I really like the concept of life on another planet in the terms of intelligent life. With some of the moons I just mentioned being relatively close to earth and possibly holding life compared to some possible life holding exoplanets like Kepler 452b upon other Kepler exoplanets which are hundreds of light years away, it would be smartest to go for moons in our own solar system and finding life before going outside of our solar system. It would also be much easier to develop the technology to do so and we could do it much sooner.
Now, Europa, Titan, Enceladus, Ganymede, and Callisto are all moons in our solar system and for the most part (expect Titan) they’re all moons with ice solid surfaces. I don’t really know much about Ganymede and Callisto and those two moons are the least likely to hold life, so I won’t be discussing them today. I really just wanted to focus on Europa and Enceladus as Titan is different than these two and also less likely to hold life despite it may look like it could, it doesn’t have water which is a need for all life forms as we know it. Who knows though, maybe life is on Titan and has been able to adapt to the cold temperatures and ethane and methane lakes and rivers the moon is covered in.
Europa is a very interesting moon for it is covered all in ice with an ocean beneath it fully of water. Now, the ice is much and I mean much thicker than anything on earth as the ice layer is 10-15 miles thick. We will get to that in a second. Anyways, the moon has water twice the volume of the water on earth so it’s much more abundant in water. Now, I mentioned how thick the ice is. Well, since the ice is so thick it would take humans something so powerful to get through this ice. The power in this object needed to get through the ice will have to be much more powerful than anything ever created before. However, if it’s possible to find shallow areas of the ice it could be easier to get through it but still extremely hard. Also, this object needed to get through the ice would have to sustain huge amounts of pressure and would take years to drill through the ice. It’s possible though that Europa has life under the water. If it does, the life would have to adapt to extreme darkness like an anglerfish. It would also have to be able to sustain extreme pressure. So, it’s possible for life to live, it may not be in the form we think it would be and it probably won’t be very smart, but intelligent life could exist.
As for Enceladus, it’s like Europa expect there are geysers that come up from the ice from what’s presumed to be a rocky core underneath. The ice shell is a little thinner too, only around 3 miles deep. NASA is going much further with Enceladus instead of Europa.
NASA shouldn’t focus more on finding life outside of our solar system because I believe that there could be life in our own solar system and it’s be more accessible to discover than hundreds to thousands of light years away. Also, what if we do find life on like let’s say Kepler 452b? Let’s say they send a signal to us and we’re able to pick up where the radio waves come from? Then what?
Submitted November 28, 2018 at 09:47PM by ThePoliticalTalk https://ift.tt/2Q1SF5N
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