The icy crust at the south pole of Enceladus has large fissures that allow water from the subsurface ocean to spray into space as geysers, forming a plume of icy particles. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this imagery in 2009, sampled those particles to reveal the chemicals contained in the ocean. Cassini discovered that geyser-like jets spew water vapor and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust of Enceladus. With its global ocean, unique chemistry, and internal heat, Enceladus has shown signs of present-day hydrothermal activity resembling that which occurs in the deep oceans of Earth.
Scientists discovered evidence of Enceladus’ internal ocean from gravity measurements based on the Doppler effect and the magnitude of the moon’s very slight wobble as it. Determining Enceladus’ interior structure is key to understanding its current activity. The mean density of Enceladus (as determined by the Cassini mission to) has shown hints of having a complex internal structure rich in liquid water. In 2017, when it was running low on fuel, Cassini was intentionally vaporized in Saturn’s atmosphere to protect the ocean moons, Enceladus and Titan, where it had discovered habitats potentially.
Cassini observations of endogenic activity on Enceladus are inconsistent with a primordial, undifferentiated, homogeneous ice-rock interior. Understanding the interior structure of 500 km-diameter Enceladus has been a top priority of the Cassini mission since plumes of ice and water have been observed. In 2005, the spacecraft Cassini started multiple close flybys of Enceladus, revealing its surface and environment in greater detail. The presence of an internal liquid water reservoir had been suggested by a series of observations early in the Cassini mission and was ultimately confirmed by the Cassini mission.
The shape of Enceladus deviates slightly from a spheroid, and its mean radius is 252.1 km. While attempts to constrain Dione’s interior structure have been made on the basis of preliminary gravity and shape data obtained by Cassini, the complexity of Enceladus’ interior and its observations have sparked renewed interest in icy satellite interiors.
📹 New discovery!!NASA announces life likely on Enceladus and Titan!!
Yet again, we were wrong about where to look for life in the Solar System. We thought that Titan was an interesting target for …
What did the Cassini space probe discover?
Cassini’s mission to Saturn’s rings revealed the formation of ice chunks and rocks, as well as waves in the rings that revealed Saturn’s interior structure. The outermost ring contains water jets from the moon Enceladus, which contain organic compounds important for the development of living organisms. These compounds make Enceladus a potential destination for extraterrestrial life.
Cassini also discovered hints about the nature of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The spacecraft made 127 flybys of Titan, peering through its dense, hazy atmosphere. The Huygens probe took crucial atmospheric data and sent back pictures from Titan’s surface. These measurements revealed an atmosphere full of complex molecules, clouds of liquid hydrocarbons, and seas of liquid methane and ethane, the only liquid seas found on the surface of any world beyond Earth. They also provided evidence for a liquid water ocean beneath the moon’s surface, making Titan an ideal place to search for alien life.
What did Cassini discover about Enceladus?
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has observed water-vapour plumes in Saturn’s moon Enceladus, resembling geysers on Earth. The plumes, which were observed three times in 2005, were dominated by water, with significant amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. The plumes, which eject large quantities of particles at high speed, were observed in a confined region of the south pole. The observations suggest that underground reservoirs of liquid water may be involved.
What did Cassini discover about the composition of Saturn’s rings?
Cassini discovered that Saturn’s E-ring, a diffuse ring outside the main rings, is primarily made up of material from the moon Enceladus, which vents icy particles and gas into space. Most of Saturn’s inner moons orbit within rings made of particles blasted off the moons’ surfaces by micrometeoroid impacts. Cassini also discovered features resembling propellers, sometimes several thousand miles long, produced by the gravitational influence of moonlets, lumps of ring material estimated to be half a mile in diameter.
These moonlets launch surrounding ring particles hundreds of feet above and below the ring, creating the features Cassini observed. The ring particles are kicked up in a gravitational interaction, causing wake to form both behind and in front of the moonlet as it orbits. Linda Spilker, project scientist for the Cassini mission, described the interaction as “like water moving in two different directions around the moonlet”.
What features did the Cassini spacecraft have?
Cassini, a spacecraft with 12 scientific instruments, included imaging cameras, radar, spectrometers, and magnetometers. The 5. 6-tonne Cassini-Huygens probe, consisting of six instrument packages, made four gravity-assist swing-by manoeuvres around Venus, Earth, and Jupiter. In December 2004, the probe was ejected on a 22-day cruise to Titan, reaching it on 14 January 2005. The Cassini-Huygens probe was the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built, and gravity-assists from two swing-bys of Venus and one of Earth provided the equivalent of 68, 040 kilograms of rocket fuel.
ESA scientists woke the probe every six months to check its well-being during the journey to Saturn. The Huygens probe can withstand temperatures of up to 18, 000°C in front of the heat shield, and the heat generated as it traveled through Titan’s thick gas atmosphere was immense. Titan, one of the most mysterious objects in our Solar System, is the second largest moon and the only one with a thick, methane-rich, nitrogen atmosphere, which experts believe resembles that of a very young Earth.
What did Voyager discover about Enceladus?
The Voyager spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, made the first close-up images of Enceladus in 1980. Voyager 1 flew past Enceladus at a distance of 202, 000 km, revealing a highly reflective surface with no impact craters. It also confirmed that Enceladus was embedded in Saturn’s diffuse E ring, suggesting that the E ring was composed of particles venting from the surface.
Voyager 2 passed closer to Enceladus (87, 010 km) in 1981, allowing higher-resolution images. These images showed a young surface with different regions with vastly different surface ages, contrasting with the ancient, heavily cratered surface of Mimas. This geological diversity surprised the scientific community, as no theory could predict such activity in a small and cold celestial body.
The answers to Enceladus’s mysteries were delayed until the arrival of the Cassini spacecraft in 2004. Based on the Voyager 2 images, Enceladus was considered a priority target by Cassini mission planners. The flybys have yielded significant information about Enceladus’s surface, as well as the discovery of water vapor with traces of simple hydrocarbons venting from the geologically active south polar region.
What have researchers discovered about the Moon Enceladus?
Scientists have discovered evidence of chemistry that could sustain life on Enceladus’ ocean, suggesting that the combination of carbon dioxide, methane, and hydrogen in the plume could be methanogenesis, a metabolic process that produces methane. This process is widespread on Earth and may have been critical to the origin of life on our planet. However, new research has revealed evidence for more powerful and diverse energy sources beyond methanogenesis.
The authors found an array of organic compounds that were oxidized, indicating that there are many chemical pathways to potentially sustain life in Enceladus’ subsurface ocean. The ocean of Enceladus might offer something more akin to a car battery, capable of providing a large amount of energy to any life that might be present.
What did Giovanni Cassini discover about Saturn?
Gian Domenico Cassini was an Italian-born French astronomer who discovered the Cassini Division, the dark gap between Saturn’s rings A and B, and four of Saturn’s moons. He was the first to record observations of the zodiacal light. Cassini’s early studies focused on the Sun, but after obtaining more powerful telescopes, he turned his attention to the planets. He was the first to observe the shadows of Jupiter’s satellites and measured Jupiter’s rotational period.
In 1666, he found the value of 24 hours 40 minutes for Mars’s rotational period, which is now 24 hours 37 minutes 22. 66 seconds. Cassini also compiled a table of Jupiter’s satellite positions, which was used by Danish astronomer Ole Rømer in 1675 to establish the speed of light is finite. He wrote several memoirs on flood control and experimented extensively in applied hydraulics. King Louis XIV of France invited Cassini to join the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1669.
What did NASA discover about Enceladus?
Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, is a promising lead in our search for life-sustaining planets due to its unique chemistry and internal heat. Dramatic plumes spray water ice and vapor along the “tiger stripes” near the south pole. Before Cassini arrived, planetary explorers only had hints of life at Enceladus. Voyager spacecraft images in the 1980s showed its icy surface being smooth and bright white, making it the most reflective body in the solar system.
How close did Cassini get to Enceladus?
Cassini conducted two close flybys of Enceladus in March and April, but no signs of plumes or an atmosphere were found. However, one of the instruments, the magnetometer instrument (Mag), observed a peculiar feature around the moon. The Mag observed that Saturn’s magnetic field lines were being draped upstream of Enceladus, creating an obstacle larger than the moon itself. This finding highlights the ongoing negative results of Cassini’s mission.
What did Giovanni Cassini discover?
Gian Domenico Cassini was an Italian-born French astronomer who discovered the Cassini Division, the dark gap between Saturn’s rings A and B, and four of Saturn’s moons. He was the first to record observations of the zodiacal light. Cassini’s early studies focused on the Sun, but after obtaining more powerful telescopes, he turned his attention to the planets. He was the first to observe the shadows of Jupiter’s satellites and measured Jupiter’s rotational period.
In 1666, he found the value of 24 hours 40 minutes for Mars’s rotational period, which is now 24 hours 37 minutes 22. 66 seconds. Cassini also compiled a table of Jupiter’s satellite positions, which was used by Danish astronomer Ole Rømer in 1675 to establish the speed of light is finite. He wrote several memoirs on flood control and experimented extensively in applied hydraulics. King Louis XIV of France invited Cassini to join the Académie des Sciences in Paris in 1669.
What are 3 things Cassini investigated about Saturn and its moons?
Cassini’s decade-long mission allowed Cassini to observe Saturn’s dynamic ring system, discover propeller-like formations, and witness the birth of a new moon. The spacecraft also observed Saturn’s F ring, which may be one of the most active and chaotic rings in our solar system. Titan’s geologic processes are similar to Earth’s, generating methane rains, building river channels, and forming lakes and seas with liquid methane and ethane.
In 2010, Saturn’s atmosphere experienced a massive storm, which arrived 10 years early, causing the largest temperature increases ever recorded for any planet. The storm diminished shortly after its head collided with its tail, less than a year after it began.
📹 The First Real Images of Enceladus – What Have We Discovered?
At first glance, it looks like a giant mothball – Enceladus, the sixth largest of Saturn’s moons. Since the Cassini space probe sent …
The best argument thus far for equipping a Starship with 100 metric tons of generalized instruments and several probes of various types so you can study things you didn’t expect to find. Recover the ship or not, use all the instruments or not, it will probably be more efficient in terms of both time and money than our current “study what you expect to find” model. It takes years to design specialist instrument packages and more years to select “the right launch platform” and nearly a decade to get there with the second package. Adopt something of the Soviet model: a collection of pre-built instrument packages that be used in “mix-n-match” fashion to do basic research. Withh 100+ metric ton capacity in nearly 1000 cubic meters of volume, you ought to ba able to assemble enough basic instruments to do some extraordinary science on the unexpected finds. If you have the instruments you need to study those unexpected finds on board, you simply need to activate them. Send fewer but far more capable missions and accelerate data acquisition. Put it together, launch it, refuel in LEO as necessary and get a megapackage of instruments on the way. Prepare for rivers of data…
As soon as I get my next paycheck I’m sending some your way. For far too long I’ve enjoyed and engaged with your content in a manner that ultimately turned into my own creative content. Literally became a published author a year ago from being inspired by your enthusiasm for science as well as your skepticism of everything. I wrote a book teaching my son about rocketry, the planets, alien species and ultimately crash landing in our backyard just in time for supper! Thank you sir, seriously.. thank you.
0:15 NASA has found evidence of life… 0:22 Life may exist. You see the problem here? Edit: in case you didn’t get, evidence is evidence, there’s life. When the evidence may suggest life may exist it is not evidence. It is a clue, a hint. But when you are not a scientist, you can say anything because anything can be used to your narrative, you are not constrained by pesky scientific logic.
7:20 Picking up the spectrographic telltale of life. Do you know what they are? Because I am acquainted with spectroscopy and I can tell it is difficult to tell. Before you can try to find evidence, not just another clue, you have to know the geology of the environment, else you will find yourself with yet another inconclusive clue for life, just like the Viking Labeled Release experiments. The Viking mission also had Gas chromatograph / mass spectrometer, way better than just “spectrographic telltale” and yet it wasn’t conclusive. I wish you could do some crash course on the scientific method to understand what I am talking about.
So many surprises during exploration right in our solar system. Probes sent with tools for single types of expectations then “whoa,” didn’t expect that! When Voyagers were their way a scientist had to really push to get the probes to look at the Jovian moons. I remember his later interview. The team was solely focused on Jupiter. “Moons? Dusty globes like our “moon?” Boring. ” In the end he convinced them and the rest is history, as they say.
So I guess we can’t say much about what’s hiding under the ice surface of Enceladus. It might be nothing, some bacteria, more complex multicellular life or at the extreme a big brain of neuronal cells spanning the whole moon and making it the smartest lifeform in our solar system ^^ The obvious solution to get rid of the speculation is of course a lander and some drilling device. Maybe such a lander and a little laboratory on it becomes more probably when Starship finally becomes operational and costs for such landers go down. Also the time such landers need to reach Enceladus can be reduced by years when they can carry more fuel with them so they don’t need to play planet pong to accelerate. Thanks for the article!
Why is the existence of life being ubiquitous such an extraordinary claim? Each generation of scientist concluded that their understanding was at the limits of all scientific understanding, yet each generation has been proven wrong by the next generation. Maybe this fact should be their guiding principle rather than “extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof”, just a thought?
9:28 “a real chemical sniffer” 🤣 You mean better than a gas chromatographer to separate the molecules of a mixture and then perform mass spectroscopy in each sample separated by the chromatographer, just like the failed Viking experiments? When I worked with a chromatographer it was a pain*** to calibrate for my sample because people calibrated it for other samples before me. Without knowing the geology and complexities of the samples, how do you propose to calibrate those? Oh, sorry you can’t propose anything because you don’t know the science behind it, just like those morons at NASA, right?
I would be interesting if life in our solar system has the same code as ALL life on earth. (which sets of 3 nucleic acids correspond to the 20 different aminoacids, that are used to build proteins) It would suggest “a creation of life event” is very rare! And that life might not even exist outside our solar system.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof” has become an unhealthy scientific bias. All evidence should be followed impartially to the most obvious and logical conclusions. The guiding scientific standard should be Occam’s Razor, “The simplest explanation is the most likely to be true.” I see skeptics dancing a jig with outlandish, unsupported and totally unproven alternative explanations to any chemical indications of life. If there’s a 2% chance that methane is being produced non-biologically that’s already a bad bet. If there’s also a 2% chance the hydrogen reading is incorrect plus a 2% chance there MIGHT be a nonbiological reason for the depletion of acetylene then alien life becomes the logical and likely conclusion. The skeptics claiming there are alternative explanations for those discoveries become the ones who are making extraordinary claims WITHOUT extraordinary proof. Everyone in the scientific community should be held to the same standards of proof. Why are no SCIENTISTS pointing this out to the general public? What does the PREPONDERANCE of data indicate regarding life on Enceladus? That is the primary question.
First of all, when looking for scientific information DON’T rely on the popular media when the original scientific papers are available. In this case the paper, Detection of HCN and diverse redox chemistry in the plume of Enceladus by Jonah S. Peter (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California and, Biophysics Program, Harvard University, Boston, Massachusetts) and Tom A. Nordheim (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California) and Kevin P. Hand (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California), published December 14, 2023 by the peer reviewed scientific publication nature astronomy. Basically, they had a graph of the spectrum from the plume collected above Enceladus. It is no list of materials present. It is basically the signatures of elements found in there with the amplitudes of the signals showing relative abundance of these atomic structures found. There are multiple mixtures of gasses which could result in the same spectrum. This makes identification of the gasses inside a statistical exercise. They’re applied the most universally accepted and recent methods. This has resulted in a list, with associated probabilities of these molecules actually being present in the plume, plus a very interesting collection of provisos and cautions. With 100% probability, water, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide (with an asterisk), methane, ammonia and hydrogen cyanide have been found in the plume.
I always wonder about this so-called evidence that cuz that’s just what they call everything, but is it proof positive that something’s going on and they just don’t want to say it. I agree with you 1000% that life is probably as common as gravity. I personally believe that when we finally have the correct sensors to detect life we will literally find it everywhere we look literally everywhere in some form or fashion be a microbe or something that will be life literally teeming everywhere. There are probably a lot of Lifestyles that exist in a manner that we cannot even imagine right now because we’ve just got our own version of what life is.
One has to be a little careful about speculating about multi-cellular life, basically because the first life-forms on Earth produced oxygen as a waste-product. The conditions under which life formed were more akin to that of a much larger warmed-up version of Titan. So for over a billion years most life-forms vented oxygen into a Titan-like Earth atmosphere. This worked well enough during that time, as the oxygen was taken up by elements like iron, and kept the concentration of oxygen manageable. However, this could not go on forever. The proliferation of living oxygen-producing organisms coupled with the ending of the oxidation process as there was simply no more oxidation possible, led to a huge increase in the concentration of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere. As most life was poisoned by oxygen, a huge amount of it died off. Only some hardy types survived. The time is estimated to be around 2.6 billion years ago, and is called the Great Oxygenation Event. The reason I see fit to mention this is because we now have severed the link in the chain of events which led to the origin of life. From then on, most life on Earth would utilise oxygen, and the atmosphere was no longer filled with hydrocarbon gases. What AA has not said is that multicellular organisms (if any) on Enceladus and Titan would have had to deal with this transition. It could well be that some other oxidation processes are still at work, or maybe not. Or that these are just the musings of an over-active imagination.
The problem is getting into the actual ocean of these moons, even if all of them deserve a mission with the right equipment one day. Most of them are expected to have oceans deep under the icy crust, be it Titan, Ganymedes, Ceres or Pluto. But as Angry mentioned, Titan might have different more alien type of life. A probe with the right equipment flying through plumes of Enceladus could detect what’s inside. It could even collect pieces of ice and return it to Earth for further study. It’s been done with asteroid and a comet, plumes of ice are a child’s play compared to that! Catch them, encapsule to prevent the contamination, deliver to Earth for further study. Maybe there are frozen alien archebacteria. More interesting would be finding active plumes on Europa or at least weak spots for some more advanced probe, but that’s closer to sending Starship with large lander which would have all the equipment needed. NASA could make it work even with Falcon Heavy, but the problem is funding.
the search for life must always go on and life can never be found because then the search fro life would be over. the day NASA discovers life is the day their funding is cut, it is this belief why NASA will look for signs of life but never look in a way it can be found. aliens could walk in to NASA head quarters saying this is our version of DNA, our history, our technology, we come in peace, and for sure good old fashion government corruption would assure the aliens never walked out and vanished with out a trace. the most evil things are done by middle management just trying to pay bills and keep it all going as normal.
What science was applied to determine that extraplanetary life is “extraordinary”. (Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof). The drake equation is rational math and suggests that there should be plenty of technologically advanced life in the universe. Hence, it’s not extraordinary. And the simple answer to the question everyone asks is that “science” is looking for the wrong things and ignoring or misunderstanding the things they have found.
All very well, but your complaint that NASA didn’t put a chemical laboratory on Cassini so they could have analysed the ice plumes that they didn’t yet know about is a case of 20/20 hindsight. Every gram of payload costs a great deal of money and rocket power to send to the outer Solar System, and adding a chem lab would have resulted in some other instrument being omitted. Given what we know now it’s unfortunate that they didn’t, but regretting things that can’t be changed is somewhat pointless.
Extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary evidence – that is nothing more than a Carl Sagan sound bite that has no basis in science at all. It is unfortunate that that sound bite caught on in popular culture to the point that even some scientists quote it (when they want to ignore something). The truth is that the scientific method requires that the experimental methodology be freely shared so that it can be determined if results are REPRODUCIBLE. If a boring result is eminently reproducible in a carefully designed experiment that is reproduced across the globe, that result must be taken seriously! A tiny flaw in the calculation of the time of Mercury’s orbit – a flaw that was known and essentially ignored for many, many decades, disappeared when a relativistic correction was made to the math, this allowed a transit to be accurately predicted by several observing teams. This very minor correction to a slight inaccuracy in Mercury’s orbit was all that was needed for Einstein’s relativity to be taken seriously, It really was a small piece of evidence, meaningless for a single observation – but Einstein’s theory gained credence every single time a prediction was made and the measurement was confirmed in a reproducible manner. One of my professors was a colleague of Prof. Sagan – I missed a chance of giving him a piece of my mind for creating that misleading homily. Edited to correct punctuation.
I seriously doubt there is any form of life living on the surface of Titan, and this evidence is from stuff that has likely percolated to the surface from subsurface organisms living in subsurface liquid water. I’m gonna put my credentials on the line making that statement, as I’m a Physical Chemist and will state that any sort of reactions capable of methaneogenesis simply will take thousands of years to complete a single reaction at the ambient temperatures involved. Reaction rates depend on the temperature and approach zero at the surface temperature of Titan. I wouldn’t rule out a subsurface ocean on Titan, and I believe there is probably some life forms inside Enceladus’, as icey ocean well as the Jovian moon Europa. I’m a devout believer in the NASA doctrine of “Follow the Water.”
Titan has everything we need for colonisation, all you need is good insulation and an oxygen supply to walk around on the surface. Low escape velocity and low atmospheric entry speed means coming and going is a piece of cake. Enceladus is relatively young at ~ 1 billion years. Europa is a more likely canidate for life, as it’s been cooking for 4.5 billion years. It’s also a lot closer. Saturn is almost twice as far. I feel the easier and more juicy target is being overlooked at times.
I keep an open mind on the possibility of life on Enceladus and Titan. I don’t want to be dogmatic and say for certain whether there is life there or not. We shall need to send more probes to both places and to continue research before giving a yes or no answer. It is true extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence. Whether that evidence will eventually turn up remains to be seen. But, regardless about the existence or otherwise of life, both are absolutely fascinating worlds and need to be explored further, starting with the Dragonfly drone mission to Titan launching in about 2028. I am certainly looking forward to the data and information it will send back (if, of course, it is successful) which will be very exciting indeed.
As to your comment on why NASA did not put instruments to detect life on the probe, lots of reasons. A) controversy, you hit it on the head with your extraordinary claims. comment. B) cost of any instrument is massive to get there. C) opportunity cost, you only have so much space and so, so many experiments, who gets on? D) If you find life or something that might be, well you start taking funding away from other groups that might want to study other things. In other words scientific turf wars. Understandable in that not getting one’s experiment on a mission to prove the theory one has spent their entire career on could be the end … of … one’s … career. Those fights are for one’s very survival.
First impressions count. I recall you explaining “why the sun glasses”. Unfortunately new viewers will judge quickly and miss your awesome content. Put a tag on the start of all the articles for a couple minutes with a brief explanation for those individuals. I’m saying that because I originally wondered but still watched everything. That’s just me.
There is the Dragonfly Mission to Titan and Europa Clipper, there is no money at Nasa to finance other spacecrafts to visit every potential moons near the gas giants. I would rather finance deep space telescope missions to map and detect exoplanet’s surfaces in detail, like the solar gravitational lens telescope.
They dont really want to prove there is life everywhere else. This is why they drag their feet and do dumb ish, and say, “Oh we didnt know or think about ______!” Fill in the blanks. We humans have a superiority complex, and whenever the fact that we are not the only life in the universe is brought up, it triggers us. I have no idea why but it does.
I love your work, great stuff, and agree with most of this article, but I have to give a small nitpick: Enceladus only has 1% as much liquid water as Earth. It’s tiny – even though the ocean is very thick compared to Earth’s oceans, it’s wrapped around a tiny sphere 500 km across. Europa has twice as much liquid water as Earth, and Titan has twenty times as much, so for most ocean worlds, you’d be right. But not Enceladus. Enceladus is small. EDIT: To calculate the volume of water in an extraterrestrial ocean, just approximate the ocean as the difference between nested spheres with radii at the top and bottom of the ocean. For Enceladus, the top radius is about 252-20 ≈ 230, and the bottom radius is about 180 km from gravity studies. This gives a 50 km thick ocean with volume of 26.5 million cubic kilometers, about 1.9% of Earth’s total of 1.4 billion cubic kilometers. However, measurements of the core radius have some error, as do measurements of the ice shell thickness. For a 30 km thick ice shell and 200 km core, the ocean is just 20 km thick, with a volume of 11 million cubic kilometers, just 0.8% of Earth’s total.
Considering the fact that these ice worlds have cryovolcanism going on, it is clear that there has been panspermian exchange of organic materials going on throughout the solar system for billions of years. And given the age of the Universe itself, there clearly has to be a huge exchange of biological material moving around the galaxy and even intergalactic space, seeding new worlds all the time. One wonders how much of Earth’s life is from other worlds. Similarly, one wonders how much Earth life has made the jump to other worlds as well. One thing is certain: NASA absolutely knows that life exists out there and their coverup of the Viking lander life experiments and the 1997 Mars rock life announcement that was also walked back is nothing if not criminal. The public is paying for all of this science and if life has been detected, then this needs to be openly discussed with the public rather than being kept for the secret benefit of a few power tripping people.
“Likely” is a bit of hyperbole. “Not impossible” is about as strong a claim as anybody can make from the data; previously we didn’t know for certain that a chemical energy cycle capable of supporting life was available on the frozen moons, but now there’s a possible metabolic chain that could support life within liquid methane. No evidence for life actually existing, no guesses at the probability, just a tidbit of evidence that means we can’t rule out the possibility.
I am strongly of the opinion they haven’t gone to check it out properly (in literally forty years of holding pattern) is because it’ll still probably just be a scratch sniff test they’ll have to drill down and see if they can catch a few simple living biological molecules. So what it really means is the mission gets there and go’s off without a hitch, they’ll both have to say yes, there’s life. We need to redraw our statistics on everything and here is a chart proving it. and then they’ll have to say: No, we cannot give you a picture of a weird fish or anything else. Putting an actual working submarine drone camera down a large drilled hole and finding something bigger, is still not possible. But it should be, we’ve known we wanted this checked out since the 90’s and the evidence has only mounted since. So logically, they haven’t bothered because they know the answer from other means. They dont want to spend the money answering a question they already know the answer for. and even if they could, I no longer believe they would. Someone somewhere would be like “what? the chances some weird, electronic looking, glowing hyper fish swims up to the camera live on Nasa stream…? No, no.. We’ll want a thirty minute delay so we can say the submersible was crushed and make the whole thing classified.’
Second comment but I have an idea how they can get through in the Villages or any of these moons down to see if there’s water I got the idea looking at those canisters falling from the Lander but what if they were thermal canisters of some kind that would burn well not really burn but just be hot and just melt through the ice put them down in a bit of a circle or something on the surface and just wait. Think about a thermal grenade currently used by the US military. Several of something like that, which could burn for days and days. Take enough that say they melt down 100 feet but burn out, you can drop more in the newly melted hole. Do it until there is either a water eruption or there is nothing…find out. Or he’ll, they could just drop napalm in the hole, subtract any chemicals that are poisonis, or even a nuke, with the radiation stuff not a part of it, just the entense heat from these things. We have that tech right now!!! It’s obsird to plan to…drill…it’s likely 100s of miles of ice.
I’ve been thinking about these moons alot ever since they made those discoveries, if there is life in any of em, it might resemble our marine life, but the thought of exploring those moons seems so scary, claustrophobia to the max, not to mention my fear of being in a deep dark ocean is just insanely terrifying, would make for a good scifi horror movie though.
If life is there it must be everywhere, I’d like to know the math on that (maybe it depends on seeding rather that abiogenesis on separate worlds). If simple microbes are everywhere the likelihood of eukaryotes is as well and thereafter complex life and technological life. If technological life is common statistically then AI machine civilizations must be more likely. Maybe we are really being visited by many civilizations. I know that’s a lot of jumps in logic but it bears analysis.
We may already have encountered extraterrestrial life in the form of Tardigrades; given everything that we know about them, they could survive in vacuum, in high radiation environments and in areas that extremophiles find quite comfortable. As it turns out, they can survive planetary type impacts as well. This data gives rise to the idea that we were colonized as opposed to strictly evolving here. And that leads me to a possible reason that NASA as well as other organizations do not focus on searching for life elsewhere; what happens with theistic religions if it’s proven that our little ball of mud and rock aren’t special, that life is everywhere? that we are in no way unique? It very well might accelerate the move away from those types of religions, and there are those with a vested interest in seeing that interpretation go unchallenged.
Here’s a thought; Man has only set foot on one planet, Earth. Not talking about the moon or any probes but actual planets upon which man has observed in person. So in reality of all of man’s planetary experiences life exists 100%. It would be more extraordinary to discover life is not common than it would be to discover it everywhere…
I do not believe that PROOF of alien life will ever (at least not in my life time) be presented to the regular people of Earth. I have a philosophy that we live in a dull, boring, monotonous world where nothing interesting ever happens. If something sounds too interesting to be true then it is. We won’t find proof of alien life for the same reason we won’t find a cure for cancer. Nothing interesting ever happens. Its part of why science fiction movies are so popular because real life is not interesting at all.
I love how calm Mr. Jordan is in his delivery with this news. This is HUGE! I think AA is the hardest working, widest ranging (both physically and subject wise) space journalist out there! One of the highlights of the year for me in 2023 was meeting Mr. Wright in person in Pittsburgh while on his book tour and I recommend that anyone who likes space to tell their friends about him so that we can get this guy closer to a million subscribers. God speed Mr. Angry!!
It’s so arrogant for people to believe we’re the only intelligent life in the universe. The universe is so vast we can’t even see it all. It’s also possible for life to exist completely different from here on earth. As for something visiting here, it’s possible. But possibly not them themselves. Like us, they would probably use drones, much like voyager and the Mars Rover. Also, concerning something so advanced that we’d be of no interest to them, I don’t believe that. No matter how advanced a civilization has become, there will always be a scientific curiosity.
For an educational website you should really check your facts don’t ever say anything within our solar system is 9 light years away from us considering the solar system itself is probably only four light years across making anything about two light years away from us at most Enceladus about nine light minutes away or just over one astronomical unit
10:09: ‘Of course, researchers worldwide are now particularly interested in the moon, which is about 9 light years away from us’. EXCUSE ME??? Saturn (and therefore its moons) is about 790,384,156 miles distant from the Earth; whereas 1 light year ~ 5,865,696,000,000 miles. There’s a slight notational discrepancy here!!!
I have been fascinated by outer space since I heard President Kennedy say that we should go to the moon when I was 3yrs old. I am still fascinated, so Yes spend the money. But that is a totally selfish statement. Spend some on space to keep learning about our surroundings but make sure you take care of OUR planet first. Question : is it possible for a gas planet to be so pressurized and compacted that the surface would be firm enough to walk on. I assume that so much pressure would crush us but hypothetically is it possible. Learn and share. 🌎🌘🌏🌖🌍🌗🌜🌚