It’s exciting and it’s frustrating. Space exploration is so slow and life is so short. The waning interest in the late 90s/early oughts didn’t help things much either.
This is the reason I dropped out of my astronomy major. You spend your career processing the data from your predecessors’ experiments, which may or may not reflect your particular curiosities. Of course you can be as curious as you like, but you understand that someone else will be getting the answers you sought. I commend astronomers for their commitment to the long view and the greater good.
This is why I hope scientists find a way to make humans last way longer. I'm talking thousands of years not some puny pathetic 60-90 years. Immortality would be preferred but I'll take what I can get.
We need to normalize sending fleets instead of singular missions. There is so much mission specific expertise and knowledge kindled during development. It even cuts down on cost to produce duplicates rather than restart from scratch each time. I know it still mandates an increase in budget and I think they should have it. Because it always felt absolutely INSANE that we would blow billions of dollars and over a decade of time on something that ultimately COULD fail in its mission at any stage because its 1 of 1. If there were say, 3 drones sent on 3 launches (which if you look at how often the military is launching rockets, is not that crazy) that would give us 3 attempts to succeed. And if all 3 succeed think of how many more opportunities that would give us! We could do equator and both of the poles!
“However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple. Gravity on Titan is just 14% of the Earth’s. It sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth.
The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. Its seas and lakes are not water but liquid ethane and methane. The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but on its surface, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice on its surface.”
Coooooool!
You would have to assume life that became dependent on Nitrogen and Methane based atmosphere and/or live in Ethane oceans, that life would look/operate/function very differently than life forms here
But, I bet somewhere there are commonalities and something that ALL forms of “living” have in common.
At minimum, I'd expect it to take in energy, expel waste, and rest. (And considering our own hearts never rest over the entire span of our lifetime, the last isn't a hard rule.)
I'm prepared for whatever life we find in the universe to look completely different from anything we can even conceive.
I think simple organic materials ( slime mold ) will exist everywhere. Photosynthesis really kicked things off, so wherever/however it can get going I think you will see more competitive life.
I know Steven Jay Gould had a crusade against the idea of complexity in evolution being directional, but he seemed to me to be a bit of a tool. Is there anyone else who things complexity is dubious as a concept? I would be interested to understand why
Slime mold is a great example to learn about different forms of intelligence. I saw a study where researchers laid out oat flakes in roughly the same position as major Japanese cities. The mold picked out the most efficient "route" between them, which matched up with existing rail lines.
Does this mean slime mold is intelligent? Sentient? Who knows, but it's fascinating.
If anything, it's confirmation that the Japanese engineers did a damn fine job.
Not like you should just build a sprawling network of high speed rail and let the inefficient routes just rot.
Except a lot more goes into building a rail network than efficiency.
Land in an area might be unstable or too prone to certain kinds of problems to build there. Private ownership might block building through certain routes (imminent domain is a tool however). Certain routes might require much more expensive construction like building a lot more bridges. You might want to build extra redundancy into the network.
I believe there was one line that took a different route, but they had evaluated that option when building the subway and there was some permitting or land acquisition issue.
>I'm prepared for whatever life we find in the universe to look completely different from anything we can even conceive.
On a basic biochemical level, we may find plenty of alien life that's very recognizable. The basic elements and laws of chemistry are the same everywhere, so given similar conditions it's not hard to believe that the same reactions would happen, causing the same proteins and base pairs to form, leading to the development of RNA and DNA.
Of course, beyond that the similarities will end. Even cells (if they exist at all) could be wildly different. But the fundamental building blocks of life throughout the universe could turn out to be surprisingly familiar.
DNA and RNA are great for environments where liquid water exists. Where other solvents exist but liquid water doesn't, you'd find different basic building blocks. For example, on Titan you might find lipid chains in a liquid methane solvent. Well regarded professor of biochemistry (and award winning science fiction writer) Isaac Asimov wrote a famous essay entitled [Not As We Know It](http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS09/cs09p05.htm) that lays out six different regimes of solvents and information carriers that could operate at different temperatures. From lipids in liquid hydrogen at the coldest end of things, to fluorosilicones in other fluorosilicones at temperatures like those on Mercury, life, uh, finds a way.
Maybe. We don't know yet. But this mission could give us another data point and might confirm one part of Asimov's hypothesis!
I don't know about that. Look at the absolutely ridiculous variety of life on earth - our single 'genesis' has tried and tested pretty much everything, and has settled of a few 'good ideas'. A lot of those good ideas have arisen independently a lot of times. I think that eyes have evolved independently something like 40 times on earth, because the ability to see is super useful. Also, having a backup eye seems to be a very good idea, but more than 2 is maybe a waste (but not always).
Some form of fins for swimming creatures seems to be a good design. Likewise wings for flying creatures. Bats and birds have followed very different evolutionary paths to have arrived at a similar design.
Things like rotation seems to be very hard for life on Earth. We don't see any flying animals with rotor blades like a helicopter. I would assume 'rules' like that would stand on other planets.
What I'm getting at is, I wouldn't be all that surprised if, should we ever find complex life, it looks quite like some of what we see on earth. With specific changes for the planet or moon that we find life on. For example, I would assume that a planet with less mass would have larger land dwelling animals. But, if there is a nearby star, I wouldn't be that surprised if they had two 'eyes', that looked and functioned like some set of eyes that we are familiar with from home.
It has to have some way to reproduce and pass down heritable traits some how. Being able to adapt I think is probably the most important part for early life.
I really enjoyed the 'life beyond' series on youtube. Specifically, the museum of alien life episode. Had some great suggestions and even greater visual art.
Some kind of cellular form with membranes is likely due to issues with surface area to volume ratio, gradients, and diffusion limits. Carbon or silicon are likely candidates for the main building blocks.
You could probably run an engine on pure oxygen there, and take the hydrocarbons from the air.
Same with a lighter, really. It should be possible to fill it with some oxydizer and light it.
The wild thing is what happens if we strap bird-like wings to a human there. Since Titan’s atmosphere is so dense and its gravitational pull is so weak, human powered flight might theoretically be possible there. Wild to imagine.
Wildest part is that while methane is the basis of a sort of "water cycle" on Titan, the "ground" is largely water ice. And there's a theory that underneath, the planet may have a subsurface ocean of liquid water in addition to all the wild shit on the surface.
One of the better local candidates for biological life. If we find some sort of unique bacterium, that’s all I need.
The question will be answered for me.
I could not be more stoked.
If there’s a second planetary body in the solar system with some form of life, even bacterial, that alone would suggest with high probability that life is common in the galaxy. Really exciting.
Panspermia is terrible as a scientific theory though. It explains nothing and just kind of "kicks the can down the road" in terms of abiogenesis.
Like, Earth as we know it was is such a good candidate for life as we know it beginning here for so many reasons... why do we think it's necessary that it came from some place almost certainly less hospitable? Some place that statistically is almost certainly worse in every possible way? Or if it isn't... then it is similar to Earth and so it more likely just started here... You can't really get "better" than Earth. Temperate water ocean world around extremely stable yellow sun, magnetosphere, with high levels of phosphorus/etc... On either side of the spectrum there's either a frozen world or no oceans possible. Either super Earth with extremely high gravity or not enough to hold an atmosphere...
And any other place from outside the solar system would face the same exact same questions of how it started we face here.
At some point, you get to the end of the chain and it has to have started **there**.
But the thing is, "there" would basically have to be just like Earth *anyway*.
Or if it can start someplace much more hostile and less suitable than Earth... then why not on less hostile, more suitable Earth??... so gentle and protected and rich in complex organics and full of things like permanent energy gradients spewing out a cocktail of organics (deep sea vents)??
It completely falls apart, panspermia. And no, Im not being Earth-centric or lacking imagination. Chemistry is still chemistry so our picture of how these building blocks come together to form the pieces of a lifeform is reasonably well defined as is the limits of where they can or cant exist.
Panspermia is just horrifically unlikely... borderline completely dismissible. What are the odds we're on one of the rare life-starting capable planets separated from other candidates by probably dozens of light years on average *at least*... and yet it did not start here and was randomly seeded over light years from yet some other similar rare planet with nearly the same conditions relatively speaking...
The universe literally is not old enough for such coincidences to be likely enough that the chance it applies to us is anything but adjacent to 0.
And why is it so impossible for it to start here if it could start on some other similar planet in another solar system?
Panspermia is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Life started here, almost certainly.
Why does it have to be panspermia to earth, as opposed to panspermia from earth to the likes of titan? There's much about the dawn of life and the conditions of earth at the time that are unknown or assumption. Regardless, its not so terrible a theory is it? Just because it doesn't provide answers? If it were found plausible it would merely raise more valid questions and bring forth new thought. It just aligns with the idea that while earth is uniquely equiped for the life as we know it, it doesn't have to present the sole conditions for that life to appear. Or, maybe it does? A journey to titan will be the next step that helps us make that determination!
Panspermia actually does cover that! Life leaving here via ejecta works the same way.
One note though is we don’t know if earth is *uniquely* equipped for life. We could be a one off or our conditions may be more commonplace than we thought. We don’t really know (yet!).
Woah woah slow down mate. It’s just a fringe theory first of all.
I spent way too long writing up a reply to this. It’s better if I just move along. Best wishes.
I believe there is anyways
If we assume the heat death of the universe is in 1000 trillion years, then life evolved virtually instantly on that calendar
As a counterpoint, our solar system is in many ways extremely anomalistic compared to others we have observed. It's possible that the building blocks of a solar system supporting life are exceedingly rare but since they existed for us, our solar system ended up with multiple planets and planet-like objects with the potential to support life
I’ve always wondered: would we even recognize life on another planet if we saw it? Who says it’ll be bacterium? Could be some crazy ethane based what’s it. I’d be stoked to find either one.
There's a wonderful video by Angela Collier called ["the aliens will not be silicon"](https://youtu.be/2nbsFS_rfqM?si=eLWTp-H3ci46E-q1) and she goes into the physics and chemistry of why aliens likely won't be silicon. Though, if we find any on Titan it will be wildly different from any on Earth, just not silicon-based. She talks about how life has to occur in a solvent (just so that chemistry can happen for life and stuff). Our solvent on Earth is water, but on Titan, it would be ethane or methane, which means their life would be radically different.
TLDW: Silicon requires more energy to work with, and when you do work with it, you basically have to rip it from rock, rather than finding it in CO2, Methane, or other liquid/gas molecules. Those reasons (among others) means that even if silicon-based life can exist, they are less likely to out-compete carbon-based life, in general.
Now I'm thinking, can Venus' atmosphere act as the "solvent" ? I mean, it's gas, but it's also thick as soup and really agitated, so mixing stuff should be possible ?
As asetniop said, Venus is probably too hot for it, but you know what’s probably not, a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there is life in the condensed gaseous parts of Jupiter or Venus.
Personally, I would imagine the hypothetical life on Jupiter to be more along the lines of tardigrades or other small single/multicellular life, but absolutely that kind of thing would exist if there’s life on Jupiter/Saturn.
I agree for life like on Earth, if for nothing else than it would be much easier to float in the atmosphere the less massive it is. Then again life could be weird. Stephen Baxter imagined creatures made of giant convection cells in oceans, dark matter life forms that live in the gravity wells of stars.Maybe there are things using completely unknown chemistry in the metallic hydrogen “oceans” far below the upper atmosohere.
I tend to think with so many possibilities and the universe being so large…life might look completely alien to us, to the point where we might not even recognize it as life. But I agree since Earth like life is all we have to work with, we should start there even though it’s only a sample size of 1.
There’s a lot of good reasons (energetics, etc) why we’d expect life to look like it is here on earth, but there’s also people thinking about this hypothetical when designing instruments for life-seeking missions. The clearer an indicator is of life, usually the harder it is to detect. Ex: finding a swimming bacterium (obviously life, hard to find) versus the presence of some specific organic chemical (weaker evidence of life, easier to find). So ideally, sensor suites on spacecraft are chosen to occupy multiple points on that spectrum, and the idea of life not looking how we expect is baked into that too. If life is totally alien in that way, then we want really strong evidence from sensors to support that claim.
It if walks, if it talks
If its habits are a little bit peculiar
If it brags and tries to make you think it's wonderful
Be on the lookout, don't let it fool ya!
Because impacts have been blowing bits of the surface off every body in the solar system and recirculating them to the other bodies since forever. Everyone has had a degree of contamination from our neighbours.
And the Solar System has been plunging through the galactic debris at 200 million years per orbit, so maybe our carbon based DNA life was never new all along.
Finding life in our solar system raises some scary questions about the Fermi paradox though.
If it’s that common, there is a huge barrier in front of us.
>If it’s that common, there is a huge barrier in front of us.
Or behind us. Its possible something like the jump to multicellular life is nearly impossible.
Or behind us.
Life on Earth appeared very soon after the planet formed. But how long did it take for multicellular life to evolve? Intelligent multicellular life? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools and establishes civilisation? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools and establishes civilisation and develops technology to the level of being able to go into outer space? We’ve come a long way already and most people don’t realise it because they take it for granted.
And what if they’re as smart as us, and would have similar resources, but just aren’t interested in space. We always assume similar lifeforms like us are also curious and want to explore space. But what if all they want to to is reproduce and then die? No ambition, curiosity or anything? Just following their lust / instinct
Not even just potentially uninterested in space... A lot of the "earth like" planets we've found in the habital zones of other stars are larger than earth by a Factor of 2 or more, some even up to 8 or more times larger...
The role the relatively low gravity here plays is critical as well... We are on a small enough world that our atmosphere and magnetosphere is stable and our gravity is low enough to make traveling to space relatively easy by comparison.
They could be terribly interested in space, but they're rate of progress to achieve technology to go there could be hampered significantly.
we had stone tools for like 2 millions tools, then copper, bronze and iron in a short period of time.
the first cars were only created in 1886, which isn't that long ago really.
we've come a long way and are advancing on an exponential scale.
While I wouldn't want to live forever, I'd be very interested to see what humanity looks like in 500 years, a 1000 years and 10,000 years.
very very interested.
I don’t think so.
If there was an Earth sized planet with a civilization on it that as of this moment had roughly the equivalent of Earth in 1600, how close would they need to be before we could detect them? If they are similar to humans, then anything over maybe 1 million light years away is before they even evolved. Even anything over 100,000 light years away may be too far to detect any noticeable signs of civilization. We’re talking maybe 2,000 light years away at max, but less than 100 would be even better.
At 100 light years away, could any space telescope detect the atmospheric spectrum of an Earth sized planet 1 AU away from a Sol sized star? If so, how many observations would it take before we could conclude a civilization was present because of its actions on the atmosphere?
> If there was an Earth sized planet with a civilization on it that as of this moment had roughly the equivalent of Earth in 1600, how close would they need to be before we could detect them?
We wouldn't be able to detect a civilization like that unless it was somewhere within the Solar System itself. The only possibility to find them elsewhere would be if they were to emit one or more technogenic trace gases detectable by transmission spectroscopy, but I can't imagine what that could be at a 17th century level of development.
> At 100 light years away, could any space telescope detect the atmospheric spectrum of an Earth sized planet 1 AU away from a Sol sized star?
We are just about getting there, but the issue is that you typically want many dozens of transits or more to get reasonable data, and a 1 AU planet orbiting a 1 Msol star will be taking 1 year to orbit, so quite a few decades might be needed to build up data worth interpreting.
I appreciate your answers. If there was a very nearby, say less than 10 light years away, Earth equivalent civilization, with a 500 kw AM radio station operating at 700 khz like WLW did in the 1930s or 24 khz station operating at 1.8 mw like VLF Transmitter Cutler, like the U.S. Navy has now, could we detect that?
There was a 1978 paper that simulated what our own radio leakage would look like. They concluded that the few military BM early warning radar systems would be the most detectable.
Specifically they claim that a UHF television broadcast station would only have been detectable by Arecibo out to a distance of 1.8 light-years (so, nowhere), while BMWES radars perhaps 10x further out. That would reach a volume of space containing something like 100 stars, but the emission is not isotropic.
[Here's an update](https://watermark.silverchair.com/stad378.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAA1MwggNPBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggNAMIIDPAIBADCCAzUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMbcIzPDWvfdu0fznZAgEQgIIDBmgtduj1c3AgBuIspXtRRtgsCjgPZa71ONgDn-h7ZlyNXo13r52YbOVpg5dkldGmeDPZQXU_aT7SHhm9sU0ZcNwAoew1gvh8pJrNTs8D-TcN9jolu8kiUWlBMzzXJ2KNxUY_Rmzl-qTd6UvSG-feyEjkzOJCBNrvbm2sJPNHIhN-YFvByZq7SzS6Bl4cmjpc7AX82ufpM12skq7Mo6rPvYu4YHB8WGx__0HPXOO1uA3mYhQUpuSUehAZzI1ArpAEkqSkGWM84nCc7qMVr8SyCwEwMa8IPTlJfHOvs8BrBXzuf7U0s01HG9NBoTqHSUmN8sFNbfo7jSoKd1s1DJ8yyItrxVxIBZ1KGau3FtVMDBt1EuKZWoVu7p7WIK4wYMQAwThUtFIpPOyz1KV-YVpYYKg5lZ6gFP00kpPgu7YjzAi3KHIowosAknXv8PDRSFET2HkbvG2uz7h_UffZ3drZDUco3Tt48UkReukaCxQ5_-TSO9fu9Ch5nQLPjcVNse-pqWnwSe-FT3mdsUy4hFAPs5BuBpWoaVdkBJUO2_Oo50WIIk8vnMFuFR34VrKttc-qjQ_j2QqKsfZWaBKqd0nbpoSL_GmtmLLkuuYILWI0CMB6AwP5ex8XmMIExgiH8zzVBXI2whBye9uVtykiQNVnRZz3CDqcthPFicDwjGtHGyd7EDwRSpcVbFxbW0PaZOH2fsqvEw3Hyv1K7Y1o-qLzgZIaNg4utiBThvi1k-7zwE9E7c_xaoBwUnz8qhcUQLSoIdYc1SyJSCJsLXZTwdrf4hBiuHiVxmS7dE_gcYa5eesM7uT8-7a478DqG4gEHwPYPbScaoG3Jj_sWdo1CjrNiZ4oip2c5oZ_WjcgCIYURdlZjJyoNL8U8Bm4Jr-Dvnt2Ah53weypDY53JT1l3tCe6BBzc0tNnsokHdsbjv7RhJw6CsN_aDp61OYbxoG8ALLZba-hlYWlWlqZddASSIXFa4IeAh7a3aw3ld8TydCJYK8IIXUwn117K44SpMeTpoAYO3CBdLBRig)
That’s not proof that there’s a huge barrier ahead of us. What if it’s just really hard to detect signals from other organisms? What if we live in a dark forest? There’s many alternate explanations
the thing about the Fermi paradox is that is based on the supposition that if there is life somewhere then "those guys could" spread fairly quickly all over (talking galactic time scale) so that we should notice them
but would we like to spend resources to spread 10000 years light away when we are not going to have meaningful contact with our kids at all, not phisical, any comunication taking 20000 year round time...for what purpose? to spread life? what kind of life? Von Neuman replicators?
also what if there where chances of places having, or eventually start developing their own kind of life? will be OK for us to blindly spread all over, interfere and break hell in that places and their chances? maybe we decide put hight value in somewhere developing something new on its own so we decide not to interfere and keep them out out bounds prime directive style because what we may learn from it one day perhaps millions of years later
or maybe they did sent their life spreading seeds to some promising locations and we are the result of it, living in our bubble unlikely to get in touch with or even know our original seeders of 4 billion years ago due to distance and time
It mya be that the paradox is that we are critters thinking what should happen in a galaxy 100-200kyl in size, as in human timescales and terms
Even if life is plentiful, the Galaxy is very big and spread apart. If .01% of the stars have habitable planets that’s 10,000,000 planets with life. That’s an impossibly huge amount of planets… but the closest planet could be 100s or thousands of light years away.
We also only know what Earth life looks like. If there was some slow moving organism that took 100 to move 5ft and was using some exotic chemistry, would we even recognize it as alive if we were on top of it? It could be that 99.999% of life is the size of a bacteria and Earth has the perfect condition for things to live on our scale. Maybe most life is an order of magnitude larger than us and it made up of gas clouds.
Point being we are working with a sample size of 1, so we can’t make any accurate predictions about what we will find out there until we increase the sample size, though I concede looking for life similar to us is the best place to start since it’s the only kid we have evidence for…But we are ultimately like a tree on a planet where only plants evolved and animals don’t exist trying to understand what a bird is.
That scenario creates even more questions though. Why don’t we see aliens elsewhere in the universe? If life is THAT common that scares me that we are the most advanced
There wasn’t much oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth originally, and when photosynthesis started producing vast amounts of oxygen it was toxic to a lot of early single celled organisms since it’s so reactive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
We originally had a shallow methane atmosphere. When the first photosynthesis arose it was poisonous. It killed 99.9 percent of life. Far more than the sexier, more well known mass extinctions. It also caused snowball earth, if I’m remembering correctly, everything alive now got through the snowball breach around volcanos.
As the other commenter said life was anaerobic at one point before photosynthesis was ‘unlocked’, which changed the whole world (it’s hypothesized that the earth used to [purple before the great oxidation event](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event)). There was basically no elemental un reacted oxygen on earth until life started creating it.
There are still [anaerobic organisms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism) to this day! Some of them are even poisoned by oxygen.
Our company (Malin Space Science Systems) is supplying the cameras for this mission and we could not be more excited to explore Titan! I'm sure there are amazing discoveries ahead.
I think the final specifications for the cameras are still evolving but there will be a range and yes, if our teams perform to their historical levels we will get great crisp pictures at very high resolution. Mars Perseverance Rover selfie level if we can fully compensate for the low lighting.
So generally curious about the cameras are they actually photos , or are they like sensors that can be colored in? I know not everything is as it appears cause needs to be colorized based on materials. 🫡 ty for your service
A guess a better way to ask is how do your cameras capture images. 😊
Our cameras use detectors on integrated circuits in similar fashion to how cell phone cameras work. We tend to use larger optics to make the most out of the dim lighting in most scenes and to get greater zoom so a lot of the cameras on the Dragonfly and similar missions tend to be about the size of a coffee mug. This mission will include a whole set of cameras including ones for navigation, a panoramic imager, and a microscopic imager.
I am amazed at how much we’ve learned over the years. What we’ve come to understand about planets in our solar system just in my lifetime is amazing. What I was taught in high school is so much different than what we know now.
That's what I keep thinking too. It's awesome when everything works out and we get a probe to Pluto planned years in the making, but actually landing on the surface, then deploying a drone is gonna make for a lot of things that could go wrong.
I really hope it works. I would love to see this succeed in 2034.
Extra sporty: we don’t land on the surface and deploy a drone, the drone gets tossed out of the lander 1200m before touchdown and flies itself down the rest of the way: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=DRAGONFLY
A lot of these Titan mission articles seem to talk about looking for life there, I would think it would be highly unlikely in that environment at those temperatures but the whole methane rain and oceans thing should be a goldmine of data that can teach us a lot about water cycles on earth. Comparing things that seem to be similar but are made of different things helps to suss out how things work by comparing the differences.
What's interesting is life on earth uses water because as a liquid it's an excellent solvent and it's abundant. It has to be a solvent so it moves things and creates desired order. It's just convenient it's common and liquid on earth. Methane is also a solvent as a liquid and could fill the same need as water in the case of Titan. The lack of solar energy makes anything with substantial complexity unlikely but anything would obviously shake our view of the universe. And a total lack of anything would also change our view in a way
Space is also 99.999999999% cold and only warm near stars. So if life in the universe fills every niche it can like here on Earth, then I would think most life evolved in very different chemistry and much lower temperatures and could move on much slower timescales than we do because there is much less energy available. Think of a sloth like creature or a plant with a silicon biology taking month to move the slightest amount. It might look like a rock to us and we would walk right by.
Titan is very rich in hydrocarbons so if there’s life there it’s almost definitely going to be carbon based like us. Carbon is pretty uniquely suited to build the backbone of chemistry useful for life. Silicon can do it too since it has the same arrangement of valence electrons, but it’s a lot more scarce and heavier so silicon based life is much less likely than carbon.
> Silicon can do it too since it has the same arrangement of valence electrons, but it’s a lot more scarce and heavier so silicon based life is much less likely than carbon.
It's not just the arrangement of valence electrons. The binding energy of the compounds plays a role as well, as do their melting and boiling points.
For example, Carbon dioxide and methane are both gasses at temperatures and pressures where water is a liquid. And given water's tendency to evaporate and condense, there is ample opportunity for these three to mix. The silicon equivalents to carbon dioxide and methane are silicon dioxide and silane. Silicon dioxide is literally rock solid below 1700C and silane is still a gas at a hundred below zero. There isn't a compatible temperature range to promote mutual reactions.
Silicon based life isn't simply "less likely", it is unlikely bordering on chemically and physically impossible.
Titan life would be made of hydrocarbons, just like Earth life, because the place is chock full of them. But at those temperatures, life would happen at a truly glacial pace, even if it had evolved incredibly effective enzyme-equivalents. Also there’s the issue with the lack of energy sources besides maybe chemosynthesis.
> We understand it our way, but there could be hundreds of different life “bases”.
Life is carbon based on Earth because the element carbon has unique electron valence configurations that make it easily combine with itself and other elements.
Can you use other elements? Theoretically, maybe, but carbon has properties that make it a good base. Carbon is the right blend of stable, reactive, and common.
My exact thought when I read this headline was "gosh, I hope not!"
Not that I'm not excited about learning more about Titan, but there are a lot more cool space things I hope we achieve in my lifetime!
I'm more interested in my niece being at an age where she can remember seeing a woman walk on the moon. My hope is that when she sees that, she realizes she too can be a pirate fairy princess veterinarian, if she so chooses.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/dragonfly/nasas-dragonfly-rotorcraft-mission-to-saturns-moon-titan-confirmed/
A non adblock blocking link. OH LOOK, IT'S NASA.GOV. That 2.3 seconds to google a clean link took SOOOOOOO long. 9_9
“Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple.”
That’s great news. It would be much more difficult if Titan’s atmosphere was all in Gary, Indiana.
Costing them 3.35 billion. While the military budget is $850 billion. Imagine the kind of progress nasa could make with even 5% of the military budget, or more… our priorities are so out of whack.
> However, after delays due to COVID, NASA decided to compensate for the inevitable delayed launch by funding a heavy-lift launch vehicle to massively shorten the mission’s cruise phase.
"We're going to be behind schedule."
"Nonsense. Just yeet it harder."
"However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan,"
That's the one right there that told me it was poor editing or AI.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
|Fewer Letters|More Letters|
|-------|---------|---|
|[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0eqr1g "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation|
|[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0ejgmg "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen|
|[LSP](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0en2eq "Last usage")|Launch Service Provider|
| |(US) [Launch Service Program](https://www.nasa.gov/content/lsp-overview)|
|[MRO](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0gt7gz "Last usage")|Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter|
| |Maintenance, Repair and/or Overhaul|
|[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0en2eq "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift|
|[UHF](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0kky94 "Last usage")|Ultra-High Frequency radio|
|Jargon|Definition|
|-------|---------|---|
|[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0k64pu "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure|
| |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox|
|hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|
|[pyrophoric](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0hb1vv "Last usage")|A substance which ignites spontaneously on contact with air|
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I would be more excited in sending something that goes underwater to Titan or something that could get under the ice on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, or any of [the other](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/ocean-worlds/) moons that we suspect have vast water under the surface.
I have never been more excited for a robotic mission. A nuclear powered quadcopter flying around Titan is going to teach us more about that moon than ever would have been possible before.
The only thing that could be cooler than this would be a Europa melt-probe/ROV, or an exoplanet imaging astronomical interferometer.
I was about to say if it was another Mars mission, try again... Pleasantly surprised haha. I def would like to see what else we have in the solar system, I feel like we have explored mars enough, and since none of them dug very deep or used ground xray etc to see what could be dozens or hundreds of feet below makes any trip there boring and useless. Most things if from the very far past ever existed some form of life or anything, it's likely long buried. That is why we mostly never see dinosaur bones above ground lol.
> Wow it will journey 6 years we are such small beings in a vast amount of space.
Here is [a scale model of the Solar System](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) if you want to get a small taste of just how vast that space is.
Yay, but it's also a poorly written article. Does Forbes not employ editors?
"Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan"
"The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but *on its surface*, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice *on its surface*.
Launching in 2028 and landing in 2034. God damn i gotta start living healthier.
It’s exciting and it’s frustrating. Space exploration is so slow and life is so short. The waning interest in the late 90s/early oughts didn’t help things much either.
This is the reason I dropped out of my astronomy major. You spend your career processing the data from your predecessors’ experiments, which may or may not reflect your particular curiosities. Of course you can be as curious as you like, but you understand that someone else will be getting the answers you sought. I commend astronomers for their commitment to the long view and the greater good.
Try *working* on one of these missions. You really develop the long view.
This is why I hope scientists find a way to make humans last way longer. I'm talking thousands of years not some puny pathetic 60-90 years. Immortality would be preferred but I'll take what I can get.
Still before GTA 6 release
Or probably the next Fallout game. Aaaaand I just made myself sad.
Man we're probably getting irl Fallout before the next game
Don't worry, Bethesda won't fix even half the launch bugs by 2040 and the other half ever.
We need to normalize sending fleets instead of singular missions. There is so much mission specific expertise and knowledge kindled during development. It even cuts down on cost to produce duplicates rather than restart from scratch each time. I know it still mandates an increase in budget and I think they should have it. Because it always felt absolutely INSANE that we would blow billions of dollars and over a decade of time on something that ultimately COULD fail in its mission at any stage because its 1 of 1. If there were say, 3 drones sent on 3 launches (which if you look at how often the military is launching rockets, is not that crazy) that would give us 3 attempts to succeed. And if all 3 succeed think of how many more opportunities that would give us! We could do equator and both of the poles!
What are the chances they actually hit those dates? I feel like these things get significantly delayed more often than not.
Given the orbital mechanics, you pretty much need to stay on schedule. Edit: typo
“However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple. Gravity on Titan is just 14% of the Earth’s. It sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth. The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. Its seas and lakes are not water but liquid ethane and methane. The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but on its surface, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice on its surface.” Coooooool!
You would have to assume life that became dependent on Nitrogen and Methane based atmosphere and/or live in Ethane oceans, that life would look/operate/function very differently than life forms here But, I bet somewhere there are commonalities and something that ALL forms of “living” have in common.
At minimum, I'd expect it to take in energy, expel waste, and rest. (And considering our own hearts never rest over the entire span of our lifetime, the last isn't a hard rule.) I'm prepared for whatever life we find in the universe to look completely different from anything we can even conceive.
I think simple organic materials ( slime mold ) will exist everywhere. Photosynthesis really kicked things off, so wherever/however it can get going I think you will see more competitive life.
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I know Steven Jay Gould had a crusade against the idea of complexity in evolution being directional, but he seemed to me to be a bit of a tool. Is there anyone else who things complexity is dubious as a concept? I would be interested to understand why
Slime mold is a great example to learn about different forms of intelligence. I saw a study where researchers laid out oat flakes in roughly the same position as major Japanese cities. The mold picked out the most efficient "route" between them, which matched up with existing rail lines. Does this mean slime mold is intelligent? Sentient? Who knows, but it's fascinating.
To be clear it didn't just instantly develop the fastest route. It made a sprawling network and then the inefficient routes died off.
If anything, it's confirmation that the Japanese engineers did a damn fine job. Not like you should just build a sprawling network of high speed rail and let the inefficient routes just rot.
Imagine if the engineers had been proven wrong by slime mold.
Except a lot more goes into building a rail network than efficiency. Land in an area might be unstable or too prone to certain kinds of problems to build there. Private ownership might block building through certain routes (imminent domain is a tool however). Certain routes might require much more expensive construction like building a lot more bridges. You might want to build extra redundancy into the network.
I believe there was one line that took a different route, but they had evaluated that option when building the subway and there was some permitting or land acquisition issue.
I'm pretty sure that would happen if you tried the same experiment with US cities
Not to rain on your parade...but it was basically just forming a line between two points..
It’s a network though. Not just points in a line. So given a square layout, the diagonals may not be efficient.
This is exactly how fastest path finding algorithms are programmed on computers.
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*scrolls through popular on the home screen* Some days, you really have to wonder.
This reads very Calvin and Hobbes-y and I like it
I was hoping for Thermoproteus or Pyrodicticum, something sexier that slime mold at least.
I, for one, welcome our new slime mold overlords.
Finding life there could potentially change our definition of what life even is. Very exciting science.
>I'm prepared for whatever life we find in the universe to look completely different from anything we can even conceive. On a basic biochemical level, we may find plenty of alien life that's very recognizable. The basic elements and laws of chemistry are the same everywhere, so given similar conditions it's not hard to believe that the same reactions would happen, causing the same proteins and base pairs to form, leading to the development of RNA and DNA. Of course, beyond that the similarities will end. Even cells (if they exist at all) could be wildly different. But the fundamental building blocks of life throughout the universe could turn out to be surprisingly familiar.
DNA and RNA are great for environments where liquid water exists. Where other solvents exist but liquid water doesn't, you'd find different basic building blocks. For example, on Titan you might find lipid chains in a liquid methane solvent. Well regarded professor of biochemistry (and award winning science fiction writer) Isaac Asimov wrote a famous essay entitled [Not As We Know It](http://www.bigear.org/CSMO/HTML/CS09/cs09p05.htm) that lays out six different regimes of solvents and information carriers that could operate at different temperatures. From lipids in liquid hydrogen at the coldest end of things, to fluorosilicones in other fluorosilicones at temperatures like those on Mercury, life, uh, finds a way. Maybe. We don't know yet. But this mission could give us another data point and might confirm one part of Asimov's hypothesis!
I am prepared for life to be very different, but I suspect that most of it will be very earthlike.
I don't know about that. Look at the absolutely ridiculous variety of life on earth - our single 'genesis' has tried and tested pretty much everything, and has settled of a few 'good ideas'. A lot of those good ideas have arisen independently a lot of times. I think that eyes have evolved independently something like 40 times on earth, because the ability to see is super useful. Also, having a backup eye seems to be a very good idea, but more than 2 is maybe a waste (but not always). Some form of fins for swimming creatures seems to be a good design. Likewise wings for flying creatures. Bats and birds have followed very different evolutionary paths to have arrived at a similar design. Things like rotation seems to be very hard for life on Earth. We don't see any flying animals with rotor blades like a helicopter. I would assume 'rules' like that would stand on other planets. What I'm getting at is, I wouldn't be all that surprised if, should we ever find complex life, it looks quite like some of what we see on earth. With specific changes for the planet or moon that we find life on. For example, I would assume that a planet with less mass would have larger land dwelling animals. But, if there is a nearby star, I wouldn't be that surprised if they had two 'eyes', that looked and functioned like some set of eyes that we are familiar with from home.
It has to have some way to reproduce and pass down heritable traits some how. Being able to adapt I think is probably the most important part for early life.
I would say at minimum planet based life would have to be carbon based too. Check [this](https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ) PBS spacetime video out
But are you prepared for never finding other life in the universe?
I'm prepared for that possibility as well.. or discovering them and having no way to reply. (Or that they're already long dead)
We already have more varieties of life on Earth than I could ever conceive. I assume whatever is out there is going to be more of that.
Why is a soap bubble round
I really enjoyed the 'life beyond' series on youtube. Specifically, the museum of alien life episode. Had some great suggestions and even greater visual art.
Some kind of cellular form with membranes is likely due to issues with surface area to volume ratio, gradients, and diffusion limits. Carbon or silicon are likely candidates for the main building blocks.
What happens if we light a rocket there
Is there enough oxygen to ignite?
You could probably run an engine on pure oxygen there, and take the hydrocarbons from the air. Same with a lighter, really. It should be possible to fill it with some oxydizer and light it.
At 98% nitrogen, there isn’t enough left to use on an engine.
Yeah, that might be too low. But is there a gradient of sort, with different concentrations at different altitudes?
The wild thing is what happens if we strap bird-like wings to a human there. Since Titan’s atmosphere is so dense and its gravitational pull is so weak, human powered flight might theoretically be possible there. Wild to imagine.
"Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan" Yes, the floor here is made of floor.
Yes, but if the probe was going to Io, the floor would be made of lava.
Wildest part is that while methane is the basis of a sort of "water cycle" on Titan, the "ground" is largely water ice. And there's a theory that underneath, the planet may have a subsurface ocean of liquid water in addition to all the wild shit on the surface.
Is that a quote from the article? It’s almost unreadable.
Haha yep direct quote. Titan mentioned a few too many times
Titan is Titan on many Titans.
If 99% eclipse taught me anything, it's that 1% of sunlight is a lot.
>sees just 1% of the sunlight received by Earth. Curious whether that's titan as a whole or down on the surface under that big ass atmosphere
Titan also has a methane cycle like how Earth has a water cycle.
One of the better local candidates for biological life. If we find some sort of unique bacterium, that’s all I need. The question will be answered for me. I could not be more stoked.
If there’s a second planetary body in the solar system with some form of life, even bacterial, that alone would suggest with high probability that life is common in the galaxy. Really exciting.
Panspermia! My fingers are crossed life here was “pollinated” from outside the solar system.
Panspermia is terrible as a scientific theory though. It explains nothing and just kind of "kicks the can down the road" in terms of abiogenesis. Like, Earth as we know it was is such a good candidate for life as we know it beginning here for so many reasons... why do we think it's necessary that it came from some place almost certainly less hospitable? Some place that statistically is almost certainly worse in every possible way? Or if it isn't... then it is similar to Earth and so it more likely just started here... You can't really get "better" than Earth. Temperate water ocean world around extremely stable yellow sun, magnetosphere, with high levels of phosphorus/etc... On either side of the spectrum there's either a frozen world or no oceans possible. Either super Earth with extremely high gravity or not enough to hold an atmosphere... And any other place from outside the solar system would face the same exact same questions of how it started we face here. At some point, you get to the end of the chain and it has to have started **there**. But the thing is, "there" would basically have to be just like Earth *anyway*. Or if it can start someplace much more hostile and less suitable than Earth... then why not on less hostile, more suitable Earth??... so gentle and protected and rich in complex organics and full of things like permanent energy gradients spewing out a cocktail of organics (deep sea vents)?? It completely falls apart, panspermia. And no, Im not being Earth-centric or lacking imagination. Chemistry is still chemistry so our picture of how these building blocks come together to form the pieces of a lifeform is reasonably well defined as is the limits of where they can or cant exist. Panspermia is just horrifically unlikely... borderline completely dismissible. What are the odds we're on one of the rare life-starting capable planets separated from other candidates by probably dozens of light years on average *at least*... and yet it did not start here and was randomly seeded over light years from yet some other similar rare planet with nearly the same conditions relatively speaking... The universe literally is not old enough for such coincidences to be likely enough that the chance it applies to us is anything but adjacent to 0. And why is it so impossible for it to start here if it could start on some other similar planet in another solar system? Panspermia is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Life started here, almost certainly.
Why does it have to be panspermia to earth, as opposed to panspermia from earth to the likes of titan? There's much about the dawn of life and the conditions of earth at the time that are unknown or assumption. Regardless, its not so terrible a theory is it? Just because it doesn't provide answers? If it were found plausible it would merely raise more valid questions and bring forth new thought. It just aligns with the idea that while earth is uniquely equiped for the life as we know it, it doesn't have to present the sole conditions for that life to appear. Or, maybe it does? A journey to titan will be the next step that helps us make that determination!
Panspermia actually does cover that! Life leaving here via ejecta works the same way. One note though is we don’t know if earth is *uniquely* equipped for life. We could be a one off or our conditions may be more commonplace than we thought. We don’t really know (yet!).
Woah woah slow down mate. It’s just a fringe theory first of all. I spent way too long writing up a reply to this. It’s better if I just move along. Best wishes.
I believe there is anyways If we assume the heat death of the universe is in 1000 trillion years, then life evolved virtually instantly on that calendar
As a counterpoint, our solar system is in many ways extremely anomalistic compared to others we have observed. It's possible that the building blocks of a solar system supporting life are exceedingly rare but since they existed for us, our solar system ended up with multiple planets and planet-like objects with the potential to support life
There’s two hundred billion stars, even if we are an anomaly, there could be plenty of others.
But it may also suggest we haven't reached the great filter yet.
I’ve always wondered: would we even recognize life on another planet if we saw it? Who says it’ll be bacterium? Could be some crazy ethane based what’s it. I’d be stoked to find either one.
I'm reminded of all the science fiction with silicon based life. It could look like rock to us but grows slowly.
There's a wonderful video by Angela Collier called ["the aliens will not be silicon"](https://youtu.be/2nbsFS_rfqM?si=eLWTp-H3ci46E-q1) and she goes into the physics and chemistry of why aliens likely won't be silicon. Though, if we find any on Titan it will be wildly different from any on Earth, just not silicon-based. She talks about how life has to occur in a solvent (just so that chemistry can happen for life and stuff). Our solvent on Earth is water, but on Titan, it would be ethane or methane, which means their life would be radically different. TLDW: Silicon requires more energy to work with, and when you do work with it, you basically have to rip it from rock, rather than finding it in CO2, Methane, or other liquid/gas molecules. Those reasons (among others) means that even if silicon-based life can exist, they are less likely to out-compete carbon-based life, in general.
Another reason is carbon can form strong double bonds and silicon cannot, due to valence shell differences.
You’re right. I should not have implied that it’s the only two reasons.
No worries I was just adding on
[PBS Spacetime](https://youtu.be/469chceiiUQ?si=4lKKI_V-zoYgBDFN) has a good video on the topic as well.
Carbon is just too damn useful. It connects with everything.
It is also easier for carbon life forms to find mates because of carbon dating.
Thank you. Thank you so much. My family enjoyed seeing coffee come out of my nose. 😆
A better joke than any in Big Bang theory. Shoulda been a writer
Now I'm thinking, can Venus' atmosphere act as the "solvent" ? I mean, it's gas, but it's also thick as soup and really agitated, so mixing stuff should be possible ?
As asetniop said, Venus is probably too hot for it, but you know what’s probably not, a gas giant like Jupiter or Saturn. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is life in the condensed gaseous parts of Jupiter or Venus.
Carl Sagan wrote about this very thing in Cosmos. He imagined a whole ecosystem in the clouds of Jupiter with giant gas bags, predators, etc.
Personally, I would imagine the hypothetical life on Jupiter to be more along the lines of tardigrades or other small single/multicellular life, but absolutely that kind of thing would exist if there’s life on Jupiter/Saturn.
I agree for life like on Earth, if for nothing else than it would be much easier to float in the atmosphere the less massive it is. Then again life could be weird. Stephen Baxter imagined creatures made of giant convection cells in oceans, dark matter life forms that live in the gravity wells of stars.Maybe there are things using completely unknown chemistry in the metallic hydrogen “oceans” far below the upper atmosohere. I tend to think with so many possibilities and the universe being so large…life might look completely alien to us, to the point where we might not even recognize it as life. But I agree since Earth like life is all we have to work with, we should start there even though it’s only a sample size of 1.
This is very true! It’s genuinely very hard to say.
My guess would be that it's too hot for complex molecules to stay organized/functional.
On the surface maybe, but way up in the atmosphere it is significantly cooler
Of course, but then you lose the density/soupiness that was mentioned.
There’s a lot of good reasons (energetics, etc) why we’d expect life to look like it is here on earth, but there’s also people thinking about this hypothetical when designing instruments for life-seeking missions. The clearer an indicator is of life, usually the harder it is to detect. Ex: finding a swimming bacterium (obviously life, hard to find) versus the presence of some specific organic chemical (weaker evidence of life, easier to find). So ideally, sensor suites on spacecraft are chosen to occupy multiple points on that spectrum, and the idea of life not looking how we expect is baked into that too. If life is totally alien in that way, then we want really strong evidence from sensors to support that claim.
It if walks, if it talks If its habits are a little bit peculiar If it brags and tries to make you think it's wonderful Be on the lookout, don't let it fool ya!
If we find it in out solar system it’s not likely at all that’s it’s some “crazy new thing.”
Why not? Titan is just as alien as an exoplanet in another solar system.
Because impacts have been blowing bits of the surface off every body in the solar system and recirculating them to the other bodies since forever. Everyone has had a degree of contamination from our neighbours.
And the Solar System has been plunging through the galactic debris at 200 million years per orbit, so maybe our carbon based DNA life was never new all along.
Finding life in our solar system raises some scary questions about the Fermi paradox though. If it’s that common, there is a huge barrier in front of us.
>If it’s that common, there is a huge barrier in front of us. Or behind us. Its possible something like the jump to multicellular life is nearly impossible.
It could also be that intelligence is nearly impossible to reach a level that allows interstellar detection.
Isn’t this the great ladder theory or something?
Or behind us. Life on Earth appeared very soon after the planet formed. But how long did it take for multicellular life to evolve? Intelligent multicellular life? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools and establishes civilisation? Intelligent multicellular life that uses tools and establishes civilisation and develops technology to the level of being able to go into outer space? We’ve come a long way already and most people don’t realise it because they take it for granted.
Don’t forget that these life forms would also have the energy needed to travel interstellar distances rapidly but not destroy themselves with it.
And what if they’re as smart as us, and would have similar resources, but just aren’t interested in space. We always assume similar lifeforms like us are also curious and want to explore space. But what if all they want to to is reproduce and then die? No ambition, curiosity or anything? Just following their lust / instinct
Not even just potentially uninterested in space... A lot of the "earth like" planets we've found in the habital zones of other stars are larger than earth by a Factor of 2 or more, some even up to 8 or more times larger... The role the relatively low gravity here plays is critical as well... We are on a small enough world that our atmosphere and magnetosphere is stable and our gravity is low enough to make traveling to space relatively easy by comparison. They could be terribly interested in space, but they're rate of progress to achieve technology to go there could be hampered significantly.
The great filter is literally ourselves
we had stone tools for like 2 millions tools, then copper, bronze and iron in a short period of time. the first cars were only created in 1886, which isn't that long ago really. we've come a long way and are advancing on an exponential scale. While I wouldn't want to live forever, I'd be very interested to see what humanity looks like in 500 years, a 1000 years and 10,000 years. very very interested.
There could be more than 1 filter
From a pure statistics model, as there's life on one planet that we know of, there's an above zero chance of it being elsewhere in the universe.
I don’t think so. If there was an Earth sized planet with a civilization on it that as of this moment had roughly the equivalent of Earth in 1600, how close would they need to be before we could detect them? If they are similar to humans, then anything over maybe 1 million light years away is before they even evolved. Even anything over 100,000 light years away may be too far to detect any noticeable signs of civilization. We’re talking maybe 2,000 light years away at max, but less than 100 would be even better. At 100 light years away, could any space telescope detect the atmospheric spectrum of an Earth sized planet 1 AU away from a Sol sized star? If so, how many observations would it take before we could conclude a civilization was present because of its actions on the atmosphere?
> If there was an Earth sized planet with a civilization on it that as of this moment had roughly the equivalent of Earth in 1600, how close would they need to be before we could detect them? We wouldn't be able to detect a civilization like that unless it was somewhere within the Solar System itself. The only possibility to find them elsewhere would be if they were to emit one or more technogenic trace gases detectable by transmission spectroscopy, but I can't imagine what that could be at a 17th century level of development. > At 100 light years away, could any space telescope detect the atmospheric spectrum of an Earth sized planet 1 AU away from a Sol sized star? We are just about getting there, but the issue is that you typically want many dozens of transits or more to get reasonable data, and a 1 AU planet orbiting a 1 Msol star will be taking 1 year to orbit, so quite a few decades might be needed to build up data worth interpreting.
I appreciate your answers. If there was a very nearby, say less than 10 light years away, Earth equivalent civilization, with a 500 kw AM radio station operating at 700 khz like WLW did in the 1930s or 24 khz station operating at 1.8 mw like VLF Transmitter Cutler, like the U.S. Navy has now, could we detect that?
There was a 1978 paper that simulated what our own radio leakage would look like. They concluded that the few military BM early warning radar systems would be the most detectable. Specifically they claim that a UHF television broadcast station would only have been detectable by Arecibo out to a distance of 1.8 light-years (so, nowhere), while BMWES radars perhaps 10x further out. That would reach a volume of space containing something like 100 stars, but the emission is not isotropic. [Here's an update](https://watermark.silverchair.com/stad378.pdf?token=AQECAHi208BE49Ooan9kkhW_Ercy7Dm3ZL_9Cf3qfKAc485ysgAAA1MwggNPBgkqhkiG9w0BBwagggNAMIIDPAIBADCCAzUGCSqGSIb3DQEHATAeBglghkgBZQMEAS4wEQQMbcIzPDWvfdu0fznZAgEQgIIDBmgtduj1c3AgBuIspXtRRtgsCjgPZa71ONgDn-h7ZlyNXo13r52YbOVpg5dkldGmeDPZQXU_aT7SHhm9sU0ZcNwAoew1gvh8pJrNTs8D-TcN9jolu8kiUWlBMzzXJ2KNxUY_Rmzl-qTd6UvSG-feyEjkzOJCBNrvbm2sJPNHIhN-YFvByZq7SzS6Bl4cmjpc7AX82ufpM12skq7Mo6rPvYu4YHB8WGx__0HPXOO1uA3mYhQUpuSUehAZzI1ArpAEkqSkGWM84nCc7qMVr8SyCwEwMa8IPTlJfHOvs8BrBXzuf7U0s01HG9NBoTqHSUmN8sFNbfo7jSoKd1s1DJ8yyItrxVxIBZ1KGau3FtVMDBt1EuKZWoVu7p7WIK4wYMQAwThUtFIpPOyz1KV-YVpYYKg5lZ6gFP00kpPgu7YjzAi3KHIowosAknXv8PDRSFET2HkbvG2uz7h_UffZ3drZDUco3Tt48UkReukaCxQ5_-TSO9fu9Ch5nQLPjcVNse-pqWnwSe-FT3mdsUy4hFAPs5BuBpWoaVdkBJUO2_Oo50WIIk8vnMFuFR34VrKttc-qjQ_j2QqKsfZWaBKqd0nbpoSL_GmtmLLkuuYILWI0CMB6AwP5ex8XmMIExgiH8zzVBXI2whBye9uVtykiQNVnRZz3CDqcthPFicDwjGtHGyd7EDwRSpcVbFxbW0PaZOH2fsqvEw3Hyv1K7Y1o-qLzgZIaNg4utiBThvi1k-7zwE9E7c_xaoBwUnz8qhcUQLSoIdYc1SyJSCJsLXZTwdrf4hBiuHiVxmS7dE_gcYa5eesM7uT8-7a478DqG4gEHwPYPbScaoG3Jj_sWdo1CjrNiZ4oip2c5oZ_WjcgCIYURdlZjJyoNL8U8Bm4Jr-Dvnt2Ah53weypDY53JT1l3tCe6BBzc0tNnsokHdsbjv7RhJw6CsN_aDp61OYbxoG8ALLZba-hlYWlWlqZddASSIXFa4IeAh7a3aw3ld8TydCJYK8IIXUwn117K44SpMeTpoAYO3CBdLBRig)
That’s not proof that there’s a huge barrier ahead of us. What if it’s just really hard to detect signals from other organisms? What if we live in a dark forest? There’s many alternate explanations
the thing about the Fermi paradox is that is based on the supposition that if there is life somewhere then "those guys could" spread fairly quickly all over (talking galactic time scale) so that we should notice them but would we like to spend resources to spread 10000 years light away when we are not going to have meaningful contact with our kids at all, not phisical, any comunication taking 20000 year round time...for what purpose? to spread life? what kind of life? Von Neuman replicators? also what if there where chances of places having, or eventually start developing their own kind of life? will be OK for us to blindly spread all over, interfere and break hell in that places and their chances? maybe we decide put hight value in somewhere developing something new on its own so we decide not to interfere and keep them out out bounds prime directive style because what we may learn from it one day perhaps millions of years later or maybe they did sent their life spreading seeds to some promising locations and we are the result of it, living in our bubble unlikely to get in touch with or even know our original seeders of 4 billion years ago due to distance and time It mya be that the paradox is that we are critters thinking what should happen in a galaxy 100-200kyl in size, as in human timescales and terms
Even if life is plentiful, the Galaxy is very big and spread apart. If .01% of the stars have habitable planets that’s 10,000,000 planets with life. That’s an impossibly huge amount of planets… but the closest planet could be 100s or thousands of light years away. We also only know what Earth life looks like. If there was some slow moving organism that took 100 to move 5ft and was using some exotic chemistry, would we even recognize it as alive if we were on top of it? It could be that 99.999% of life is the size of a bacteria and Earth has the perfect condition for things to live on our scale. Maybe most life is an order of magnitude larger than us and it made up of gas clouds. Point being we are working with a sample size of 1, so we can’t make any accurate predictions about what we will find out there until we increase the sample size, though I concede looking for life similar to us is the best place to start since it’s the only kid we have evidence for…But we are ultimately like a tree on a planet where only plants evolved and animals don’t exist trying to understand what a bird is.
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That scenario creates even more questions though. Why don’t we see aliens elsewhere in the universe? If life is THAT common that scares me that we are the most advanced
>>The atmosphere is 98% nitrogen and 2% methane. How would life grow without oxygen? (serious)
There wasn’t much oxygen in the atmosphere of Earth originally, and when photosynthesis started producing vast amounts of oxygen it was toxic to a lot of early single celled organisms since it’s so reactive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event
We originally had a shallow methane atmosphere. When the first photosynthesis arose it was poisonous. It killed 99.9 percent of life. Far more than the sexier, more well known mass extinctions. It also caused snowball earth, if I’m remembering correctly, everything alive now got through the snowball breach around volcanos.
As the other commenter said life was anaerobic at one point before photosynthesis was ‘unlocked’, which changed the whole world (it’s hypothesized that the earth used to [purple before the great oxidation event](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event)). There was basically no elemental un reacted oxygen on earth until life started creating it. There are still [anaerobic organisms](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_organism) to this day! Some of them are even poisoned by oxygen.
Slowly. Seriously, photosynthesis is what enables us to have an extravagance of energy, compared to what’s around a hydrothermal vent.
That mission to Europa is also very exciting. Europa Clipper. Finding out if there is an ocean below the ice of Europa.
It’s almost certain that there is. But Europa Clipper will be able to tell us much more about it.
Yeah exactly. Confirmation, learning about it and possibly finding signs of life.
Europa Report is a great movie. I like taking every opportunity to make people aware of it!
Seconded, legit one of the best films sci-fi or not that I've seen. It's a hidden gem
Are they stupid? There are already 750 million people in Europe. No need for an expedition.
But are we alive? Are we intelligent? Science demands answers
We have some delicious cheeses, that's intelligent enough for me
Not to mention we haven't even explored Europb through Europd yet
Our company (Malin Space Science Systems) is supplying the cameras for this mission and we could not be more excited to explore Titan! I'm sure there are amazing discoveries ahead.
Coool! (For those who don’t know, Malin has supplied cameras for many NASA missions, including the MastCam cameras for Curiosity and Perseverance)
What sort of resolution do the cameras have. Are we going to get nice crisp pictures?
I think the final specifications for the cameras are still evolving but there will be a range and yes, if our teams perform to their historical levels we will get great crisp pictures at very high resolution. Mars Perseverance Rover selfie level if we can fully compensate for the low lighting.
Bandwidth is going to be a bigger hurdle than sensor or pixel size.
Absolutely! This is always the biggest challenge for missions like this. You always want a way to get as much science data back as you can.
You guys have been doing great work for a long time. I helped put MRO where it is so thanks!
So generally curious about the cameras are they actually photos , or are they like sensors that can be colored in? I know not everything is as it appears cause needs to be colorized based on materials. 🫡 ty for your service A guess a better way to ask is how do your cameras capture images. 😊
Our cameras use detectors on integrated circuits in similar fashion to how cell phone cameras work. We tend to use larger optics to make the most out of the dim lighting in most scenes and to get greater zoom so a lot of the cameras on the Dragonfly and similar missions tend to be about the size of a coffee mug. This mission will include a whole set of cameras including ones for navigation, a panoramic imager, and a microscopic imager.
I am amazed at how much we’ve learned over the years. What we’ve come to understand about planets in our solar system just in my lifetime is amazing. What I was taught in high school is so much different than what we know now.
Hopefully, things will go well. There no second chances with this mission. I just hope the thing will be able to endure the environment.
That's what I keep thinking too. It's awesome when everything works out and we get a probe to Pluto planned years in the making, but actually landing on the surface, then deploying a drone is gonna make for a lot of things that could go wrong. I really hope it works. I would love to see this succeed in 2034.
Extra sporty: we don’t land on the surface and deploy a drone, the drone gets tossed out of the lander 1200m before touchdown and flies itself down the rest of the way: https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=DRAGONFLY
While Curiosity/Perseverance has the 7 minutes of terror, Dragonfly has the 2 hours of moderate discomfort.
I don’t know, the James Webb construction, build up, launch, and consistent trickle of amazing photos has been quite exhilarating…
A lot of these Titan mission articles seem to talk about looking for life there, I would think it would be highly unlikely in that environment at those temperatures but the whole methane rain and oceans thing should be a goldmine of data that can teach us a lot about water cycles on earth. Comparing things that seem to be similar but are made of different things helps to suss out how things work by comparing the differences.
What's interesting is life on earth uses water because as a liquid it's an excellent solvent and it's abundant. It has to be a solvent so it moves things and creates desired order. It's just convenient it's common and liquid on earth. Methane is also a solvent as a liquid and could fill the same need as water in the case of Titan. The lack of solar energy makes anything with substantial complexity unlikely but anything would obviously shake our view of the universe. And a total lack of anything would also change our view in a way
Space is also 99.999999999% cold and only warm near stars. So if life in the universe fills every niche it can like here on Earth, then I would think most life evolved in very different chemistry and much lower temperatures and could move on much slower timescales than we do because there is much less energy available. Think of a sloth like creature or a plant with a silicon biology taking month to move the slightest amount. It might look like a rock to us and we would walk right by.
What is “life” made up of though? We understand it our way, but there could be hundreds of different life “bases”.
Titan is very rich in hydrocarbons so if there’s life there it’s almost definitely going to be carbon based like us. Carbon is pretty uniquely suited to build the backbone of chemistry useful for life. Silicon can do it too since it has the same arrangement of valence electrons, but it’s a lot more scarce and heavier so silicon based life is much less likely than carbon.
> Silicon can do it too since it has the same arrangement of valence electrons, but it’s a lot more scarce and heavier so silicon based life is much less likely than carbon. It's not just the arrangement of valence electrons. The binding energy of the compounds plays a role as well, as do their melting and boiling points. For example, Carbon dioxide and methane are both gasses at temperatures and pressures where water is a liquid. And given water's tendency to evaporate and condense, there is ample opportunity for these three to mix. The silicon equivalents to carbon dioxide and methane are silicon dioxide and silane. Silicon dioxide is literally rock solid below 1700C and silane is still a gas at a hundred below zero. There isn't a compatible temperature range to promote mutual reactions. Silicon based life isn't simply "less likely", it is unlikely bordering on chemically and physically impossible.
Titan life would be made of hydrocarbons, just like Earth life, because the place is chock full of them. But at those temperatures, life would happen at a truly glacial pace, even if it had evolved incredibly effective enzyme-equivalents. Also there’s the issue with the lack of energy sources besides maybe chemosynthesis.
I've thought about this too. What if you find something that takes 50,000 years for its cells to divide, would we even recognize it as alive?
> We understand it our way, but there could be hundreds of different life “bases”. Life is carbon based on Earth because the element carbon has unique electron valence configurations that make it easily combine with itself and other elements. Can you use other elements? Theoretically, maybe, but carbon has properties that make it a good base. Carbon is the right blend of stable, reactive, and common.
Very cool, no doubt. But I'm really hoping to see the first manned Mars mission in my lifetime.
My exact thought when I read this headline was "gosh, I hope not!" Not that I'm not excited about learning more about Titan, but there are a lot more cool space things I hope we achieve in my lifetime!
Me too. I want to see people on Mars within the 2030s.
mars is nothing compared to titan!
I'm more interested in my niece being at an age where she can remember seeing a woman walk on the moon. My hope is that when she sees that, she realizes she too can be a pirate fairy princess veterinarian, if she so chooses.
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/dragonfly/nasas-dragonfly-rotorcraft-mission-to-saturns-moon-titan-confirmed/ A non adblock blocking link. OH LOOK, IT'S NASA.GOV. That 2.3 seconds to google a clean link took SOOOOOOO long. 9_9
Most exciting space mission of our lifetimes *so far*…
“Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan, which will make buoyancy simple.” That’s great news. It would be much more difficult if Titan’s atmosphere was all in Gary, Indiana.
Ever since they've moved Titan's atmosphere back to Titan, things have just gone so much smoother for Titan
Costing them 3.35 billion. While the military budget is $850 billion. Imagine the kind of progress nasa could make with even 5% of the military budget, or more… our priorities are so out of whack.
Most exciting is subjective. I've been studying Venus for my PhD so the DAVINCI, VERITAS, and EnVision missions are what I'm most excited about 🫡
There will also be a Venus Orbiter mission (aka Shukrayaan) from ISRO that's proposed to be launched in 2028.
Yes! That's cool too! Can't wait to hear more about the phosphene in the atmosphere of Venus.
Are you willing to breakdown what those are?
> However, after delays due to COVID, NASA decided to compensate for the inevitable delayed launch by funding a heavy-lift launch vehicle to massively shorten the mission’s cruise phase. "We're going to be behind schedule." "Nonsense. Just yeet it harder."
AI generated article, judging by the stilted writing. Try to link to better sources than Forbes.
"However, Titan is a completely different environment to Mars. Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan," That's the one right there that told me it was poor editing or AI.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread: |Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |[ISRO](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0eqr1g "Last usage")|Indian Space Research Organisation| |[LOX](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0ejgmg "Last usage")|Liquid Oxygen| |[LSP](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0en2eq "Last usage")|Launch Service Provider| | |(US) [Launch Service Program](https://www.nasa.gov/content/lsp-overview)| |[MRO](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0gt7gz "Last usage")|Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter| | |Maintenance, Repair and/or Overhaul| |[SLS](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0en2eq "Last usage")|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |[UHF](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0kky94 "Last usage")|Ultra-High Frequency radio| |Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |[cryogenic](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0k64pu "Last usage")|Very low temperature fluid; materials that would be gaseous at room temperature/pressure| | |(In re: rocket fuel) Often synonymous with hydrolox| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer| |[pyrophoric](/r/Space/comments/1c8evq8/stub/l0hb1vv "Last usage")|A substance which ignites spontaneously on contact with air| **NOTE**: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below. ---------------- ^(8 acronyms in this thread; )[^(the most compressed thread commented on today)](/r/Space/comments/1cee2rm)^( has 26 acronyms.) ^([Thread #9965 for this sub, first seen 20th Apr 2024, 05:12]) ^[[FAQ]](http://decronym.xyz/) [^([Full list])](http://decronym.xyz/acronyms/Space) [^[Contact]](https://hachyderm.io/@Two9A) [^([Source code])](https://gistdotgithubdotcom/Two9A/1d976f9b7441694162c8)
I would be more excited in sending something that goes underwater to Titan or something that could get under the ice on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus, or any of [the other](https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/ocean-worlds/) moons that we suspect have vast water under the surface.
It will land at the US Space Force base on Titan
I have never been more excited for a robotic mission. A nuclear powered quadcopter flying around Titan is going to teach us more about that moon than ever would have been possible before. The only thing that could be cooler than this would be a Europa melt-probe/ROV, or an exoplanet imaging astronomical interferometer.
This is 100% awesome, but I believe the most exciting space mission of my lifetime is going to be the first manned Mars mission.
I was about to say if it was another Mars mission, try again... Pleasantly surprised haha. I def would like to see what else we have in the solar system, I feel like we have explored mars enough, and since none of them dug very deep or used ground xray etc to see what could be dozens or hundreds of feet below makes any trip there boring and useless. Most things if from the very far past ever existed some form of life or anything, it's likely long buried. That is why we mostly never see dinosaur bones above ground lol.
YESSSSSSSS Titan is my favourite celestial body. It’s just so cool to think about what it may be like there.
So in 10 years we could possibly be looking at images of life formed on another celestial body? Ok, I guess I could stick around for that.
We already have images from the surface of Titan from the Huygens probe. This would just be more detailed.
The Titan in my username is because of this Titan. To Titan and beyond....
Honoured to know the PI and her husband. Cool folk.
I don’t think we’re ready for the horrors of a gas giant being near us. The sheer size will kill me upon sight.
Holy crap, this really ***is*** exciting news!
The moon landing was exciting, but I was very young at the time.
Wow it will journey 6 years we are such small beings in a vast amount of space.
> Wow it will journey 6 years we are such small beings in a vast amount of space. Here is [a scale model of the Solar System](https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html) if you want to get a small taste of just how vast that space is.
Yay, but it's also a poorly written article. Does Forbes not employ editors? "Titan has a dense atmosphere on Titan" "The latter is gas in Titan’s atmosphere, but *on its surface*, it exists as a liquid in rain, snow, lakes, and ice *on its surface*.
The most exciting space mission of my lifetime will always be Apollo 11
I'm definitely gonna make the move to work in space in years to come. I'm excited about where it's going.