[HN Gopher] NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Euro...
___________________________________________________________________
NASA spacecraft to probe possibility of life in Europa's salty
ocean
Author : pseudolus
Score : 340 points
Date : 2024-09-20 12:02 UTC (5 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| prevailrob wrote:
| All these worlds are yours - except Europa
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| Attempt no landing there.
|
| > Clipper is a pricey gamble. Even though it was scaled back
| from a design that included a lander
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > Attempt no landing there.
|
| And what did folks try and do in the sequel? Attempt to do a
| s*t-ton of moon landings!! Best commentary on the nature of
| humanity in any work of fiction since the Bible.
| pcardoso wrote:
| I think this message was sent after the landings happened
| and after Jupiter's ignition.
|
| When they were stranded in Europa it was still an icy moon.
|
| For those wondering, this is from 2010, the sequel
| book/movie to 2001 a Space Odyssey.
| pavlov wrote:
| Clarke's third book "2061" describes the attempts to land
| on Europa despite the forbidding alien message.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Mea culpa, you are right! I forgot about that.
| xp84 wrote:
| I remember finding this series greatly engrossing,
| including 2061 and 3001, when I read them at age 12 or
| so. I wonder now if I should attempt re-reading. My only
| worry is that it'll take me until the year 2061 at the
| amount of free time I have today :(
| nihzm wrote:
| > please use the original title, unless it is misleading or
| linkbait; don't editorialize.
|
| IMO the title of the post should be "Ice Skater"
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| MaxGripe wrote:
| Just in case, let's check if one of Jupiter's moons, packed with
| salt and freezing near absolute zero, happens to have life.
| Sounds like a great way to spend public money.
| MaxGripe wrote:
| "What an ignorant fool! There could totally be life there!"
| selectnull wrote:
| "near absolute zero" is not nearly correct. The temperature of
| Europa ocean is believed to be between 0 and -4 degrees
| Celsius.
| Aaron2222 wrote:
| From Wikipedia[0]:
|
| "The scientific consensus is that a layer of liquid water
| exists beneath Europa's surface, and that heat from tidal
| flexing allows the subsurface ocean to remain liquid."
|
| Liquid water is hardly "freezing near absolute zero".
|
| [0]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_(moon)#Subsurface_ocean
| gilleain wrote:
| Why would salt be a problem? There are single celled organisms
| known as halophiles that survive extreme salt. Do you know what
| range of concentrations are reasonable for life, or which salts
| might be present on Europa?
| 9dev wrote:
| Just one aircraft carrier less, and NASA can send probes to
| most of Jupiter's moons and still have money left for
| marketing...
| hoseja wrote:
| Yeah but it won't be NASA sending them but CNSA.
| protomolecule wrote:
| Which is all the same for humanity.
| firtoz wrote:
| > "We're not a life search mission. We're a habitability
| mission," says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper's project scientist
| at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the
| mission. But even Pappalardo, a cautious scientist who is
| constitutionally averse to hyperbole, says finding a hint of
| life is "not out of the question."
| holoduke wrote:
| What more important can we human beings do than exploring space
| and improve our tech?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What more important can we human beings do than exploring
| space and improve our tech?_
|
| This is a value statement. Every answer from heroin to
| petting my cat is technically a valid answer.
|
| OP's question is written obnoxiously. But it raises a valid
| point: why should we do these things, and why should it
| matter to people who don't find it inherently valuable?
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| I wouldn't put it that way, but I'd rather space exploration
| money focus on colonization and improving life on earth. For
| example, asteroid mining has massive potential. What if rare
| metals suddenly were no longer rare? What could we make? What
| if we had outposts on other planets? How might that change
| perspectives and culture on earth? How might R&D to colonize
| Mars make life on Earth more resilient and sustainable?
|
| Searching for life elsewhere seems so empty and unsatisfying.
| Almost like a religious quest for enlightenment or something.
| If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
| selectnull wrote:
| > Searching for life elsewhere seems so empty and
| unsatisfying.
|
| To me, finding any extra terrestrial life, or even just a
| fossil of past life, would be the most exciting find in the
| history.
| dotancohen wrote:
| It would answer humanity's longest open philosophical
| question. The religious and social consequences would
| likely change the course of human history.
|
| Imagine humans no longer fighting each other, but rather
| working together towards a goal. I can think of nothing
| that would catalyze such a change more than the discovery
| of extra terrestrial life. Even climate change isn't doing
| it.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| How do you think the discovery of extraterrestrial life
| would do that? I think most people would say "that's
| neat" and continue living their life unchanged.
| XorNot wrote:
| Yes, I guess new ideas have never contributed to any
| change in social dynamics ever. That's the course of
| history you know: the social psychology and accepted
| wisdom is exactly as it is now, unchanged from Roman
| times because no new thinking based on discovery or
| philosophy ever led to a shift in the structure and
| beliefs of society.
| selectnull wrote:
| Yeah... I would go that far. Average human's life
| wouldn't change in short period. But on a larger scale of
| time, it could propel us to explore the universe.
| WoogieWoogie wrote:
| There could be immediate peace on Earth between all
| mankind once there is extra-terrestrial life to hate or
| fear instead.
| selectnull wrote:
| We are perfectly capable of hating them and ourselves at
| the same time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _asteroid mining has massive potential_
|
| Europa Clipper "is the largest spacecraft NASA has ever
| developed for a planetary mission" [1]. If you want to mine
| asteroids, learning to send big spacecraft to the far end of
| the asteroid belt seems like a no brainer.
|
| > _If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?_
|
| Depends on what we find. Think about the density of medical
| knowledge we extract from the Amazon basin every year. New
| biochemistries could be game changing in ways we can't
| predict. (We have enough trouble predicting how _known_
| organic chemistries behave. It is overwhelmingly likely, if
| alien biochemistries exist, that they show us new science.)
|
| If it's similar to terrestrial biochemistry, on the other
| hand, that suggests our bodies might do better
| extraterrestrially than we've assumed. That, in turn, could
| catalyse the investment and support needed to mobilise a
| multi-generational effort towards colonising space. (Their
| morphology could also give us hints on how to survive in that
| environment. Biomimicry on a whole new level.)
|
| [1] https://europa.nasa.gov/mission/about/
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > If we found a fossil snail on another planet, then what?
|
| There'd be a massive jump in the likelihood of finding a
| living snail.
| A_non_e-moose wrote:
| > There'd be a massive jump in the likelihood of finding a
| living snail.
|
| And there would be an ever bigger jump in the likelihood of
| some billionaire being the first to eat extraterrestrial
| escargot.
| MattPalmer1086 wrote:
| We are brought into existence from dust, and marvel at the
| creation we find ourselves in. It looks like we're the only
| living things in this vast cosmos, how strange.
|
| But sure, we could just focus all our attention on increasing
| our industrial capacity and expansion. Although that also
| seems so empty and unsatisfying to me.
| wheatgreaser wrote:
| nasa's budget is miniscule compared to the funds allocated to
| the military
| rvnx wrote:
| They complete each other, first step is to explore other
| planets, then send the military to protect it and take the
| resources there before other nations.
| space_oddity wrote:
| It might seem like a long shot, but exploring moons like Europa
| isn't just about finding life... It's about expanding our
| understanding of life's potential across the universe
| scoofy wrote:
| Finally... I've been waiting for this almost my entire adult
| life.
|
| Liquid _oceans_ beneath the surface.
|
| A brownish-red smattering of color despite the solid ice on the
| surface... maybe it's irradiated salt or magnesium sulfate, but
| it's an awful odd color for ice.
|
| We need to send a probe to Europa, like yesterday, and we need to
| send one that can get below the ice and look around.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > We need to send a probe to Europa, like yesterday, and we
| need to send one that can get below the ice and look around.
|
| IMO, "need" is a strong word here and if I thought that this is
| something we needed to do I would re-examine my priorities. We
| need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war machine,
| we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I think we _need_ to do all of it.
|
| Explore space together or in competition, instead of war.
|
| And climate change is a concern for everyone.
| arethuza wrote:
| Worth noting that the ESA Juice mission will be at Jupiter
| at the same time as Clipper and the teams are already
| working together:
|
| https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice
| /...
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| We cannot do all of it. The money and the manpower does not
| exist to do all of it.
|
| We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in
| the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities.
| You would not spend your time trying to find out if there
| is a form of life 20 feet below you.
|
| Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not
| have these basics.
| lukan wrote:
| "Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? "
|
| Often enough. Quite succesful, even though I brought most
| basic supplies with me. So I know about basic needs.
|
| "Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not
| have these basics."
|
| And there is a possibility, that this always will be the
| case. And I would not wait to find out and stop with all
| general progress till then.
|
| My compassion is with humanity as its whole, not with
| every single human. I fear, I have not limitless
| compassion and I don't see, how we can stop all wars just
| like that(the main reason for famine today - can you stop
| the Gaza war for instance?), but I see how little effort
| can be spend to finance such an interesting mission.
|
| Also, space exploration is a tool to bring humanity
| together.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| > The money and the manpower does not exist to do all of
| it.
|
| No, they both exist. Motivation by your legislator is
| what doesn't exist. There's a reason some departments get
| almost everything they ask for and others get almost
| nothing: they know how to grease the political machine.
| That doesn't mean we should fight over scraps for science
| and social programs, it means you need to acknowledge
| that there's a game that needs playing. And yeah, it
| feels real bad that there are lives at stake playing that
| game, but that's the fault of capitalism, not science.
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| The money does exist, and manpower isn't a problem
| considering how many people this planet has. The problem
| is the small monority that has most of the money, and
| doesn't like to pay their fair share of taxes.
|
| "As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires
| collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half
| of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion
| respectively). The top 1% held a total of $43.45
| trillion."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Un
| ite...
| XorNot wrote:
| The US spends more per capita on healthcare, then similar
| first world nations spend providing public healthcare to
| all their citizens.[1]
|
| The US has the worst infant mortality, and maternal
| mortality rates, of any first world nation.[2]
|
| Just think of it: with the highest spend of GDP _per
| citizen_ , and getting so much less you're the butt of
| every other country's jokes about healthcare systems.
|
| "Lack of money" has so little to do with the conditions
| in the US, it's essentially negligence to think it's the
| problem. The US doesn't _want_ to fix any of the problems
| you list: it easily could, with the resources it has
| today.
|
| [1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-
| briefs/2...
|
| [2] https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-
| maternal-mor...
| jajko wrote:
| Exactly, mankind has potentially amazing capacity to move
| into star working trekkish utopia within 1 century (not
| meaning warp fantasy but how society and individuals in it
| work). But so many stars would have to align, starting with
| dropping most religions and killing on spot most dictators
| that it won't happen.
|
| But we should aim high, higher than we think our potential
| is, to actually get somewhere.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| How about if we aim our compassion higher?
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Aiming higher than the desire for all people to live in
| harmony with each other, with the freedom to pursue their
| needs and interests at the top of Maslow's pyramid
| without fear? Aiming higher than desiring peace for all
| mankind, where no one wants for anything, and those that
| are still struggling regardless receive help and
| compassion from their fellow humans? That seems like a
| tall order.
| jajko wrote:
| How do you force compassion on people? Religions tried
| for millennia and failed miserably, despite it being
| consistently among top rules in all of them. If something
| that cuts so deep can't win on its own 'just because I
| say so', I'd say lets move towards rationality, progress
| and smartness, with right eyes there lies tons of
| compassion too.
| selcuka wrote:
| > We need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war
| machine, we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change.
|
| Sure thing. We don't have to do them in a specific order,
| there are enough resources to tackle them all at the same
| time. A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't
| affect others, but at least someone is doing something about
| one of those projects.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in
| the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities.
|
| > A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't affect
| others,
|
| $5 billion would go a long way to providing shelter, water,
| fire, and food for the homeless in the United States.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| It's 0.1% of the annual US revenue spread out over many
| years. So probably more like 0.01% per year. Picking on
| this one project, which is good science, is silly.
| desdenova wrote:
| It's also only a little more than what Microsoft paid for
| Minecraft.
|
| Priorities.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| that's comparing shared money versus somebody else's
| money.
| fastball wrote:
| San Francisco spends that much on homelessness in a few
| years and doesn't make a dent. The problem is not money.
| FredPret wrote:
| Maybe the problem is not _enough_ space exploration.
| People need to be inspired. To live for a larger purpose
| ttoinou wrote:
| Money won't solve that problem. Or it would have been
| solved before
| Gooblebrai wrote:
| You are falling into a false dichotomy of having to
| choose between one thing or the other. Dumping more money
| into one problem doesn't necessarily help solve it
| better. Analogous to adding more members to a team so
| more people can focus into the problem.
| dools wrote:
| > Dumping more money into one problem doesn't necessarily
| help solve it better
|
| I agree this is a false dichotomy, but also pretty sure
| dumping money into building houses and hiring every
| unemployed person at a socially inclusive minimum wage
| would eliminate both housing and unemployment.
|
| But I also think we have enough resources to both conduct
| space exploration, house and feed everyone. We can
| eliminate involuntary unemployment with a couple of
| keystrokes.
|
| The sum total of all of this would be to stimulate the
| type of innovation required to transition to a zero
| carbon emissions economy.
| jwells89 wrote:
| > I agree this is a false dichotomy, but also pretty sure
| dumping money into building houses and hiring every
| unemployed person at a socially inclusive minimum wage
| would eliminate both housing and unemployment.
|
| It's one of those things where the details of the
| implementation are critical. In the US specifically,
| large amounts of money have already been put towards
| these problems to little effect.
|
| To be clear, I staunchly support spending money on these
| things; clearly, they're dire needs that should be
| addressed, but if something isn't done to increase
| effectiveness and hold those responsible for the spending
| accountable, increasing spending is unlikely to move the
| needle.
|
| Additionally, even if the goal were to reallocate funds,
| space programs aren't really the best place to look. The
| pile of cash that would be yielded by "just" cutting fat
| in the US military apparatus would likely eclipse that of
| shutting down NASA altogether.
| vel0city wrote:
| It seems like so many people feel that $5 billion just
| _evaporates_ after the government spends it. The
| government spent it, it 's gone. Poof.
|
| No. That $5B paid lots of people directly in their
| salaries, which then got spent in their local economies
| which then in turn went to construction workers building
| houses for those employees, the grocers selling the food
| those people eat, etc. It also went to go buy lots of
| actual raw materials, which once again employed lots of
| people and spurred those industries and all the secondary
| and tertiary spending that happens and what not.
|
| So in a way, that government spending on science _is_
| investing in those towns. And ultimately does lead
| towards more people being able to afford a home, put
| groceries on the table, etc.
|
| Growing up surrounded by NASA in Clear Lake it was quite
| obvious to me how important government spending was to
| the local economy, and how negatively it would affect
| people if the government decided it wouldn't be worth it
| to fund it anymore.
|
| How many blue-collar construction workers will do better
| when NASA gets funding to upgrade their 1960's
| facilities? Won't it help them afford housing? Won't it
| help ensure their kids don't go hungry?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Simply spending money is not an investment. An investment
| is something that provides positive return over time. It
| is tied to net positive productivity and economic
| exports.
|
| Creating a dependent local economy or industry that
| consumes more than it produces is not an investment, it
| is welfare.
|
| While government can make investments, not all spending
| is an investment any more than all the purchases I make
| are investments.
| vel0city wrote:
| Some percentage of that spending does turn into actual
| economic investments in those local towns. Infrastructure
| gets built because of it. Homes are built. Shops are
| built. Tax revenues get collected to build schools to
| educate new generations of citizens. New technologies are
| made, new industries grown, etc. So even with your
| specific definition of investment that spending did spur
| some of it. Land is improved. Positive productivity,
| economic exports.
|
| > An investment is something that provides positive
| return over time
|
| That's one definition, implying it will just continue to
| give a return. Like dividends. Another would be "an act
| of devoting time, effort, or energy to a particular
| undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result."
| A definition on Wikipedia is "commitment of resources to
| achieve later benefits". All the spending is investing in
| knowledge of space, material science, biology, and more,
| hopefully for a worthwhile result.
|
| One could say, "a student invested a lot of time studying
| for their sixth-grade math exam". Very much an acceptable
| statement to make, I don't think most would argue it is
| improper English. Is that strongly tied to positive
| productivity and economic exports? Did passing that test
| directly affect the GDP of the country?
|
| Either way, the people I'm replying to weren't trying to
| debate the semantic differences between "investing" and
| "spending", and that wasn't really my main point. I do
| agree there are differences in this, but that can often
| be a matter of opinion and perspective.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I agree that this isnt a point that can be decisively
| proven.
|
| I would just add the following thoughts. When discussing
| investment in terms of money, and especially government
| spending, the connotation is typically positive economic
| returns.
|
| Similarly, if we are being pedantic, a _bad_ investment
| is still an investment, as in the case where the returns
| are less than the cost. I would categorize much of this
| spending as a bad investment, one that leaves the country
| worse off in the long run.
|
| I think the word is largely without meaning when used
| with the subjective definitions outside the economic
| context. It simply reduces it to "I like this thing".
| Buying beer is now an investment, because it will have
| some later "benefits", and I think getting hammered on a
| Tuesday night is "worthwhile" because I like doing it.
| vel0city wrote:
| > When discussing investment in terms of money, and
| especially government spending, the connotation is
| typically positive economic returns
|
| So, the only reason why a city should build a park or a
| library should solely based on positive economic returns.
| We should price out how much actual dollar value return
| the library directly gives to the town _this quarter_ or
| the playground on the park. How much did adding that
| swing set really increase property values? I guess we
| shouldn 't have done it. Otherwise, it is purely just
| wasteful spending.
|
| I would leave you with the following thought. Not
| everything needs to have an easily measurable
| economic/financial benefit to be a good thing. Having
| such a myopic view isn't a positive thing in my opinion.
| I agree there's still such a thing as waste even in
| (especially in?) the space programs of the last few
| decades, but acting like funding space programs in
| general is a waste because it didn't generate positive
| economic returns in an easily measurable fashion to be
| quite a shortsighted viewpoint.
|
| And as mentioned, it's not like the money evaporated. It
| moved. That money spent is in the communities. It's in
| the homes there. Its built businesses. Its grown entire
| cities. People went to college because of that spending.
| People planted crops because of that spending. That
| spending kept the velocity of money up instead of having
| it stagnate under someone's mattress.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Thats not the point I am making. I think you people can
| make a case for expenses without conflating them with
| economic investment. A swing set might not make money,
| but I can play with my kids there and have fun. I can buy
| a beer without it being an investment.
|
| I dont think I agree with the velocity of money argument.
| It wouldnt be stagnating under some mattress. However,
| that is a much bigger topic that I dont think Im up for
| today
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Stepping on my soapbox once again to say that putting money
| towards science doesn't take away money from everything else.
| There's no shortage of money, or corporations that can be
| taxes, or people who didn't pay their fair share that can be
| taxed. Don't get upset with the science, get upset with the
| politicians who don't give a shit about the programs you care
| about or enforcing tax law.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Money is infinite but resources needed to send a probe
| outta space are quite limited
| sph wrote:
| Then let's not spend any resources but instead spend time
| weeping. It's not like stockpiling plutonium, gold,
| iridium and other rare earths metals used in spaceships
| is gonna make the world any better.
|
| Should we instead force the scientists working on this to
| abandon space research to "fix the ills of the world" so
| they do "something useful" instead?
|
| I honestly don't know what people who keep complaining
| about scientific research, especially space exploration,
| _want_. It is not those billions spent to send a probe to
| Europa the cause or the solution to the world 's
| problems. Hint: it is not money the cause nor the
| solution to the world's problems, nor are drive-by social
| media activists complaining about it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| A big part of why this kind of space research is worth
| doing is weapons development. That is a big part of why
| huge money goes to space research - because it's more
| efficient to give that cash to JPL than to Raytheon in
| terms of developing certain kinds of rocketry and
| robotics technologies.
|
| In comparison, many other branches of science work on
| much leaner budgets, and sending stuff to space actually
| does look very wasteful from a "$ per paper" perspective.
| If you disregard the weapons development value, there is
| actually very little reason to do these big-money
| experiments that could instead support the research of
| hundreds or thousands of more frugal science experiments.
|
| At the same time, there are lots of ways to do space
| research more cheaply, like launching small satellites.
| Most of the people who don't like this stuff are against
| the billion-dollar single missions rather than against
| astrophysics or against the concept of sending things to
| space. Many of them also are against the FCC project at
| CERN, for example.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| You're right, we should get more kids into STEM!
| jsbg wrote:
| It's the other way around. Money is finite and the
| curiosity we want to satisfy is infinite.
| ttoinou wrote:
| In our financial system money can be created at will
| jsbg wrote:
| Printing money is not the same thing as creating value.
| Epa095 wrote:
| In all practical terms there is a shortage of money(and
| resources), since then entities you mention are powerful
| enough to stop the extra taxation.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| By that logic the powers that be can arbitrarily decrease
| the amount of money for social or science programs at any
| time at their whim. Why do any science when you could be
| feeding the starving, and money could run out at any
| second?
|
| That's ridiculous, though. But it's the logical extreme
| of the defeatist argument that there's no way to get more
| money for these things.
| Epa095 wrote:
| So you think we can always just tax them more, and they
| would accept that? That's equally absurd.
|
| It's obvious that we can tax them a bit, but if we tax
| them too much they use their power to stop it. That power
| manifests in many ways. It can be to give money to right
| wing politicians, or it can be to move to lower-tax
| regimes. But anyway it's clear that there is not an
| unlimited pot of rich/corporate tax money out there ready
| for the picking without resistance.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > Stepping on my soapbox once again to say that putting
| money towards science doesn't take away money from
| everything else.
|
| This is objectively not true. Resource usage (money or
| other resources) is zero sum, and every dime spent on
| science is money that cannot be used for something else.
| I'm not opposed to spending money on science, but it
| doesn't do any good to make false claims like this.
| bluGill wrote:
| Zero sum isn't quite true. I only work a 40 hour week and
| would like to cut back, but I could work more hours and
| I'd likely be more productive.
| sph wrote:
| I see you channelling Conner O'Malley here: "we need, we
| need, we need, we need" - and as coherent as one of his
| rants.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cBiyWlYous
| weweersdfsd wrote:
| If we survive climate change, I would argue that conquering
| space should be the top priority to ensure long-term human
| survival. Projects like this ultimately gather knowledge that
| can help that goal.
|
| But sure, we also need to tax the ultra-rich more, so that we
| can have money for all the things that need to be done. Tax
| evasion is a problem, not NASA's spending.
| tirant wrote:
| What do you mean if we survive? We are already surviving
| and actually doing quite well.
|
| So basically you are proposing to forcedly seize money from
| 0,01% of the population to fulfill your view of a multi
| planetary future for human kind. I don't see that very
| ethical or appropriate to be honest.
|
| I'm all in for space exploration, but should be done in a
| way that respects individuals and their decisions on how to
| live their life and not by taxing them to fulfill the
| wishes of a few. That's why space exploration needs to be a
| private endeavor or at least financed publicly but only via
| optional taxing.
| Otek wrote:
| Why did you wrote this comment instead of spending time to
| fix those problems you've mentioned?
| Epa095 wrote:
| Yeah, don't try to convince others, go fix global climate
| change by yourself. Are you lazy?
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think we would be a lot further in addressing climate
| change and most social problems if people did more of the
| later and less of the former.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Without advocating ideas die with the first person
| getting them. It's obvious that we both need to act, and
| encourage others to act as well. We have no reason to
| belive OP don't act, and advocating for acting is a noble
| act (as it is both uncomfortable and necessary)
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I wasnt speaking about OPs action, but the statement they
| made. I think advocating without acting is an ignoble
| action, shallow, lazy, and selfish, and destructive.
|
| It is usually people refusing to do any work and pay the
| cost, but telling others that they should do these
| things.
|
| Most topics have no lack of advocating, and a large lack
| of people willing to take action.
|
| In short, I think most advocates are hypocrites trying to
| exploit others.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| Assumption.
| epidemian wrote:
| I don't see the causal dependency between these things. Could
| a probe to Europa be sent while still having housing problems
| in some countries? And could it be sent after having those
| housing problems addressed? I think the answer to both of
| those questions is yes. And conversely, can the housing
| problems be addressed while sending a probe to Europa? And
| can they be addressed while _not_ sending a probe? Again, i
| think the answers are both affirmative.
|
| These things don't seem to depend on each other. And
| different people want to do different things in this world. I
| don't think that the people who want to help shelter homeless
| people would be deterred by other people wanting to send a
| space probe, or vice-versa.
|
| I picked housing from the problems you mentioned just because
| it was the first one. I think this argument would still apply
| for the others. The reasons we're having those problems have
| nothing to do with how many probes we send to space.
| singularity2001 wrote:
| same. So to shortcut the big question "when"? April 2030
| riazrizvi wrote:
| I'm calling it now. Compared to Hollywood fair, our first alien
| contact IRL is going to be underwhelming.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Our first "contact" with alien life has already happened.
| Once upon a time people thought that Mars was covered in
| canals, that a civilization lived there. Society did not
| collapse. People just accepted it and not much changed. Then
| there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria. Not much
| changed then either. Authoritative proof of life on Europa
| will not have a dissimilar impact. Until there is a critter
| in a video, a discernable radio message, or a saucer on the
| white house lawn, the general population will just shrug it
| off.
| riedel wrote:
| White House lawn, wait: could orange skin color be somehow
| related to the ice color on Europa...
| tomrod wrote:
| I look forward to a few months from now where I never
| have to immediately recognize this reference.
| safety1st wrote:
| It has? I'm just quoting Wikipedia here: To date, no
| conclusive evidence of past or present life has been found
| on Mars.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| That's what it says today. Had Wikipedia been around in
| the 1800s it would have said that canals on Mars
| indicated an agricultural civilization. The point is that
| society has already processed the concept of alien life.
| We know how people will react because we can look to how
| they reacted in the past when scientists told them about
| alien life.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals
| Mistletoe wrote:
| Yes I remember children's books I had as a child saying
| exactly this.
| diggan wrote:
| Finding something that "indicated" something is very
| different than "We went digging in Europa and found these
| alive creatures that look like Dolphins under the surface
| that live on Ammonia"
|
| Society hasn't processed something we have no evidence of
| (yet), that doesn't make much sense. Ask "society" at
| large if they believe there are other species out there
| and most of them will say "I don't know" or "Probably
| not". In many places, religion is likely to be more
| believable to people than multi-cell life somewhere else
| than Earth.
| shmeeed wrote:
| That's an interesting take, but I'm not sold. It sounds a
| bit like claiming to be a family of firefighters because
| your grandpa participated in a drill once, passing along
| empty buckets.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| My impression was that it seemed like a big intriguing
| maybe, not something like a verified fact.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| A healthy chunk of the population believed, enough to
| impact national policies. Some of the first efforts at
| what we now call radio astronomy were attempts to listen
| for Mars signals. Just over a century ago "the big
| listen" saw large parts of the planet, including the
| military, turn off their transmitters in order to listen
| for Martians.
| bqmjjx0kac wrote:
| > Then there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria.
|
| I can't figure out what you're referring to. Can you post a
| link?
| sandworm101 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Hills_84001
|
| >> In 1996, a group of scientists found features in the
| likeness of microscopic fossils of bacteria in the
| meteorite, suggesting that these organisms also
| originated on Mars. The claims immediately made headlines
| worldwide, culminating in U.S. _president Bill Clinton
| giving a speech about the potential discovery_.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Minor alien-encounter film trivia: That Bill Clinton
| speech is what Robert Zemeckis ripped off to create a
| news footage facsimile of a more dramatic discovery in
| _Contact_.
| exitb wrote:
| The speech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHhZQWAtWyQ
| mxkopy wrote:
| There is no conclusive evidence that life has existed on
| Mars. In fact Mars is one of the lesser candidates for life
| due to its weak atmosphere and lack of tectonic
| activity/magnetic field. (Though Mars was much more fertile
| directly after its formation, it seemed to have been a
| rather violent time for life to develop).
|
| Finding life on Europa, or anywhere other than Earth, would
| be foundational. The most likely scenario is that it would
| be carbon-RNA based, which could imply a panspermia theory
| rooted in the early stages of the solar system's formation.
|
| The off chance that we find something non carbon, non RNA,
| or some combination thereof -based (non carbon RNA would be
| wild) would obviously have some pretty large implications
| as well.
|
| Though unfortunately the most likely scenario is that we
| don't find any life forms, as is the historical trend, and
| our search continues.
| simiones wrote:
| The point the poster above was making is that we have
| already seen how society changes when we _believe_ we 've
| found basic proof of life, because we really believed we
| did a few times in the past: nothing changes.
|
| Sure, finding actual living organisms would create new
| opportunities for study in xeno-biology, but it likely
| wouldn't change anything significant in our lives unless
| it is contact with complex multi-cellular and preferably
| intelligent beings.
|
| Even for science, the most likely possibility (life on
| Europa, if it exists, would use the same basic chemistry,
| but not the exact same things as life on Earth) would not
| have any major impacts in reality: it would end various
| kinds of speculation, it would give us some new avenues
| for looking for extra-solar life, and it would create new
| carriers in studying this new branch of biology. But it
| would likely not change anything major in existing
| fields, it wouldn't give us some new perspective on life
| on Earth, and it would not change much about how we study
| biology. Just like finding out that not all protozoa are
| bacteria (some are archaea), or before that finding that
| fungi are a completely separate kingdom of life from
| plants and animals, didn't fundamentally change anything
| even in the day to day lives and study of even the vast
| majority of biologists.
| bluGill wrote:
| The only way life changes anything on earth (a few crack
| pots worshiping this new life as god doesn't count even
| if they get following) is if the life is intelligent
| enough to change something.
|
| Life on the level of bacteria is interesting, but as you
| say still uses our chemistry. We put something in a text
| book and move on. Maybe a few study it and science learns
| a lot but nothing that affects our life.
|
| If the life is intelligent though they may have solved
| some problems we have. Maybe they have a quantum theory
| of gravity that we don't (my understanding of physics is
| we think this should exist but we don't have one - but
| I'm not a physicist).
|
| Of course the life may be intelligent but at a level
| equivalent to us 3000 years ago - just learning the
| basics of geometry. There is now the moral issue of how
| much should we tell them that we know.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Most people believe in ghosts, if you get them to be honest.
| Aliens probably aren't far from that. We're just kind of
| hard-wired to believe that the further you get from our day-
| to-day life, the more likely monsters are there.
| slumberlust wrote:
| The ghost claim is interesting. I'd have thought most
| people would be honest about NOT believing in them.
| riazrizvi wrote:
| You don't know how many people believe in ghosts, and you
| don't know what they're thinking when they listen to a
| ghost story. I 'believe in' ghosts as a non-supernatural
| construct we use in literature. A technique to embody and
| externalize voices in people's heads.
|
| It's weak, I believe, to operate on a platform of talking
| for strangers so confidently.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's scientifically rational to believe in "aliens". There
| is plenty of evidence supporting a theory of abiogenesis.
| Even though we have not actually observed the process
| entirely, we are reasonably confident on some mechanisms by
| which it may occur.
|
| Ghosts, on the other hand, are pretty far out there. We
| have no evidence or even any working thesis of how the
| consciousness of individuals could persist in some ethereal
| form after death.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| Ghosts as a phenomenon aren't really falsifiable, so
| there's not much point trying to make unequivocal
| scientific statements about them, if they exist. If
| there's something we can measure or some phenomenon that
| multiple people could elicit reliably then it would be an
| answerable question. But they're supernatural precisely
| because there is nothing to study scientifically. It's
| just some qualia that people interpret to be ghosts.
| edm0nd wrote:
| I have always wondered what kind of overlap there is in
| between people who believe in things like ghosts and also
| people who believe in a God.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| Aliens are not woo. Life is a natural phenomenon that is
| very clearly possible within the known laws of physics. We
| know life can naturally occur in the universe, because it
| happened here. Why not somewhere else, too?
| nerdjon wrote:
| I fully expect that our first alien life will likely be
| microscopic life on a nearby planet. Followed by some simple
| organisms and/or plant life.
|
| The likelihood of anything we would consider 'intelligent'
| being first contact is likely fairly low.
|
| As much as saying that does make me sad, evidence of alien
| life is honestly the one big thing that I am sad about living
| when I am living since I would love that to be a reality
| before I die.
| ls612 wrote:
| If bacterial/some prokaryotic life is found in our solar
| system I'd see that as terrifying. That means it's much
| more likely that the Great Filter is ahead of us.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| On the other hand, we _were_ warned not to land on Europa.
| Could be interesting ...
| mattlondon wrote:
| > we need to send one that can get below the ice and look
| around.
|
| I wondered about this - perhaps some sort of lander with a
| thermo-nuclear energy source that could slowly melt its way
| down to the liquid water, spooling out some sort of antenna
| from an internal compartment as it goes.
|
| Turns out though that the crust is up to 25KM thick though.
| Probably not viable!
|
| Edit: turns out 25KM spools of fibre are openly available to
| buy online (so i.e. not exactly unheard of) and only weigh
| 3-4kg. Maybe not so out of reach after all? Leave a "base
| station" on the surface at one end of the fibre, and at the
| other end another "subsurface station" that has a ROV-style
| tethered- "swimmer" (not a lander) that communicates back to
| the surface via the fibre, and the base station radios back to
| some orbiting thing/DSN etc. Fun to imagine these sort of
| things without any knowledge or experience or credentials! :)
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Well, it's more viable than you might think. Putting a 300
| degree sphere on the surface would eventually get somewhere.
| But getting anything useful _back_ is pretty hard, since you
| 'd have a probe that's boiling water below 25km of ice and
| probably far from the lat/lon it landed at.
| perihelions wrote:
| You could make it buoyancy-neutral and have it float-melt
| its way back--heater pointed up.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| I'd never considered the pressure under an ice cap... it
| would scale with depth, no?
|
| So a water channel within the ice (going "up" from the
| sea below) would have a decreasing pressure gradient as
| it ascended?
| mattlondon wrote:
| I would imagine the water channel would re-freeze fairly
| rapidly, so you'd end up with a "bubble" of liquid water
| around the thing slowly melting itself down.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Point. Is ice sufficiently plastic to exert pressure with
| depth? I honestly don't know.
|
| E.g. What would the pressure of a bubble of water under
| 1km of ice vs 15km of ice?
| nick238 wrote:
| The ice clearly moves, as Europa's surface isn't just
| same as an airless, solid ball-of-rock's default:
| craters, but has all sorts of features that reshape the
| surface, so given enough time, it'll equilibrate. (What
| 'enough' means is left as an exercise to the reader).
| There are papers[1] that discuss the ice properties, but
| it's hard to get a specific answer out of them. There
| have to be tons of research papers out there about the
| design criteria for melt-drill probes like this, for
| Europa, Enceladus, and others.
|
| [1]:
| https://websites.pmc.ucsc.edu/~fnimmo/website/draft5.pdf
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Maybe the main melt probe could leave behind little RTG
| powered relays as it descends. They'd get frozen in place
| as the main probe continues melting its way down.
| 8fingerlouie wrote:
| > Maybe not so out of reach after all? Leave a "base station"
| on the surface at one end of the fibre, and at the other end
| another "subsurface station" that has a ROV-style tethered-
| "swimmer"
|
| I think your main issue will be that the hole freezes over
| behind you, meaning you'll need some serious power to pull
| the fiber through 20 km worth of ice. You can of course pull
| the fiber in a sleeve of some kind, if you can keep water out
| of it, and if you can't there's really not much you can do
| about it.
|
| I would think the best option would be a somewhat high power
| radio transmitter/receiver.
| exitb wrote:
| You'd need to take the cable spool down the hole, so the
| unspooled part above is already in place.
| mrshadowgoose wrote:
| Spool goes on the descending module.
|
| > would think the best option would be a somewhat high
| power radio transmitter/receiver.
|
| If you can figure this one out, the militaries of the world
| would love to have a chat with you. Water/ice is
| ridiculously good at attenuating EM. It's a huge issue with
| submarine communications.
| nick238 wrote:
| Wire-guided torpedos[1] and missiles[2] are fairly
| common, and the wire pays out from the projectile-side so
| it's not progressively dragging more and more. The more
| recent DM2A4 Seehecht torpedo[3] has a fiber-optic link,
| probably to reduce EM emissions or the detectability of a
| km's-long wire/antenna, despite being underwater.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire-guided_missile
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DM2A4
| zardo wrote:
| > I think your main issue will be that the hole freezes
| over behind you.
|
| Getting an ice plug started is a problem, you need
| meltwater to get fast heat transfer from the melt-head to
| the ice, but you can't have liquid water at Europa surface
| pressure.
| safety1st wrote:
| I find Europa fascinating but unfortunately I think the lack of
| missions is less about interest and more about feasibility. On
| earth we rarely drill more than 2-3km down. The Russians did
| 12km once in Antarctica. With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of
| multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and
| properties we know very little about, have zero experience
| with. Not to mention the immense distance, time lags and
| hostility of the environment. Drilling on earth is dangerous
| and difficult and failure prone as it is. How do we learn to do
| this? How many missions and failures are required?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of
| exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know
| very little about, have zero experience with.
|
| I mean, that's why we go. Clipper is going to figure out, in
| part, whether we actually need to go down 20km or if we can
| just scoop up stuff kicked by cryovulcanism into low orbit.
| https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-
| from...
| jvanderbot wrote:
| The value from a surface probe that can sample those brown
| stains is immeasurable. Imagine an HD video of the guysers,
| or an imaging spectrometer using refraction from the sun
| through a guyser (or whatever I'm not a scientist) and
| picking up strange amounts of something that can't be
| explained by just water and salt. Or even a detailed radar
| scan of the subsurface - are there pockets of warm water?
|
| Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms
| of ice is short-sighted.
| safety1st wrote:
| Yeah I think a mission to see whether we can scoop up stuff
| that's been blasted up to the surface or even into orbit
| (and probably picking up some data on the ice crust along
| the way) is a lot more promising.
|
| Just saying, there are people in these comments observing
| that "you can buy a 25km fiber cable online" lol... I love
| the exuberance but people may not be fully grokking the
| scope of the engineering problem here :) every mission
| comes at the expense of other possible missions, and
| drilling 25km down into Europa could easily be a feat that
| we would fail to accomplish even with 5 or 10 missions.
| There are challenges we will not surmount in our lifetimes,
| and this might be one of them. Deep drilling is
| dramatically harder than your average HN user probably
| realizes... exuberance alone cannot conquer physics.
| chefandy wrote:
| Well, what good is a naive misgiving if you don't even
| use it to haughtily dismiss genuine expertise? I can't
| tell you how many times I've had developers essentially
| manaplain my non-dev fields of expertise to me knowing
| that I was a credentialed professional and they were
| making stab-in-the-dark assumptions. Phrases like,
| "theoretically, it should be very simple," should usually
| be replaced by, "It would be ridiculous to assume
| everything I don't know about this is inconsequential,
| but here are some baselessly confident words about it:".
| potato3732842 wrote:
| What good is a professional credential if you don't use
| it as an appeal to authority to shut down any criticism
| of your opinions? /s
|
| On a more serious note, it's a travesty that lawyers get
| all the hate and PEs get none.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| add to this the constant claims in the field of renewable
| energy and the energy transition. I've heard "energy
| storage is a solved problem" so many times that i cannot
| help but laugh.
|
| Code & techbros are not the solution to everything.
| chefandy wrote:
| Then, some will dust off that Larry Wall quote about
| hubris as if it's exculpatory... Well, I read that book
| too, and he was definitely talking about _problem-solving
| approaches in software development,_ and not _general-
| purpose personality traits for software developers._
| potato3732842 wrote:
| If it truly is just ice it would likely be more effective
| to melt through and spool out power/comms behind it
| (think TOW missile) rather than drill through. Carrying
| spare energy is a less thorny problem than all the
| (literal) moving parts required to autonomously drill a
| few miles in the outer solar system.
| dylan604 wrote:
| That would be a lot of power required to prevent
| refreezing. If we're just throwing nonsensical ideas out,
| why not drop your probe down one of the geysers? Let the
| planet make the holes for you. You _just_ need to make it
| so it doesn 't get blown out each time the planet/moon
| sneezes. Of course, because I used the hand wavy word
| _just_ means you automatically get to triple the cost
| estimate.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| Would refreezing break the cable?
| dylan604 wrote:
| If you build the probe so that it has the spool of cable
| in it, then the probe has to be as large as the full load
| of cable. If you make the probe just big enough to do
| what it needs while pulling the cable from the lander
| then it can be much smaller. If using the smaller probe,
| then the cable will need to be fully movable as it melts
| deeper. The larger probe with the full length of cable
| will require much more energy as it needs to melt a much
| larger hole.
|
| Where is all of this energy coming from?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > Where is all of this energy coming from?
|
| A nuclear reactor, probably.
| briansm wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_heater_unit
| safety1st wrote:
| Really? To heat and melt sufficient ice around 25km of
| cabling? I don't know what temperature this ice is at, I
| think on the surface Europa averages around -300F, so
| it's probably at least that low. I guess a lot is going
| to depend on whether you're fine with the ice refreezing
| around the cable - if the ice shifts at all, the cable
| breaks. Keeping the whole thing heated continuously seems
| implausible
| tagami wrote:
| that would surely mess with any organics you might want
| to find
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| I think our breakdown in understanding here is our
| concept of cables. When I say cable (and many others
| here) I mean fiber optic cable. Even with 25km of fiber
| optic cable it is rather small and light. Drones,
| missiles, and torpedoes are already doing this with many
| miles of cable in a tight space. The issue with this
| which I am not sure about is the dynamic of the ice on
| the fiber optic cable and how well it would hold up to
| refreezing of the ice.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Refreezing isn't the big issue; shifting of the ice
| (causing physical severing of the line) is. We don't have
| a great handle yet on how much it moves around.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes, I think we definitely have a gigantic
| misunderstanding of cable here. Mine is based in reality,
| while yours seems to be very unrealistic. How in the
| world is a fiber optic cable going to do what needs to be
| done? Where is the power coming from to heat the probe
| via a fiber optic cable? Even a fiber optic cable at a
| length of 25km is a very large spool. If you want the
| probe to hold the spool and unwind as it goes, it must be
| at least the size of the spool of cable. If you think
| this would work with an unsheathed piece of bare fiber
| cable, then your just not even trying to be serious.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| I see another misunderstanding then. With this method the
| actual probe would use nuclear material to melt its way
| through the ice. In addition, the heat of the nuclear
| probe on one side and the ice on another (or melting ice)
| would make for the ideal conditions of a peltier (or just
| use a traditional RTG) device to power onboard sensors
| and electronics. The fiber optic cable is only for
| communication.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> use nuclear material to melt its way through the ice_
|
| All 300 watts of it? It's not going to even make an
| indentation, let alone through 10s of km of ice.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Simple reactors can be designed to be turned up and down
| according to need. A 300w RTG is more than enough to run
| all the necessary electronics. The ice-melting 30,000w+
| heater can be a second rector that is spooled up only
| when ice needs melting.
| dylan604 wrote:
| we're attempting to search for life and the thing you
| want to do is use radioactive heaters? we deliberately
| crashed a satellite into the planet to avoid having it
| potentially contaminate the moons we are curious about,
| and yet you're thinking they'd just irradiate everything
| like this? it's really just not logical
| usrusr wrote:
| The spool can be a long, thin "pipe" of wound cable that
| goes with one end of the "pipe" pointing to the rear
| (up). You can put an arbitrary amount of cable in a given
| hole diameter by making the spool taller.
|
| (Google image search suggests that a similar approach has
| been taken by the TOW, it's not a spool that could be
| reversed by adding a motor to an axis, more like a
| tightly packed coil that gets straightened as wire is
| pulled out)
|
| As for the energy, I assumed GP was thinking of solar
| panels on the surface. I also assume that we share
| scepticism based on the low sun intensity out in the
| orbit of Jupiter... (and that's before you even start
| wondering how much further away from the melting point
| that ice will be than all ice of conventional human
| experience)
| bumby wrote:
| > _You can put an arbitrary amount of cable in a given
| hole diameter by making the spool taller._
|
| Wouldn't this be limited to the tensile strength of the
| material and the weight of the cable? Granted, Europa has
| much less gravity, but 25km is a lot of cable weight.
|
| Consider something as small as fishing line; one online
| estimate gives it .245g/m. At 25km, that's over 3 tons of
| line weight hanging down a hole on Earth or nearly 800
| lbs on Europa.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The probe bears on the ice below it and the cable gets
| held by the ice that's re-frozen above the hole.
|
| What you have to worry about is the ice shifting and
| severing the cable.
| jl6 wrote:
| Now I'm wondering whether you could fire sonar pings
| through the ice and transmit data using an acoustic sonar
| modem. Then the ice-melting probe could be completely
| untethered. It would be a profoundly unfriendly probe
| though: a hot radioactive ball emitting ultra-loud
| pulses. We would have to attach an apology note.
| basementcat wrote:
| You have to use more expensive radiation hardened fiber
| for Europa because the cheap stuff will literally go
| dark. It is likely there will also be a lower rate copper
| signaling path in case the umbilical tether is slightly
| damaged. Previous efforts to drill outside of Earth
| (mostly Mars) have proven difficult; there have been
| suggestions to instead "melt" through the ice with a
| radioisotope thermoelectric generator but this presents a
| different set of problems.
|
| Rest assured that incredibly smart people at a propulsion
| laboratory are working on solving these sorts of
| problems. If you are a citizen of the USA, you can help
| by asking your elected representatives to adequately fund
| these efforts so these personnel won't be laid off in the
| next few months.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| "Immeasurable" and "large" are not synonyms. I agree with
| you that it's immeasurable, but I disagree that it's large.
| It's likely that nothing is going to change if we know what
| those brown spots are today or if we know in 10-20 years.
| Sure, there will be some cool "I fucking love science"
| photos that come out of this, but if that's the
| "immeasurable" value you are anticipating, I would give
| that a value of less than $1 million.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| If your claim is that it'd not be worth it to pay two
| million dollars for a surface lander that successfully
| samples and conducts experiments on Europa's ice in situ,
| returns HD video, etc, then I can't really agree with you
| or even see how we would reach agreement. A Europa lander
| was at least considered as a viable billion dollar
| mission when I left JPL.
|
| If that's not your claim then I don't understand your
| valuation and the rest of the comment doesn't track.
|
| And not to engage at a base level but my use of
| immeasurable is correct in being interpreted as "large"
| unambiguously, at least by Merriam webster.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| My claim is that the pictures themselves are probably
| only worth $100k or so, and you can read the comment
| again to see how that tracks semantically. The
| experiments, maybe ten million unless they can
| _demonstrate_ that they have some sort of value.
|
| A "viable billion dollar mission" includes all sorts of
| other things that are of value, including developing
| capabilities to do things that are strategically
| important, which I would claim is where a large majority
| of that billion dollars comes from. Similarly, I would
| expect that JPL would very much inflate the value of
| their own work. Everyone does.
|
| Also, I see "incapable of being measured" with "broadly :
| indefinitely extensive" tacked on in the MW definition.
| There is no requirement there that "immeasurable" mean
| "large", just "incapable of being measured" with the
| expectation that it is used when describing things that
| are extreme. My most recent use of "immeasurable" was
| "immeasurably small" which I'm sure you would agree is a
| proper use.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| I think we're just interpreting each other's comments too
| narrowly. I'd be repeating myself to reply further.
| poopbutt9 wrote:
| YOu can just ctrl-i on the picture file and see how big
| it is, it's pretty easy to measure. Even if there are a
| lot of files you can select all, it's definitely not
| immesurable.
|
| Hosting the photos costs money too, which I don't think
| GP is considering.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| This is true of pictures here, but who knows with
| European pictures, they might be in alien or metric.
| m4rtink wrote:
| The record setting Kola Superdeep Borehole is no it
| Antarctica but close to the northern polar cycle on the
| northern edge of Asia:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
|
| They did some drilling to the Ice at the Antarctica Vostok
| station, going donw to about 3 km:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostok_Station#Ice_core_drilli.
| ..
| knodi123 wrote:
| Did they do it with a remotely operated probe that can't be
| repaired or assisted?
| ggambetta wrote:
| We send Bruce Willis and a ragtag team of lovable, drilling-
| expert misfits?
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| > I asked Michael [Bay] why it was easier to train oil
| drillers to become astronauts than it was to train
| astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut
| the fuck up. -- Ben Affleck
|
| Still one of my favorite movies though.
| photonthug wrote:
| Although.. in defense of that mythical blue collar work
| ethic, I do know plumbers and machinists that have built
| their own planes and become aviators. Never met a test
| pilot or double-phd that become a plumber
| knodi123 wrote:
| > Never met a test pilot or double-phd that become a
| plumber
|
| Yeah, but if one of them had, he'd probably be too
| embarrassed to tell you!
| moffkalast wrote:
| There are certain things we can do on a afaraway planet and
| not at home, such as using an unshielded RTG to melt the ice
| with exposed plutonium. and just unrolling a cable while the
| probe sinks down like a torpedo. Assuming it's all ice and
| not rock after 20 meters down...
| protomolecule wrote:
| The liquid will freeze back behind the probe.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| Correct, hence the need for the probe to unroll the cable
| as it goes down. If you had the roll on the surface, you
| would need to heat the whole cable to allow it to slip
| down.
| protomolecule wrote:
| Which would require much more power than a single RITEG.
| arethuza wrote:
| Why - 25km of fibre isn't that large?
| jdiez17 wrote:
| Back of the envelope feasibility check: assume the cable
| is a cylinder with diameter = 1cm, length = 25km. The
| area of the cylinder face is A = 2*pi*r*h = 785.4 m^2.
| The thermal conductivity of water ice is approx. 2.3 W /
| (m K). So to maintain a temperature difference of 10 K
| with the ice, you need 2.3 W/mK * 785 * 10 =
| approximately 18kW.
| arethuza wrote:
| I was assuming something little thicker than optical
| fibre - the "probe" could be self powered using an RTG
| with the "waste" heat doing the melting?
|
| Once the ice freezes again behind the probe it would
| protect the fibre... perhaps?
|
| Fortunately something like that wouldn't be too difficult
| to test on Earth - probe recovery might be tricky though.
| nick238 wrote:
| A mini nuclear-reactor-as-a-heat-source might be
| appropriate for a melt-drill. RTGs are a bit unfortunate
| as they'll exponentially decay from the time of
| manufacturing, and you'll need to both 1. deliver high
| enough power at Europa, and 2. radiate away that much
| power and a bit more when you're flying there.
|
| A nuclear reactor could produce basically no heat while
| offline, then be switched on and suddenly provide 100s of
| kW when it gets to wherever it's going. The hard part in
| space is radiating away the heat, but if you're on an ice
| world, that's orders of magnitude easier.
|
| The hardest part I'd see would just be getting into the
| ice; there's not really any "melting" in vacuum. The
| constant boiling away of the water would keep insulating
| your heater from the ice. Meters 1 to 20,000 are probably
| pretty easy.
| XorNot wrote:
| Europa is hard vacuum on the surface, so this is not
| actually intuitively obvious: i.e. if you built up a
| gaseous steam interface between the bore hole walls, then
| you might have quite a bit of trouble losing heat back
| into the surrounding ice.
|
| In fact you could just boil the water to steam and vent
| it out the top via a surface valve assembly - the
| interior would act like a vacuum thermace flask.
| Gupie wrote:
| Dropping a lump of plutonium on the heads of the
| inhabitants of Europa might be seen as an unfriendly act!
| :)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Or we start a "worship the deadly warm thing" cult.
| flatline wrote:
| It sounds like we don't know enough to even consider landing
| a probe, let alone something completely unprecedented like
| drilling a deep hole. This mission, if I understand the
| article, will attempt to determine the depth of the surface,
| its constituency, and possibly the constituency of what's
| below it. It may be that Europa is not geothermally active as
| we hope, and is made up entirely of ice and other simple
| inorganic compounds. That would likely shift our efforts to
| other, more promising targets of exploration in the solar
| system. Drilling is many steps ahead of where we are at.
| maitola wrote:
| Researchers are not sure about the thickness of the ice on
| Europa. Some scientists believe on a thick shell of 20Km
| (like Pappalardo) others on a much thinner of even 1Km or
| less.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| That's what nukes are for yeah? You just let it melt its way
| down
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| I wish more people were passionate about space, and we had
| more funding available. Because you list all these
| difficulties and I just think "well we better get started!
| Who do I vote for so we can get started?"
| BurningFrog wrote:
| If there is life in the ocean, I think there should be life
| signs in the surface ice.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Do the deep sea extremophiles on earth leave visible signs
| on the surface?
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I don't know. I expect there is some organic material in
| the polar ice fields?
| eru wrote:
| > The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica.
|
| You mean in the Arctic?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole
| dghughes wrote:
| They probably meant Vostok in the Antarctic Russians
| drilled a 3,720m deep hole in ice.
|
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/annals-of-
| glaciology...
| jancsika wrote:
| I just imagine you saying this to a group of frustrated NASA
| engineers, then seeing a hard cut to a bunch of rough necks
| chasing each other around on an oil rig.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| Yes it would be that easy in Hollywood. I'd be willing to
| bet my entire net worth that even 200 years from now it
| will still seem absurd to put a drilling rig with multiple
| living humans onto Europa. Too bad I have no way to
| collect, much less say "I told you so."
| eMPee584 wrote:
| finally, a valid use case for the block chain.. long
| future bets
| keepamovin wrote:
| The lore of secret space program insiders say that there are
| octopus/cephalopod species under that ice in that ocean. And,
| more so, that they are related to the ones on our planet. Wow.
|
| For those who don't know "SSP lore" is the idea that a
| technological breakaway civilization descended from Mars-via-
| Antarctica "Space Nazis" who back-engineered anti-gravity tech
| in the 1950s (the bell craft) with the help of psychics who
| channelled aliens designs, and then began retrofitting
| submarines with advanced propulsion systems, before graduating
| to more advanced "interstellar craft", have long been out among
| our local cluster of stars, pushing humans beyond the limits of
| public space programs, and now consist of an international
| cadre of Earth humans (and born-on-Mars humans), involved in
| intergalactic trade and exploration....Aaaand it's so secret
| that if you are recruited and then allowed back to Earth, you
| are mind wiped and age-regressed/time-travelled back to the
| moment you signed up after a 20 year stint, the fabled "20-and-
| back" program.
| naruhodo wrote:
| Very cool, but why Nazis?
| keepamovin wrote:
| Actual, historical Nazis in fact! - as the lore goes.
| Apparently, Hitler was very into the esoteric and exploring
| all avenues for advantage. Through proxies and commanders,
| this included tapping the Vril society psychics for their
| channelled alien designs, recovering downed or crashed
| UAPs, anti-gravity research and possibly more insanely,
| making deals with a negative group of ETs for even more
| technology. As the war loomed in their favor they doubled
| down on their research into anomalous super craft, but as
| it lurched against them, they, says the lore, transferred
| all their research down to their Antarctic bases, dug into
| the ice and also linking up with natural geothermally-cut
| caverns deep beneath the icesheet.
|
| Eventually, Admiral Byrd was dispatched to bring these
| space Nazis to heal and steal their tech, but was defeated,
| by said tech. The US then engineered operation Paperclip to
| get as much of this advanced German tech as possible. And a
| detente was reached with the Space Nazis in Antarctica, and
| possibly some deals, while they continued to develop their
| "high voltage electrogravitic and torsion field
| technology", all of which resulted in them eventually
| moving their operations to Mars, while the "Allies" (now
| well infiltrated by these Space Nazis in supreme positions
| of power thanks to Paperclip and their own wiles) took over
| most of the Antarctic underground bases, perhaps even
| procuring some of this advanced technology for themselves,
| before the Space Nazis became Mars Germans and broke away
| with it.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Hey, that's the plot to the game "Battlezone"!
| jerjerjer wrote:
| Please, less typing, more takey meds.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I think a major hurdle with NASA is that the American ~public~
| political leadership does not accept failures (they barely
| accept success). Thus, NASA seems to only swing at pitches they
| know will be home runs. If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission
| that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come
| about how "wasteful" NASA was. (of course, you'll never hear
| those same politicians complaining about how wasteful failed
| military engagements costing 10000x are).
|
| It's unfortunate, because NASA is probably the only
| organization on earth capable of achieving such goals.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| To be fair, this is a pretty rational approach to many low
| impact questions with no timeline. You can simply wait for
| cost to go down and chance of success to go up.
|
| Most people would agree we dont _need_ to know about Europa
| today. If you look at other issues where the government
| spends money like a drunk sailor, there are at least debated
| claims of urgency and need.
| DowagerDave wrote:
| I think the biggest hurdle is the human condition. We're
| prepared to spend 10x to get a human into some version of
| outer space as basically cargo, but don't get the same
| emotional resonance with unmanned exploration even though
| that's were the valuable science happens.
| hfe wrote:
| > If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will
| be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful"
| NASA was.
|
| And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution
| is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of
| failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did
| eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing
| a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of
| money into some venture, only to give up on it after the
| first failure is something we should all be angry about. If
| its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.
| mlyle wrote:
| I agree, but this also means "investing in smaller chunks."
| We're stacking missions up to be so complicated that
| they're really expensive and the first try really _has_ to
| succeed. We need to figure out how to get smaller chunks so
| that individual ones can fail.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yes. A lot of the innovation in space recently has been
| about making space missions cheaper. NASA and JPL still
| do these huge multi-billion-dollar headliner missions,
| but the democratization of space is an underrepresented
| story in the public view of space. It's still hard to get
| far from orbit cheaply, though.
| mlyle wrote:
| Yup. Actually, I'm advisor for a high school team that
| was selected by NASA's CubeSat Launch Initiative to put a
| satellite in LEO, mostly to do space technology
| development and demonstration. The growth of rideshare
| and dedicated small satellite launch missions has been
| impressive to watch in the past couple of decades.
|
| Getting out of LEO has a lot of challenges; the delta V
| is expensive, but also survivability away from Earth's
| thermal radiation and magnetic field gets harder. This
| has a compounding effect where costs and scope run away;
| if you need to buy expensive launch, rad-hard hardware
| and do exotic things for power and heating, you want to
| amortize the fixed portions of these over more science...
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Maybe there should be more emphasis on what IS accomplished
| during the building and engineering of those missions
| regardless of the final mission outcome. I think the PR spin
| needs to be in a direction that highlights the achievements
| along the way more.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Laughably, horribly dystopian how much we spend on the
| military vs. programs like NASA.
|
| I want my Star Trek timeline back :(
| supportengineer wrote:
| I hope this question gets answered before I pass, which is
| probably no more than 25 years from now.
| spennant wrote:
| I feel the same way.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094245
| 0xblinq wrote:
| I'm from Europa. I can confirm there's life here. Not sure for
| how long though.
| alex_suzuki wrote:
| ,,The Europa Report" is IMO a pretty underrated movie:
| https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/europa_report
| space_oddity wrote:
| A hidden gem in the sci-fi genre
| rwmj wrote:
| This is a great low budget sci-fi film (and pretty scary at the
| end too).
| ahoka wrote:
| A fun game game that takes place on Europa:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/602960/Barotrauma/
| Tade0 wrote:
| Nothing like a good Europan handshake.
|
| I am this close to suggesting a round of Barotrauma in the
| next team-building exercise I'll participate in, as it
| reveals _a lot_ about what works and what doesn 't in a team.
| marklar423 wrote:
| One of my favorite hard-scifi movies ever.
| duxup wrote:
| I liked the film overall, but the talking heads style narration
| was tedious. It was a strange film as I loved parts, hated
| parts.
|
| I get why they do the narration that way, but man I do not care
| about the folks narrating their experience back on earth when
| we could be watching the folks on / near Europa. It has an
| unintentional self important vibe about the "I was on my way
| into the office when something happened." whole thing.
| wigster wrote:
| a fine excuse to listen to a top tune by the multi talented
| Thomas Dolby.
|
| Thomas Dolby - Europa And The Pirate Twins
|
| https://youtu.be/qkj4p3rI17s?si=1Ui8lskcljKfGo-E
| danwills wrote:
| I guess there's very little chance of accidentally transferring
| earth-style life to Europa's oceans with this flyby kind of
| plan.. that's a plus!
| criddell wrote:
| Even if we did accidentally seed life on Europa, it would be a
| pretty interesting result.
|
| I wonder if any organic matter from Earth has ever fallen on
| any other planets or moons?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'd be surprised if this hadn't happened at some point. Rocks
| from Mars found their way over to Antarctica.
|
| However something to consider is that whatever biological
| material that ends up landing elsewhere probably wouldn't be
| able to survive and reproduce. I say that because even the
| hardiest microbial organisms on Earth still depend on the
| activity of other species in the ecosystem. For instance,
| only certain species of bacteria produce Vitamin B and I
| can't think of any species that is completely self-reliant.
| It's one thing to keep a cell from dying in a harsh
| environment, but it would have to bootstrap itself into
| metabolizing and reproducing in a barren environment with no
| prior life to consume building blocks from.
|
| That being said, I'm not enough of a biologist to know if
| there are any extremophile bacteria which are completely self
| sufficient. If there are, we can rule out my layman's
| assertion/thought experiment.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It's ironic that we are searching for life on other planets when
| we are eradicating the life right here on ours.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Not really. A small minority care about space life. A small
| minority care about conservation.
| FollowingTheDao wrote:
| > A small minority care about conservation.
|
| A small minority care, until it is too late. The everybody
| cares. It is the job of the scientists and governments to
| help us understand why we should care. But both are captured
| by oligarchs and people looking for their own power and
| prestige.
| lukan wrote:
| Allmost everyone cares about conservation .. but about
| conserving the immediate life around them, e.g. their life
| and the close people around them.
|
| Climate change is still too abstract for most people to be a
| real concern. If they are cold, coal makes them warm now.
|
| I more and more find truth in the simplified statement: "we
| are little more than confused apes after all"
|
| We are capable of so much more .. but it takes time and
| whether we have the time to evolve some collective consciouss
| about the bigger problems concerning us all, remains to be
| seen.
| ywvcbk wrote:
| I don't think we're eradicating life, just most natural
| ecosystems and ecological diversity.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I meant life as in indiviudal lives. Saying what you said is
| like saying "Stalin didn't eradicate life. Just a few million
| people."
| moconnor wrote:
| "We're not a life search mission. We're a habitability mission,"
| says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper's project scientist at the Jet
| Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| How can we ensure not 1 of the quintillion spores it will pick up
| upon interaction with earth will not survive transport and
| contaminate Europa?
| XorNot wrote:
| The surface of Europa is hard vacuum and its not landing there,
| with several miles of ice to the ocean. It's as protected from
| contamination as it's ever going to get.
| jermaustin1 wrote:
| We can't any more so than any other lander/prob/rover we've
| sent. And will it really matter when we eventually (probably
| not in our lives) send people there anyway. All their body-
| biome and other contaminants will come with them, too.
|
| We are going to contaminate the solar system with humans
| eventually. A spore that may survive and MAY be viable is the
| least of the Europa's problem.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Humans I'm not so sure, but fungi maybe.
| hinkley wrote:
| Human cells only account for half of the cells in your body.
| We are bioreactors.
| Mistletoe wrote:
| We do hydrogen peroxide rinses of everything, but there are
| some organisms that can survive even this. I worked with some
| of them like B. pumilus that came back from the space station
| and exposure to space. Incredible resistance to hydrogen
| peroxide.
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22680694/
|
| https://astrobiology.com/2014/05/space-station-research-stud...
| FredPret wrote:
| If an organism can survive a hydrogen peroxide bath, all our
| other sterilization methods, then a multi-year space trip
| bathed in UV rays and general radiation, then re-entry into
| Europa, and then proceeds to colonize that world... it
| deserves to.
| hinkley wrote:
| It might already be there hitching a ride on a rock. Saturn
| and Jupiter have so much gravity the center of mass of the
| solar system can be outside of the sun when their orbits
| align. Who knows where the debris of the K-T event ended
| up.
| FredPret wrote:
| Correct me if I'm wrong but is this (panspermia) the
| justification given in the Star Trek canon of why all the
| aliens have two arms, two legs, can speak, and speak
| English?
|
| Regardless, it'd be extremely cool to have some distant
| cousins swimming around that far away. It'd also be
| extremely cool to find completely unrelated life.
| hinkley wrote:
| My take is that fungi have built most of Nature. They are
| the first farmers. So if the right branch of the fungal
| kingdom and anything else lands on a planet, you'll get
| the rest eventually.
| FredPret wrote:
| If by "the rest" you mean complex life, sure. If you mean
| "aliens" that speak English with an accent but look
| suspiciously like human actors in funny hats... well, I'm
| willing to suspend my disbelief.
| hinkley wrote:
| Star Trek is - I love it but still - kinda bullshit that
| way. The Hainish model is more likely.
|
| Attempt at galactic empire fails completely, and hundreds
| or thousands of generations later some civilizations who
| remember their origins reacquire the ability to travel
| between systems and attempt to remind each other that we
| are all brothers even though we have evolved very
| different traits.
| tredre3 wrote:
| Star Trek canon says that humanoids were deliberately
| seeded across the galaxy by an ancient race, not random
| panspermia. It was established in the TNG episode "The
| Chase". It's mentioned in some other episodes but it's
| typically kept on the down low to prevent
| hurting/contradicting religious feelings/origin stories
| (in universe).
|
| https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Progenitor
| Mistletoe wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised at all that aliens that can do
| space travel are bipedal. It's just a great way to
| manipulate things with arms. No manipulating equals no
| spacecraft. Speaking would be the same. I always thought
| the aliens in Star Trek spoke their own language but the
| universal translators translated it?
|
| > By the 24th century, universal translators had advanced
| to the point where a full-fledged UT could be built into
| the combadges worn by Starfleet personnel. The
| translation was so natural and seamless that beings
| unaware of them believed that others spoke their own
| language.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I mean odds are good it already happened a long time ago. Some
| space crap crashed into earth, spewing some rock covered in
| microbes into space where it eventually collided with Europa.
| We have identified plenty of space crap from other planets and
| moons in our solar system that crashed into us.
|
| Granted the environment on our space probes is a little
| different than a shattered rock sent from an impact event but
| still...
| twic wrote:
| Follow the guidance of your Planetary Protection Officer:
|
| https://sma.nasa.gov/sma-disciplines/planetary-protection#pl...
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Will the levels of radiation allow life to exist there?
| perihelions wrote:
| There's no radiation in the subterranean oceans, which is what
| they are investigating.
|
| (Radiation shielding is an exponential function; a few meters
| of water is, for most purposes, total shielding [0]. The major
| radiation source on Europa is solar particles trapped in
| Jupiter's magnet belts, which bombard Europa's airless surface.
| The ocean begins multiple tens of kilometers below that
| surface).
|
| [0] https://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
| EugeneOZ wrote:
| Thanks a lot!
| ricksunny wrote:
| I wonder how many nat security council meetings there would be
| between a discovery of life on Europa and the public getting to
| hear about it, for cases:
|
| 1) the life is non-intelligent 2) the life is intelligent
| andyp-kw wrote:
| Either way, it would force us to re-think our practice of
| broadcasting into space.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Perhaps, though I would think that finding life in our solar
| system does not necessarily mean life will be outside our
| solar system. As in did something happen in our solar system
| to spark life. Also, I think the ship has sailed on not
| broadcasting into space.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Should we bring life there - just in case we find none? Like some
| deep sea smoker sample of life, transported to another deep sea
| smoker?
| justmarc wrote:
| Can you just please let us know when you actually find something
| worthy of our attention?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Now that SpaceX can blast cargo into space cheaply, what we need
| to do is send a probe to _every_ planet and moon in the solar
| system.
|
| Just because:
|
| 1. we can
|
| 2. we have no idea what we'll find
|
| No excuses!
|
| Oh, and 10 more James Webb telescopes, too!
| dgrin91 wrote:
| The problem with probes, landers and satellites, especially
| what, is that the rocket isn't the limiting factor. Development
| of the payload is the vast majority of the cost & time
| exitb wrote:
| Well, the more you make of something, the cheaper it gets.
| Things also get easier when you're less constrained for
| weight and volume. I imagine that Starship delivering a robot
| all the way to the Mars surface would make things
| significantly cheaper. Mars is also a difficult place to land
| on, as it's very big for its thin atmosphere. If we had a
| system that can successfully land on Mars, it could be fairly
| easily used on other planets and moons.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| SpaceX plans on sending 5 starships to Mars in 2 years
| (optimistic) or 4 years (pessimistic). Wonder what sort of
| stuff they'll send in the payload. Just supplies for the
| astronauts who come 2 years later or will they allow for
| rideshare of scientific payloads?
| WalterBright wrote:
| We have a system that has landed successfully on Mars,
| several different ones.
| indoordin0saur wrote:
| A lot of that is because getting something launched was so
| hard (time, money, dealing with government grants, etc.) that
| they made _damn_ sure the thing was going to be robust and
| work. The prices SpaceX will be launching at allows us to
| just chuck some off-the-shelf hardware together and not care
| so much if half of the hundreds of probes we send out fail.
| WalterBright wrote:
| We've already developed the JWST. Unless, of course, all the
| tooling and test equipment was thrown away.
| duxup wrote:
| We've been able to send probes to other planets for many
| decades. Cost of the actual rocket doesn't appear to be the
| obstacle.
| protomolecule wrote:
| Part of the reason why the probes are expensive is the
| limitations on the size and mass imposed by existing rockets.
| cookingmyserver wrote:
| I think indirectly it does. When your launch vehicle costs
| hundreds of millions of dollars to use once on a scientific
| mission you try to put as much engineering into the
| scientific payload to (1) make damn sure it works when you
| are paying $200 million for a launch and (2) make sure you
| can do as much science as possible.
|
| With something like Starship I wouldn't be surprised to see
| SpaceX cheaply provide a starship approaching end of life to
| a scientific mission. With cheaper and readily available
| launch opportunities we could see deep space missions that
| utilize larger amounts of probes manufactured more cheaply
| that have much less longevity (die after a year of data
| collecting) but can do a greater amount of science over their
| shorter lives. Essentially, using a large launch vehicle like
| starship as a mothership until they get to their destination.
| Reducing the need for RTGs.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A billion dollars a launch is definitely an obstacle.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| Space is undeniably fascinating, and it's completely natural to
| be captivated by the search for extraterrestrial life. However,
| the key point I want to emphasize is this: Our
| existence proves that life is possible.
|
| While discovering life elsewhere would indeed be extraordinary,
| it is ultimately within the realm of possibility. What would be
| truly remarkable is making such a discovery within our lifetimes
| --that would be the real stroke of luck, rather than the mere
| fact that life exists.
| lisper wrote:
| > Our existence proves that life is possible.
|
| Obviously. But it would still be nice to know how probable or
| improbable it is.
| lockedinspace wrote:
| Yes, and if that occurs during our lifetimes, that's the
| jackpot.
|
| I would guess that now it's quite unlikely, we might be an
| ant colony far, far away from others. Finding specific biota
| or small organisms seems like our most effective approach.
| neaden wrote:
| If life independently started in two places in our solar system
| in fairly different places, then it would be reasonable to
| think that it is fairly common and we would expect it in most
| solar systems. If life only exists on Earth in our solar
| system, then it's more reasonable to think life is fairly rare.
| sidcool wrote:
| I can bet $1000 that Europa at least has a life form that
| represents a virus or bacteria. It may not be similar, but it
| must have a biochemical form.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| You won't be able to collect on this for ~100yr
| tiborsaas wrote:
| Maybe he can make the bet and let the grandchildren collect
| it.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I'd bet it has more than that. Check out all the cool stuff
| they found swimming around in some subsurface lake/river in
| Antarctica... before they popped in a camera it was yet another
| "surely complex life couldn't possibly survive in that"...
|
| The more we look around the more wrong the "surely complex life
| couldn't exist in that" crowd become.
| digging wrote:
| Yes, but also, we don't know where complex life _began_ on
| earth. It probably wasn 't in extreme cold, but who knows.
| Certain extreme environments may be more amenable to
| adaptation than to abiogenesis. There are still just many
| many unknowns, which is why we need more missions like this!
| bbor wrote:
| Random side note: it appears that the scientific journal
| publishing the relevant paper is also publishing this science
| journalism piece, which makes me wonder why I've never seen that
| before.
|
| Why does _Popular Science_ even exist anymore, really? Why don't
| the journals just hire journalists directly? It would presumably
| cut down on clickbait misunderstandings, and it would give the
| journals a tool in the upcoming antitrust litigation against
| them. If the journalism is good enough, the journals might even
| get to net-zero value add someday!!
| pmontra wrote:
| Time to print JPL's poster about Europa
|
| https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/europa-jpl-travel-poster/
| afh1 wrote:
| Kind of clickbait. It will just fly by and remotely probe the
| surface. "We're not a life search mission. We're a habitability
| mission".
| thepuglor wrote:
| I really hope this mission is designed with VR in mind. Obviously
| any feed will be delayed, but it would be amazing if Nasa figured
| out a way to package the vessel approach and other key moments as
| a livestream VR experience. It should feel like the modern
| version of everyone watching the moon landing (not that i was
| there).
|
| They could even create an abstract visualization of the total
| number of people of viewing, so that when you look back into
| outer space you are overwhelmed with the realization that this is
| a moment for all of humanity, not just another stream amongst so
| much drivel.
|
| Best VR use case I can think of!
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| If I had multi-millionaire or billionaire money I'd put a
| satellite in low earth orbit with high definition cameras just
| to livestream the view in VR.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| >Not only is it closer to Earth and easier to visit than
| Enceladus, but evidence suggests its ocean may have existed for
| 4.5 billion years--longer than Earth's oceans
|
| Here's what I don't like. Nothing living appears on Europa's
| surface. In the same 4.5 billion years, Earth went from single-
| cell life to whales, jungles, and humans.
| itchyjunk wrote:
| Implication being if life exists in oceans -> surface life must
| exist in ~4B years? That does seem to be true for Earth I
| guess.
| Etheryte wrote:
| I mean, all of Europa is covered with a thick layer of ice and
| conditions above the ice layer are far from favorable for life.
| I'm not sure why you would expect to see anything on the
| surface?
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Radiation levels on Europa's surface are about 5 Sv in 24
| hours, which is a massive dose; for reference, this is enough
| to kill 50% of humans exposed to it and make the survivors
| extremely ill.
|
| It is also extremely cold (-171C mean) and near-vacuum (100
| nanopascal).
|
| If there is life in Europa and it bears any resemblance
| whatsoever to the biology we know, it simply couldn't exist on
| the surface. Even the hardiest single-celled organisms here,
| which have also had 4.5B years to evolve into uncontested
| niches, could barely survive a limited exposure to these
| factors.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Check out
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiosynthesis_(metabolism)
|
| I do assume this extreme level of cold and vacuum can also be
| acclimated in those 4.x billion years
| ericbarrett wrote:
| Right, this is a possibility--but complex life doing so, in
| vacuum, at 100K? All I'm saying is, knowing what we know
| about chemistry, it seems _extremely_ unlikely.
|
| I'd be ecstatic to be proven wrong empirically, but it
| doesn't make sense to start our search there.
| lizknope wrote:
| I found this table. I picked out a few data points
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert#Dose_examples
|
| 5-10 mSv: One set of dental radiographs
|
| 10-30 mSv: Single full-body CT scan
|
| 80 mSv: 6-month stay on the International Space Station
|
| 1 Sv: Maximum allowed radiation exposure for NASA astronauts
| over their career
|
| 5 Sv: Calculated dose from the neutron and gamma ray flash,
| 1.2 km from ground zero of the Little Boy fission bomb, air
| burst at 600 m
|
| 5.1 Sv: Fatal acute dose to Harry Daghlian in 1945
| criticality accident
|
| He died 25 days later
|
| 54 Sv: Fatal acute dose to Boris Korchilov in 1961 after a
| reactor cooling system failed on the Soviet submarine K-19
| which required work in the reactor with no shielding
|
| He died 6 days later
| maitola wrote:
| "We're not a life search mission. We're a habitability mission,"
| says Robert Pappalardo, Clipper's project scientist at the Jet
| Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manages the mission."
|
| So we are going to wait 7 years, and spend $5B to actually not
| search for life on Europa? Why? Sometimes it feels like Nasa is
| doing everything possible for not searching for life outside
| earth, which would be a game changing discovery for humanity,
| several orders of magnitude more important than the habitability
| of Europa.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| Searching for life to confirm would only be useful if you have
| lots of pocket change. We all know life exists outside the
| solar system, only the biggest ego maniacs will truly believe
| humans are the only life in the universe
| sigzero wrote:
| > We all know life exists outside the solar system, only the
| biggest ego maniacs will truly believe humans are the only
| life in the universe
|
| That statement isn't remotely true and it all depends
| entirely on what you define "life" as being.
| cooper_ganglia wrote:
| I understand the view that life likely exists elsewhere in
| the universe, and I agree that, given the vast number of
| planets and galaxies, it's certainly a plausible idea. The
| sheer scale of the universe, coupled with our growing
| knowledge of exoplanets and extremophiles--organisms that
| thrive in conditions once thought inhospitable to life--makes
| it reasonable to think life could exist beyond Earth.
|
| That being said, I have no logical reason to know life exists
| anywhere else except on this planet. I think it's important
| to differentiate between the likelihood of something and
| claiming certainty about it. While the possibility of
| extraterrestrial life is exciting and worth exploring, until
| we have direct evidence, we can't confidently say it's out
| there.
|
| In fact, we can't even answer the philosophical question, "Do
| other people aside from me even actually exist?" with 100%
| certainty. This brings us to the ironic part: sometimes,
| claiming we know life exists elsewhere can be a reflection of
| the same kind of ego that leads others to believe humanity is
| uniquely special in the universe. Both positions can, in a
| way, stem from an overestimation of our ability to know the
| unknowable.
|
| I think it's great to remain curious and open to discovery,
| but also humble about the limits of our current knowledge. :)
| m3kw9 wrote:
| in math they use a lot of approximations to do calculations
| like limits -> infinity. It's a good enough approximation
| that is almost unrefutable. Also, who has more ego, we are
| the winner of 1 in 10e30, or there is way more winners.
| generic92034 wrote:
| The mass in the observable universe is considered to be
| 10^53 kg. So nothing is going to infinity when it comes
| to life made from matter (or energy).
|
| I am not sure how to talk about things outside the
| observable universe. If light speed provides the ultimate
| limit for causality, this outside might as well not
| exist, from our perspective.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| yes but do they have DNA or something like it? Are we their
| descendants? Are they ours? How much of that life is
| "intelligent" and how much of it is just microbes and stuff?
|
| You are right in that it seems pretty "obvious" that we
| aren't alone... the math is overwhelmingly in favor of it
| being everywhere. But there is a huge distance between the
| math saying it exists and actually looking at it with your
| own eyes.
| crustaceansoup wrote:
| We have a lot of really useful things to learn about life
| away from Earth even if you assume that life exists
| elsewhere.
|
| How common is it? In what environments does it occur?
|
| Does it start the same way everywhere? Does it end up going
| the same directions the same way everywhere? Does it use the
| same metabolic pathways and the same genetic material?
|
| Even just a confirmation without taking samples or deeper
| analysis is enough to start on these questions. Right now we
| can't even really start.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I'm not sure you truly appreciate just what a massive
| engineering challenge that would be. Try to do too many new
| things at once and you end up with the JWST being 2 decades
| late and costing 10x as much as originally projected.
|
| The obstacles are numerous. Even Jupiter's magnetic field is a
| huge problem. There was recent talk that this missions
| electronics may not be sufficiently hardened. Typically, space
| probes to the gas giants will have a highly elliptical orbit to
| mitigate potential radiation damage.
|
| So just surviving in Europa's orbit is a problem. Landing on
| Europa is another huge problem. There's no atmosphere to brake
| into. An icy surface may have crevasses and such and you could
| potentially immediately lose your probe. So how do you land
| safely on ice when you don't know how much weight that surface
| will support? A solution might be to do a burn to slow down and
| do a stationary land but that's also complex and adds a lot of
| weight. Also the engines and the fuel need to survive for 7
| years until they're used.
|
| Conquer all those obstacles and you're now on the surface. Now
| what? The ocea is under kilometers of ice so you can't really
| reach it. You really have to look for a volcano/geyser and you
| have to get to what that produces without being destroyed or
| damaged. Does the ice thin? Is there heat that means the ice
| thins and there's (heated) liquid water underneath? We really
| have no idea.
|
| Finally you get a sample of subsurface ocean water and now
| what? What does life look like? How do you detect that? What
| signatures are you looking for? How do you avoid contamination
| from EArth-based life? That's not as easy as you might think.
|
| The contingencies and redundancies required are jus tmind-
| bogglingly complex.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Jesus the orbital injection alone wasn't something I would
| have thought about. We rely a lot on the atmosphere to break
| our probes. Without that you need to burn just as much fuel
| slowing down as you did speeding up. Well, actually that
| isn't true because your mass is way different so your fuel
| requirements are much, much less than that initial launch but
| still a non trivial amount.
|
| I'm not a space probe engineer but I sometimes wonder if we
| go overboard on specialized compute hardware. I kinda wonder
| if that made more sense "back in the day".... Ingenuity only
| rad hardened microchip is its flight controller. The rest is
| commercial off the shelf "normal hardware".
|
| I dunno... all I know is most people including myself ask the
| same questions as the parent. What the hell are we waiting
| for? Send some shit over there! Let's do this.
| digging wrote:
| > I'm not a space probe engineer but I sometimes wonder if
| we go overboard on specialized compute hardware. I kinda
| wonder if that made more sense "back in the day"
|
| ...Probably not.
| jmyeet wrote:
| > We rely a lot on the atmosphere to break our probes.
|
| Yes and no. The atmosphere on Mars is a great example of
| the worst of both worlds. It's actually worse than having
| no atmosphere at all. It's not enough for aero braking. But
| it's enough to blow corrosive dust all over your solar
| panels and instruments and generally make your life
| miserable.
|
| Of course, aero braking works exceptionally well on Venus
| but it has... other issues.
|
| It did help on Titan though with the Cassini-Huygens probe.
|
| > Without that you need to burn just as much fuel slowing
| down as you did speeding up
|
| Not really. It's... complicated. If you were going between
| two points in the same inertial frame of reference then yes
| you need equal delta-V to slow down at the other end but,
| as you point out, that takes less fuel because your weight
| is lower (although part of your initial delta-V comes from
| the launch vehicle you disposed of).
|
| But the EArth is going around the Sun at ~30km/s. Jupiter
| is going around ~15km/s. Europa is going around Jupiter at
| ~13km/s. So we have to speed up to escape EArth's orbit
| (around the Sun) and the EArth's gravityh well but also
| slow down to match Jupiter's velocity and also avoid
| speeding up too much as Jupiter's gravity well captures
| you.
|
| But the lower orbital speeds of the outer planets is why we
| have never done an orbital insertion on Uranus or Neptune.
| This distance and delta-V requirements put flight times at
| like 10-30 years, depending. Heck, we haven't even done a
| flyby of each and that was back in the 1980s. Saturn is
| kinda of our practical limit for orbital insertion
| currently. And that's expensive and takes a long time.
|
| But Europa having an icy surface is just a huge
| complication. Even if you do a burn to slow down, what's
| the heat on those thrusters going to do once you land? Is
| it going to melt ice and then you immediately drown? How
| thick is the ice? I don't mean overall thickness. I mean
| there may be crevasses and such. Just look at how dangerous
| it is to walk across glaciers.
|
| How will you get traction on ice in relatively low gravity?
| yreg wrote:
| > An icy surface may have crevasses and such and you could
| potentially immediately lose your probe.
|
| I wonder, would it be viable to send multiple probes? What
| cost effect would it have on the mission to build and launch
| an extra one?
|
| I know that e.g. for the Curiosity mission they've built a
| second rover that they've kept on Earth for potential
| troubleshooting. How much more expensive would it be to build
| yet another one and launch two of them?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| You almost wonder if there's budget-politics at work if you
| admit you're looking for alien life to lawmakers tinged by
| Christian fundamentalism.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| NASA is absolutely looking for life in the Solar System. Many
| of the Mars missions have looked for signs of life.
|
| What NASA is not doing is looking for communications from
| intelligent aliens. Why? Because Congress decided in the 1990s
| that that would be a waste of money, and banned NASA from doing
| it.
| Sharlin wrote:
| You seem to have a very naive understanding of the dynamics
| here. Making it a life finder mission would have taken two
| times longer and cost three times more, assuming it wouldn't
| have been cancelled long before that.
|
| NASA is not in charge of its own budget. Neither it is,
| ultimately, in charge of what missions get greenlit. Sure, NASA
| is an inefficient organization in many ways, including planning
| and management practices that never seem to get better despite
| numerous reviews, but honestly it's incredibly difficult to be
| efficient when your bosses sit in the Congress. You don't want
| to know what NASA's Planetary Science division could have
| achieved in the last twenty years with all the billions that
| have gone to the boondoggle that's the Senate Launch System and
| its earlier incarnations.
| stetrain wrote:
| Because a close fly-by probe is something we know how to do,
| and is a much more affordable and achievable goal than a
| mission that would have the true goal of confirming life on
| Europa.
|
| Such a mission would involve landing on an outer solar system
| body with no atmosphere, penetrating 10-15 miles of ice, and
| directly sampling liquid water for microbes. That's a huge
| undertaking that would cost a lot more than $5B. If any part of
| that failed, it would be a pretty bad look for NASA and those
| who voted to fund it, and a negative result still wouldn't mean
| there is no life.
|
| I certainly think that's something we should be attempting to
| do in the future. But an initial close flyby mission is
| something we know we can do with a high probability of success,
| and data gathered from such a mission could build support for a
| more extensive follow-up in the future. The data gathered might
| even make that future mission less expensive and more likely to
| succeed by mapping likely places where the ice is thinner, or
| where tectonic activity pushes water to the surface.
|
| And hey if a microbe in a plume of water happens to land in a
| collection receptacle on this mission, that's just an
| incredible bonus without setting the mission up for
| disappointment.
| sigzero wrote:
| "ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING
| THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE."
|
| Pretty cool to actually be doing this.
| takinola wrote:
| If we were to find DNA based life on Europa, would there be a way
| to tell if it came from Earth, seeded Earth or both came from an
| external source?
| anothername12 wrote:
| LEO WiFi, international space stations testing alfalfa growing in
| zero-g, "space walks" and moon returns. Meh. It's the robotics
| probes like this one, Cassini, and Voyagers that are the exciting
| missions. Far bigger return for science.
| ronsor wrote:
| >LEO WiFi
|
| I missed that one. What?
| tredre3 wrote:
| Probably Starlink. Some people seem to use WiFi as synonymous
| for Internet.
|
| "We must split the wifi bill"
|
| "I don't have wifi at home"
|
| are things I've heard. So, to them, Starlink is a wifi
| provider.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| _" It's the spring of 2031"_
|
| Have to admit I read this and my immediate emotional reaction was
| "that's so far away, that's the far far future" .. and then
| realized, no, no it is not in fact that far away.. and I've just
| ... gotten old.
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Anyone who grew up with artist impressions and scientific guesses
| about Pluto was quite surprised when the first close-up photos of
| Pluto were released. NASA was very wrong about how it looked and
| what it was made of.
|
| The blue we all thought it was came from its atmosphere as seen
| from far away, not because it was an icy world reflecting blue
| light through ice and snow - the ice and snow on its planetary
| surface is a lot more red and brown like Titan because it's
| methane (like on Titan, and presumably by the color of Europa, on
| Europa too).
|
| I know we have high fidelity photos of [a reddish brown] Europa,
| but when I was younger seeing those documentaries of the "oceans
| under the surface" they were always depicted as blue with alien-
| looking dolphins swimming through them. To this day they claim
| it's composed of "water ice", despite being that color in the
| newer high definition photos.
|
| Another commenter here said "it's an awful odd color for ice" -
| it's probably methane, like Pluto and Titan, not water ice. Maybe
| I'm overly skeptical, but just connecting dots.
| LetsGetTechnicl wrote:
| Tbh I think $5 billion is a reasonable amount of money for
| something cool like this. I wish we could shovel the billions of
| dollars we spend on war and destruction into science, and the
| betterment of all humanity. But, alas...
| omegaworks wrote:
| >But, alas...
|
| Please try your best to resist apathy. Contact your
| representative and let them know your priorities, especially in
| light of a looming government shutdown that threatens funding
| to exactly these kinds of initiatives.
| ck2 wrote:
| No matter how careful, I don't see how they don't accidentally
| introduce earth bacteria to other planets and moons?
|
| We have life in practically every hostile location on earth and
| bacteria survive even the most constantly sterilized environments
| like hospitals and clean-rooms?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Why do we need to drill every Km? Sonar is used everywhere in the
| sea and whales can sing toward 15 Km.
| ghostoftiber wrote:
| I missed the A and read E on the end of "europa" and was like "ah
| yes I see you have met the French".
| Phelinofist wrote:
| Reminds of the book by Brandon Q. Morris "Enceladus"
| knowitnone wrote:
| If there is no life, why not plant it?
| diggernet wrote:
| I already know what they'll find..
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Hardness-Minds-Europan-First-Contact-...
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