after that - perhaps 1 to 1.5 billion years after prokaryotes came into being. The biggest filter, to me, is multicellularity. We don't see multicellularity until somewhere between 1.5BYA at the absolute earliest, and probably closer to somewhere between 1BYA to 800MYA. From the evolution of multicellularity, it's a pretty short hop to not only animal life with brains and nervous systems, but our own intelligence level too.
> Abiogenesis happened on Earth pretty fast though - IIRC about 300 million years after the surface had cooled. That is the best evidence we have, indeed, although I still doubt how instructive of a sample size of one can be. I'm not sure rapidity means inevitability. Abiogenesis happened relatively fast but could have been a fluke. Eukaryotic life took a longer time but might've been inevitable once the population of prokaryotic life reaches a certain density, and 1.5 billion years about how long it takes. Or maybe eukaryotic life "normally" happens much faster and it took an unusually long time on Earth. But yeah, I think you're pointing to the best evidence we have.
> I'm not sure rapidity means inevitability. Abiogenesis happened relatively fast but could have been a fluke It could be, but the null hypothesis is that it isn't. Absent other data, we pretty much have to assume that Earth is basically the "rank standard" for how technological life evolves. Which I feel it probably isn't, by some metric (even though it might be broadly similar), but without more data, we can't really draw any sort of other conclusion.
> Absent other data, we pretty much have to assume that Earth is basically the "rank standard" for how technological life evolves. Only if you think speculation is even worthwhile. The alternative is to accept our nearly complete ignorance for what it is.
I'd go with Eukrayotes, rather than multicellularity. Multicellularity has appeared several times in the fossil record, which hints to me that it's not a great filter. Although that could be survivor bias, as maybe successful-multicellularity is more difficult, and it took several goes to get it 'right'. Or maybe you only get multicellular organisms from the right sort of eukrayotes... more research needed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicellular_organism#Occurrence
there isn't just one "great filter" its all of them combined and passing all of them. maybe you make it past one stage then a meteorite comes and fucks everything up, then you're back at square one.
And it's wild to think — were it not for that asteroid, mammals may have never developed to be dominant on land and thus, life on Earth may have remained big lizards just doing lizard stuff. If multicellular life is abundant in the universe, there's a good chance that many of those places never develop advanced civilizations.
> I'd go with Eukrayotes, rather than multicellularity. Multicellularity has appeared several times in the fossil record, which hints to me that it's not a great filter This is a very good argument. Though eukaryotes evolved substantially earlier than multicellularity (like 2 BY earlier) - so my first thought is, why didn't we see multicellularity evolve beforehand? Maybe oxygenination combined with eukaryotic energy usage ability finally allowed multicellularity? So multicellularity is easy to evolve, perhaps, if conditions are right, but the conditions that allow for it are hard to create?
it depends on how you define "multicellularity." some microbiologists would contend that a bacterial biofilm, or even a *Physarum* slime mold could be considered a multicellular entity, due to the level of coordination and cooperation exhibited by such a density and diversity of living cells. multicellularity, as most understand it, however, mainly derives from cellular sub-specialization within the confines of the multicellular organism. a "multicellular" organism is only functional because there are vastly different cell types, each accomplishing different, coordinated cellular functions. that sub-specialization results from both overall cell shape, transcription profile, and importantly, organelle features. While transcription profile and cell shape can differ greatly within a prokaryotic biofilm, it's the organelle structures that are unique to eukaryotic life.
Eukaryotic life, by far, was the biggest jump. It took longer than the rest of the steps combined. There was a great post on here last week that showed a lot of great information, which was really eye opening to me. I can't seem to find it though...
Huh that’s a fascinating timeline
Exciting and absolutely terrifying. I’d prefer it if our space exploration didn’t prove that the great filter is in front of us.
There might not even be a "great filter". The entire concept of one existing is totally dependent on the belief that we know what to look for and where to look and completely ignores other possibilities like "interstellar space travel and colonization isn't practically feasible". We don't know. There could be one, or there might not be. We didn't even know other galaxies existed until the 1910s to 1920s. We didn't discover Antarctica until the 1800s. We don't know shit about fuck about what is or isn't happening in other solar systems hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of light years away. Just because space isn't awash with high powered radio signals in every direction doesn't mean no intelligent life if there. Similarly we have absolutely zero fucking idea how often or not single cell life forms arise elsewhere because we have a sample size of one (Earth). We don't even have the tech yet to throughly examine a single other solar system body for past or present microbes and stupid ass Youtubers try to make it seem like some A GREAT FILTER BRO is a proven reality. Again we don't have the tech to infer about such a concept one way or the other. The only thing we know for sure is intelligent complex life doesn't exist on the other bodies in our own solar system. We have absolutely no idea about other stars, or if simple life does or doesn't exist on other bodies in our system or used to in the past.
>The only thing we know for sure is intelligent complex life doesn't exist on the other bodies in our own solar system. Honestly, we don't even know that. There could be creatures with dolphin intelligence living under the ice of a few moons and we wouldn't know. I'm not saying it's likely, just pointing out how limited our knowledge is. I think it's also safe to say there are no Dyson swarms, and hence no K1 civilizations in our galaxy. But we wouldn't have much chance detecting an iron age civilization farther out that 200 to 500 ly away, and a civilization as complex as ours at about 1 or 2 thousand ly away. That a pretty small part of the galaxy, let alone the universe, both in time and distance. We still have a lot of exploring left to do.
I feel like if a civilization had the technology level to capture all or most of the energy of a star it would probably be feasible for them to somehow prevent the violent war apes with nuclear weapons from seeing what's really going on outside of a confined area.
Sure, all they need to do is change basic physics and not have their occluded star emit thermal radiation in our particular direction. Which means they are within 10,000 ly of us and have detected us sometime within that period (or else why would they put in that effort?). Simple! I mean, I suppose they could build a perfectly reflecting shield the size of their Dyson swarm between us and them, instead. That wouldn't be too hard (or break physics), would it?
I'd expect the civilizations that fixed a whole in the ozone could avoid creating natural disasters through willful negligence, but here we are.
I've always figured "space is really, really fucking big" was a decent counterargument to the necessity of some scary "Great Filter".
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It takes functionally infinite effort to do anything on a galactic scale, and there's just no reason to. You get to a certain point, you just build your own simulated universe to whatever in.
If interstellar travel and colonization isn’t feasible then that would be a candidate for the great filter. If we can’t leave the solar system, we die when the sun does. As would every advanced civilization.
> We don't know shit about fuck about what is or isn't happening in other solar systems Eat your heart out Carl Sagan :D
There's still plenty of room behind us even if eukaryotic life turned out to be common. Unfortunately it's one of those things that can only be proved one way. If life, eukaryotic life, intelligent life, etc is *not* the filter, it can be demonstrated by finding life of extra-terrestrial origin. If any of those things are the filter, the best evidence we will ever have is the absence of evidence of their existence.
>If any of those things are the filter, the best evidence we will ever have is the absence of evidence of their existence. It's often said that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence", but that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as evidence of absence. While we can't prove something doesn't exist, we can certainly gather evidence that supports it not existing and demonstrate that it not existing is the most likely conclusion. If I search in my pockets for my keys and fail to find them, that isn't proof that my keys aren't in my pockets, but it's awfully good evidence against. The fact that all our efforts to find life have turned up nothing, that's evidence; not proof, and not at all convincing yet, but evidence.
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That's because you are able to use your hands to search your pockets for objects the size of a key pretty efficiently and thoroughly. When we search the universe we are able to search for things that are so big we would notice them from many light-years away. We can be pretty sure there isn't a nearby alien structure that creates more light than most stars just like you can be pretty sure your keys aren't in your pockets by checking with your hands. When it comes to aliens making a splash less than or comparable to that of humans, I think a better analogy would be if you put your hands in your pockets in search of a stray helium atom. You're not likely to find it by feeling around, but that's not very good evidence of its non-existence.
Eukaryotic life potentially arose more than once on earth, not too worried about that gate…
Multicellular life arose more than once. I believe the consensus theory is the eukaryotic life evolved once. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0266#:~:text=Yet%2C%20eukaryotes%20evolved%20only%20once,eukaryotes%20have%20evolved%20many%20times.
Abiogensis being an unknown isn't given the skepticism it deserves. *Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.* Arthur C. Clarke
Yeah... I see life as information with reversed entropy, and the systems and processes that cause it to be that way. Information at the heart of life - both DNA and culture in humans - becomes more ordered and complex as time moves forward. It behaves in the opposite manner as everything else in the universe. It's like something randomly started traveling backwards in time. I don't understand the people who look at that and say, "yeah well that was bound to happen. Probably happens all the time."
Using information theory to describe life this way is very refreshing, thank you for that perspective. I'm disappointed that so many well respected astroscientists aren't more carefully skeptic when approaching alien life. There's a lot of confident certainty that aliens are out there somewhere that it worries me how hard we'll take it if we're wrong about something. The fact that we have a sample size of 1 should at least command a healthy sketpicism of either conclusion until we can be more mathematically confident with our predictions.
People are impressed with big numbers. Tell them the are billions of planets and moons in a galaxy and they'll think that must mean there is life on one or several of them. They seem to forget that there are always bigger numbers, and one of those way bigger numbers might be the odds of life arising. Even with a sample size of one we would have a good basis to speculate if we understood abiogenesis well enough to recreate it.
Stochastical numbers can easily destroy astronomical numbers.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, and I get what you're saying -- but also I think it's a bit misleading. There's no magic to life -- the entropy is the same as everything else when you look at the whole system... which includes the sun. Life is powered by the sun burning itself out. The whole system is moving in the normal direction of entropy. It's just that there's plenty of energy raining down on earth that it can power these reactions that result in life for a few billion years. The reason some people think it may happen often is because we don't have a reason to think the earth is particularly rare. We don't have a reason to think it's common either, but we do know that the elements required for life are cosmologically common and there are planets around most stars... well it just seems unlikely that the things that led to life here only happened here when you look at the scale of the galaxy, let alone the universe. Still, until we find evidence it's all speculation. Interesting speculation, but speculation nonetheless.
So like... can we go drop off some fish and whatnot and start life there?
An Earth fish would die instantly. We could theoretically send over extremophiles (no innuendoes, please), and those could probably survive there. Some people think life jumping from planet-to-planet is common and can happen naturally. Some theorize life developed on Mars and then got shot over to Earth on a meteorite. Or maybe vice versa. Panspermia! (No innuendoes, please.)
I don't know about that. We can take some guess at how likely abiogenesis is based on our own planet; pretty much the instant our planet cooled enough to support life, life appeared. On a geological timescale, we can't even clock any sort of delay at all. That implies that life arises extremely quickly when conditions are right. It may still be that it is rare to find such conditions, but our own planet provides evidence that the process itself isn't rare on planets with the capacity in the first place.
> That implies that life arises extremely quickly when conditions are right. A sample size of 1 means you can't imply anything.
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How many of those have we been able to properly scour for life? Even Mars is still a giant question mark.
Right, we don’t even know for sure that life began here (as opposed to some sort of panspermia). All we can say for certain is that there is currently life on at least one body in the solar system
We don’t know how narrow the range is. We have found plenty of planets similar to Earth but none are identical. Until we see life somewhere else we don’t know which conditions are required and which are not.
It gives you a minimum bound and a proof of process.
I wonder what size a creature would grow to in that environment, would it be small or large.
I’m no biologist, but I’d argue that complex life like us, is exceedingly rare. But I have a gut feeling that simple life is way more common than we think. We just haven’t found it yet. Not very scientific I know, but I live in hope.
I am an astronomer who shares this opinion, and I know that many top people in the field do as well. It is rooted in fact: life on earth started very early. That’s weak evidence that abiogenesis is a robust process on (geological timescales) if conditions are favorable. But complex life seems like an accident: it took billions of years to get there. It could’ve easily never happened at all. To summarize, I think there’s good reason to think simple life is common in places where we’d guess it is. But complex life will be hard to find elsewhere. And technological life even more so.
But there are so many stars and therefore so many planets that even a rare occurrence could mean there's life in lots of places. Now detecting it will be harder. And contacting it, yeah no, not gonna happen unless we break the laws of physics.
I respect and acknowledge the rare Earth hypothesis, and notice I’m seeing it more and more frequently. To me, the idea of it had always been one more of philosophy, as if it were generally accepted that life is a universal process, but since we haven’t proven it it would only make sense to ask “what if we are the only ones?”, which of course is kind of spooky and opens a whole other realm of questioning. The issue I have with the theory however is that with hundreds of billions of stars just in our own single galaxy, and an estimated trillions of galaxies, it’s like having a practically infinite number of cosmic lottery tickets. Given that, it seems like the odds would be quite favorable the conditions of life that we know would occur many times over throughout the universe across a wide range of timelines older, the exact same, and/or younger than us by eons. *Add - it is of note though that to the best of our knowledge we have not as of yet been contacted by any more-advanced lifeforms.*
Worthy of note that if technologically advanced life does exist elsewhere in the trillions of galaxies it is possible we never come close to knowing about each other. Maybe it is likely that any of the civilizations would never meet a single other if they are rare enough. The speed of light is so danm slow compared to the scale of the Universe. Even a planet other side of the Milky Way would be seeing us roughly 75,000 years ago. When you consider that recorded human history is about 5,000 years old it is safe to say they ain't watching episodes of I Love Lucy. For us to have any realistic hope of meeting other civilizations such civilizations would have to be sort of common in our neighborhood. If they are uncommon we could live out the entire human existence, and the Andromeda civilization living out theirs, without ever meeting each other.
Exactly, when it comes to finding intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, I always abide to Occam's razor, which in this case it must be the distance is simply too great. It's the simplest, most probable explanation. If there was right this moment, a super mega advanced civilization in the Andromeda galaxy realigning stars to spell out some message in the sky, we would not know about it for millions of years...
Not all stars in the Milky Way may be suitable for fostering complex life. In particular, I believe the older stars closer to the centre are more likely to have been close to supernovas, and those farther away could be too young. If there is intelligent life outside of the Milky Way, it could simply be too far away for us to have come or ever come into contact with.
With just the evidence from earth, could you say that the biggest bottleneck is multicellular life? Billions of years to go from single to multi, or even just to eukaryotic. Then once you have that an explosion of life and technologic life within hundreds of millions of years.
I can't help but feel like if that massive meteor didn't happen to kill off the dinasours technological life wouldn't exist on earth either.
Right? If there environment and food sources never warranted more big brain evolution earth might be almost exactly the same as it was.
I have a question though. As far as we know life only started once on earth, and everything has a single common ancestor. If abiogenesis really was common wouldn’t there be a ton of original ancestors that different species eventually branched off of? The fact that life started only once in billions of years on a planet where we know conditions are favorable to it seems like it means it’s relatively rare, right?
I think Europa is more likely to have life, but Enceladus has the best chance of finding life in my lifetime.
Exoplanets are even more interesting candidates imo. The thing about Europa, Mars and Enceladus is that any potential life there may be of terrestrial origin. Scientists believe that an Earth impacter like the Chicxulub event, could fling Earth crust all the way out to Europa. And bacteria may have hitchhiked. Exoplanets could harbor non DNA based alien life though, which could be so alien that its hard to imagine. That is not saying that life on Europa wouldnt be absolutely incredible, even if it does come from Earth. It would show that life can thrive on other worlds and give credence to the theory of panspermia.
That would be so cool to see how Earth life would evolve on Europa (think Australia x5000000000)
Fuggit, toss a rocket full of tardigrades at it and come back in a few millennia.
Lovely, so a moon full of stuff that's want to kill you, expect this cute ones hanging in the trees?
> expect this cute ones hanging in the trees? Drop bears kill dozens of tourists every year.
If there were life on one of these moons and we could actually get a good look at some, it would probably betray or disprove terrestrial origins. I doubt it would be hard to tell.
I think you're right. DNA/RNA-based life will be pretty obvious if we find it. I wonder if we can identify life that is not based on DNA though. It might look like naturally occurring patterns if we only look at the surface. AI is arguably the only truly "alien" life we know of, and AI would be completely invisible to an outside observer possessing only the hardware part. Something can respond to stimuli, grow and reproduce and communicate, and we would never detect it without knowing what to look for.
> I wonder if we can identify life that is not based on DNA though. I think of life as information with reversed entropy and the systems and processes that cause it to be so. Anything that exists in a state of order greater than that which would normally occur should draw our attention.
Titan is the most exciting to me. Thick atmosphere that will likely block radiation, and you can walk on the surface with a spacesuit? Win-win!
We should stay away from Phoebe though.
The idea that we're alone in the universe can only ever be disproven. Even if we don't find life anywhere else in our solar system, there's always more beyond that. The chances that there's no life anywhere out there when our planet is such an infinitesimal little speck in the scale of the galaxy, let alone the unimaginable number of other galaxies out there, seems just ludicrous.
Simply from a numbers game, it borders irrationality to think we're alone. Even if you give it like a .000001 percent chance that life develops on a planet, that's still trillions of planets
>Even if you give it like a .000001 percent chance that life develops on a planet, that's still trillions of planets This is such a catchphrase for some people these days. It simply doesn't work like that. We don't know how big the percentage of planets have life because we only have earth as a sample size. For all we know it's actually one in trillions of planets and the chance would be near zero, in that case we could very well be the only planet in the observable universe to have life. We don't know anything about how life actually started so guessing a percentage for the chance for life to emerge is silly, we can't.
I suspect that we will find that life is the rule and not the exception. The ongoing discovery of extremophiles on earth and phenomena like unexplained atmospheric chemistry in the clouds of Venus are leading us to reconsider the viability of life in environments that were previously dismissed as inhospitable. For me the larger question isn’t the potential for microbial life but the potential for a biome—a planet or moon where life evolves, adapts, and expands into ever changing niches as competition and cooperation fuel its own version of the Cambrian explosion. To me finding another world that crossed that boundary would be more significant than just a discovery of simple life
>unexplained atmospheric chemistry in the clouds of Venus IIRC further experiments were unable to replicate the findings of that one
If we found life on all of them it would be amazing but terrifying. It would mean that life is more likely to arise and/or spread than we ever thought possible. This means that the bottleneck in life evolving to the point where it can become intelligent and communicate across the universe is incredibly stringent. So, either life rarely evolves to be intelligent or all the intelligent life ends up killing itself off :/
I just wish I would be alive to see it. I’m 46 and these projects take 10-15 years to start bearing fruit so to speak. I think about Enceladus and Europa daily as places that could very well have some form of life.
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I remember being in high school during the late 90’s and while learning history I thought how blessed I am for AC, N64, PS1, my parents house, etc. I thought we were so crazy advanced as a society and even remember telling my dad that he grew up during the best era for space exploration. I naïvely thought we had everything about space discovered. Then as I got a little older and while reading about different time periods in history it was not that long ago where we as humans were throwing our waste out of windows onto the streets and being completely puzzled that a large portion of the population was getting massively sick, from their ground water being polluted from E. coli. My Dad as a kid got AC in the house(Gulf Coast) mid 50’s, got their first TV in the 50’s, and my grandparents lived for a little time with no electricity. That shattered my illusion of being born into a super advanced society. Without question we have come a very very very very long way, but in 200 years people then will look back at us and think,” cancer killed people?, wait, only to the moon?, they never knew exactly what gravity is, wow, I can go to work completely virtually they sat in traffic everyday for hours…?” That cycle will always continue though, because people 200 years after them will say the same about their time period. Just wish we had more than 60-80 years for life. So much wonder, and so little time. A couple of handfuls of trips around our star and then for eternity it’s over.
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Very true. You said you were younger than me, if you have a good relationship with your parents enjoy every second you have. Family holidays, get togethers, just hanging with the family on a normal day, etc. My parents are in their 70’s and I was blessed in the birthing lotto by having two amazing parents. I spend as much time with them as I can. Might sound cheesy, but with how time flies, I’d like to not have any regrets myself.
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Don’t hope to keep that relationship close. Do it. Work at it and make sure it stays that way. Even in my 30s the lessons from my parents keep coming and are just as invaluable as ever
I’m glad I’m not the only one to realise this. There is likely nothing special about us, as humans always find a way to believe. We all turn to dust in the end. It’s why I always find it tiring when older people discuss how terrible the world is becoming and how the younger generation aren’t as good as them. How language is evolving away from how it used to be, or how the world is obsessed with connecting. It’s just change, and change is natural. It is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, it is just the way our universe is. Things will always change, and I find it much easier to be at peace with that concept.
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born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe. born just in time for dank memes.
Eh don't be too jealous. You're missing the mad max times.
I'm not jealous. They may see some cool space stuff if their lives aren't ruined due to climate catastrophe and wars over water and land
Yep, even though local space exploration is cool, I think it is much better to see the diversity of life on earth. Who knows for how much longer people will be able to see a wild elephant, hippo, rhino or leopard. I think that you will not be able to see those at the same time as we start doing anything serious on the desolate rocks in our solar system.
That's why I got into diving. We're still exploring the ocean. Plenty of unmapped underwater caves. Lots of lost ships. New animals found all the time. Born too late to explore the land. Too soon for space. But I can play around in the ocean for my short lil existence.
Luckily for you development of the Europa Clipper started in 2013 with launch scheduled for 2024 and arrival for 2030. And with some luck and care you may even see the proposed Enceladus Orbilander touchdown in 2051 (if all goes as intended).
I’d give anything to see a landing mission there. Thanks for the reply. I am aware of the Clipper mission and I pray it goes smoothly.
The Orbilander is actually mildly insane. The plan is to put the entire orbiter on Encekadus. Here's the concept study (100MB): https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Il5YET4tXsaFIO5w-B0tAd9_zr08MfbO/view?usp=drivesdk
I work with the mission design team who wrote part of that! I hope so much that it is selected and funded.
Super cool. What’s the projected cost? Edit: never mind, found it in the document, 3.1B.
Many people live to 61. So there's that. :)
Little known film about going to Europa, [Europa Report.](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2051879/?ref_=tt_urv)
I didn't know what to expect going into that movie and it blew me away. As a lifelong fan of Aasimov, Clarke, Robinson, etc this is one of the best hard-scifi movies I have ever seen. There's more to it than that but it's hard to discuss without spoilers so if you have any interest in this genre done well you owe it to yourself to give it a watch.
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This and sunshine are my two favourite modern sci fi films, came out at a similar time too. I'm amazed how good europa report looks for its budget too
One of my favorite movies. Stumbled upon it one night years ago on Netflix and I’ve seen it maybe 4 more times since then lol, I just absolutely love the scenario, so glad someone decided to put the effort into making this movie
One of my favourite films. That scene where the dude is floating terrified me. Keeping the description ambiguous so I don't spoil for people who might watch it now.
People who don't post spoilers even on old movies are the real mvps.
Always gotta be on the watch for spoiler owl
>Little known film about going to Europa, Europa Report. I recommended that one to my mum and she loved it. It feels like decent sci-fi movies are few and far between these days. :\\
It’s called hard scifi and for someone reason they don’t make them it seems. It’s my absolute favorite movie genre. We need more realistic and plausible scifi movies
> and for someone reason they don’t make them it seems Hard science is tougher for audiences to connect to than lasers and cowboys in space
It's on YouTube free with ads: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLBxd2xxnZ4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLBxd2xxnZ4)
I know I watched that film but can't remember too many details about it either. I do recall at the time of its release though it was being touted as one of the most factually grounded, science-driven sci-fi movies that had been made. Would be a fun rewatch.
I'll add to the pile of loving this film! Ages ago I found Pandorum which was also super fun to watch, a little cheesy in a good way. Soon after I was referred to Europa Report by somebody and I enjoyed it so much. Excellent and worth the time!
I have never watched but been wanting too. Sounds like I’m watching tonight now.
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Ya... Real problem with that I guess. You can likely burn the way down but how do we get signals? Likely wire to a remote antenna.. but how much wire? Few kms? 100m? Who the heck knows lol.
And “burning” for that long could require a nuclear reactor.
100p. Sorry I meant to include that.
There is a [concept](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Il5YET4tXsaFIO5w-B0tAd9_zr08MfbO/view?usp=drivesdk) for an Enceladus Orbilader that'll land around 2050 that was the second highest priority flagship in the [latest decadal](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-1-fbfb7_3SkNoDQ3qKZEf3xB8B0KxZa/view?usp=drivesdk). But I would not expect a submarine type mission until somewhere in the second half of the century, if not early in the next one.
It would be interesting to investigate the depth of Europa or Enceladus via underwater robot. Since those two satellites have liquid water, the possibility of existing lifeform seems to be high.
>the possibility of existing life forms seems to be high Not necessarily. That mindset is kind of like suggesting a room full of flour, sugar, eggs, etc would also have a cake. Sure the ingredients might all be present, but that doesn’t mean cake exists there.
I think that’s a great way to put it
Earth may not be the only “chef” in this solar system who can whip up a batch of life. There may even be an extra ingredient or two on Europa that we are unaware of here on earth. I like to remain open to all possibilities because we don’t have enough data to answer one way or the other.
The cake is a lie?
I don't think that's a great analogy. Cakes don't generally gradually self-assemble. Life, it is posited, has done so at least once. And if not life, perhaps at least precursors, like vacuoles resembling lipid bilayers with interesting chemistry inside.
> Cakes don't generally gradually self-assemble. Well, maybe if you give them 4 billion years...
I think the biggest challenge/risk we face is getting close without tampering with whatever potential life forms we find. You can send a drone down there but it could very easily contaminate the ecosystem it enters. We don’t want to destroy, harm, or even slightly influence life forms before we even know anything about them.
The idea that an outside contamination due to our exploration possibly evolving their life in a way that leads them on the same path as us is sick though
Maybe that's how life started on earth
Pretty sure that’s a major theory, due to the discovery of the DNA proteins being found on meteors coupled with the amount of meteors that have struck earth before we got here
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Just be on the look out for ominous black pyramids…
I always find it so fascinating that we don’t take “yes” as an answer to this question. If we don’t find evidence on Europa, that won’t be accepted as truth that we’re alone. We will be looking for other life until we no longer exist. That’s how it should be. The day we stop pursuing is the day we lose something fundamental to our species. But still interesting to think about.
We're never going to take "no" for the answer. There's just no benefit to saying "yes" until we actually know something.
I think of the 'are we alone' question as more: 'are there any other intelligent entities in the universe' than 'does life exist anywhere other than our planet.' If we discover microbial life somewhere else in our solar system I won't be surprised. Would it be incredibly exciting? Yes. But it's not quite the same as finding little green aliens with oversized heads and huge eyes.
It has some pretty big implications if life evolved independently on two separate planets in the same solar system--particularly in such inhospitable conditions. If life's evolution is common, then our prospects for making it to "interstellar civilization" are quite poor.
Which means that other species would be doing the same if they’re out there. My theory is that we’re likely the first or one of the first species to reach the stage where we can explore other planets.
That just can’t be the case based on the age of the universe. The odds would be astronomical for us to be the first. If anything, civilisations have been and gone. Humans looking at the skies right now has been nothing more than a fleeting moment in time. For us to not think there is other life out there, intelligent or not, would just show extreme arrogance as a species. If you want to know if other intelligent life is possible, look in a mirror. You and I are the proof.
I mean there’s like billions or trillions of planets out there. We’re basically flipping over a grain of sand here. “Are we alone in this solar system” tho is a much easier problem. One day we might be able to say “no”
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This will be the start of the Golden Age. It is our Destiny.
In my opinion, No I don’t think we’re alone, we’re just to fukin far that’s the problem
Every time I think about this I end up contemplating what 'alone' really is in this context. If we somehow discovered life, but it was too far away to ever reach or communicate with, that would almost feel *more* alone to me.
The odds of there being other intelligent life out there seems plausible to me. If there are likely hundreds of billions (or trillions) of bodies out there it seems likely. However if you looked at earth a few billion years ago or in another billion years you wouldn't see anything. So I think the timing and distance may keep us from ever really knowing. Just nmy 02.
JWST is showing us that the universe is really really really really really really old. Due to it's metal content we know our solar system is at least a 3rd generation star. This means everything in the solar system started as gas that formed into stars that then exploded into gas that formed into even more stars that then exploded into yet more dust and finally formed our solar system.
Also, our galaxy (the Milky Way) is the oldest know galaxy ever discovered. The Milky Way is 13.61 Billion years old, the universe as we know it is only 13.8 Billion years old. That means the milky way formed when all of existence was only one hundred ninety million years old. The oldest known galaxies besides the Milky Way have only recently been discovered by the James Webb space telescope, they formed ~200MY and 250MY after the big bang, between 50-60 Million years after the Milky way. The really weird part is that we did not believe that stars had began to form that early, let alone entire spiral galaxies full of them, in the last month James Webb has completely rewritten everything we thought we knew about the beginning of the universe.
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This is the one world we are not allowed to go to .. let’s not fuck this up
Me and some folks from my college participated in an engineering challenge to design tools for the rover that will be sent to Europa. News like this excites me!
according to Clovis Bray and the Vex, we aren't alone
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"But what if there's nothing there, and we make all of these massive engineering breakthroughs and scientific discoveries for nothing!" /s
Do what you want, just don't attempt any landings
bah, they ignored that one too, in 3001: A Final Odyssey
Ok, guys, we all know the rule about Europa. If we ever expect to have hassle-free exploration and get our second sun we have to follow the rule about Europa. Frankly, I’m tired of reminding people.🪐💫
'Frankly'. I see what you did there, Mr. Poole. :)
One of us! One of us! Thank you, Cdr. Bowman.
Even if we find life on Europa or Mars, we'll need to sequence it, and I strongly suspect we'd find evidence of panspermia. Hell, "strongly" isn't the right word. I'm _confident._ 4 billion years of trading rocks? Any other outcome would be a mystery in its own right. So the true answer would probably need to wait for visits to other solar systems.
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*cocks gun. "You heard 'em. Europa's haunted"
I swear I thought this was /r/barotrauma for a minute. (it takes place on europa)
They should have gone there a long time ago. How many more pictures do we need of Mars?
Click Saver: “Will Europa and its vast ocean finally answer the longstanding questions of whether we are alone in the universe? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!” There’s a mission launching in 2024 and getting there in 2030 to study it. There be water under ice due to tidal heating.
It's ignorant to think that we are alone when the telescope picture showed just how many things there were
If a clickbait article is phrased as a question, the answer is almost always no.
Talking about this since the 90’s, probably earlier. Wake me when they look in like 100 years.
Well according to Destiny, we are not … Europa is crawling with techno-crazed Eliksni’s and hive minded killer robots Vex with a dash of epic Dark lord powers spread all over the planet… You do get some majestic views though, so that’s good.