Gregory's ServerOH MY FUCKING GOD, TEAM. I am calling it: there's life on Europa. https://webbtelescope.org/contents/news-releases/2023/news-2023-113
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28 comments
 @mw1cgg @girlonthenet I must stress that I am neither a scientist nor an alien, I have no inside knowledge. I am just a girl with a heart full of hope that one day within my lifetime we'll send a little drilling robot to the surface of Jupiter's best moon, and it will find some little bacterial guys and therefore at some point before I die I will see alien life. @girlonthenet I hope you're right, but I can imagine a lot of reasons how carbon would be there without life, too. Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Neptune all have significant amounts of carbon. But if there is life, what I'm most curious about is whether it's similar to our own. Like, does it even have DNA, or does it use some other mechanism. If it's similar, does that point to interplanetary cross-pollination or does it indicate convergence on something similar to what we've got here.  @girlonthenet I suspect you might have already seen it (or its progeny) every time you see a living thing on earth.  @girlonthenet @Remittancegirl I am half convinced that octopuses are stranded aliens slumming it with the earthlife. @girlonthenet @Remittancegirl And, yes, I do rather expect that when we find life elsewhere, the panspermia theory will be confirmed by the similarities. @ErosBlog @Remittancegirl oh same! They are so precious and weird and it would be such a beautiful, beautiful thing if true. I want to believe it purely for the gorgeousness of the story. @ErosBlog I actually wrote some tentacle porn once with that as part of the worldbuilding - the creatures lived at the bottom of the sea and had come from other worlds to catalogue human experience (including pleasure) 💦 @girlonthenet To paraphrase badly, there may well be intelligent life out there, it’s seen us and decided to take avoid us like a martian plague!  There is a running joke in astrophysics (a not very funny one) that the high-profile astrophysicist Mike Brown wants to send a mission to Europa because he wants to go whaling. I suspect there are not whales on Europa, but last time anyone said gainsaid Mike Brown he took away Pluto's planet status, so I'm not going to start shit with him. (Mike, if you're reading this, I joke.)  @girlonthenet I'm so broken I read it had a salty ocean and thought 'wtf an ocean got to be salty about?' @phil @girlonthenet You'd be salty too if you got probed and spied on as much as Europa, and had weirdo old bald guys writing fanfic about what you've got under your clothes. @girlonthenet been there, poked the monolith with a stick... Made the T shirt.   @girlonthenet There's lots of ways carbon dioxide can be released into an atmosphere though, as us earth people know all too well. IMO this is the most promising lead so far. https://www.nasa.gov/goddard/2023/webb-discovers-methane-carbon-dioxide-in-atmosphere-of-k2-18b Dimethyl sulfide is ONLY produced by life (plankton specifically) @girlonthenet Roll on JUICE data! (In several years)  |
@girlonthenet ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS, EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE. USE THEM TOGETHER. USE THEM IN PEACE.