I am thinking more and more it would be a pretty good idea to keep the place habitable where we are now. Besides other things, it is quite beautiful here.
And more importantly, anaerobic life arose on Earth first and plausibly the jump from a lifeless planet to anaerobic life took an order of magnitude less time than the evolution of photosynthesis did. Because of that and given how much more common subsurface liquid water is than surface liquid water in our solar system I wouldn't be surprised if anaerobic life was drastically more common than aerobic life in the universe.
Yes! From the article: "The team found that about 13 to 40 pounds of oxygen is generated each second by Europa’s surface. ... While earlier studies reported widely varying ranges up to 2,245 pounds per second, this result shows the higher end of that range was unlikely."
That entire interval is "oxygen starved". It's all a minuscule amount.
Somehow we have an entire article about how a person can't walk around Europa without a helmet, as if it was news. The actual research is news, but it's about something completely different.
The early earth was likely "oxygen" starved too. We have an abundance on earth because plants need Hydrogen and plants pay a high energy price to get it from water and then plants discard the O2.
Europa has water therefore it has oxygen too. Whether there is enough available energy is a different question.
Although the event is inferred to have constituted a mass extinction,[7] due in part to the great difficulty in surveying microscopic organisms' abundances, and in part to the extreme age of fossil remains from that time, the Great Oxidation Event is typically not counted among conventional lists of "great extinctions", which are implicitly limited to the Phanerozoic eon. In any case, isotope geochemistry data from sulfate minerals have been interpreted to indicate a decrease in the size of the biosphere of >80% associated with changes in nutrient supplies at the end of the GOE.
I just want to say that in case anybody plays with Warlock II on DotPW (Manalink), if you add 1 Elesh Norn, 1 Grisselbrand instead of Living Wish, the deck becomes too lethal to even exist.
To be fair, plants had ample sunlight to use for energy to break apart carbon dioxide. Undersea European life would need some other source of input energy.
Chemosynthesis is something that's been observed where deep sea worms use hydrogen sulfide to convert co2 and o2 into sugars. It's possible that there are other chemical pathways that can be used where the o2 isn't used at all.
Britannica: "During photosynthesis in green plants, light energy is captured and used to convert water, carbon dioxide, and minerals into oxygen and energy-rich organic compounds".
Getting the Carbon from CO2 gets the backbone of organic compounds. Getting the Hydrogen from H2O is also necessary and is also part of photosynthesis.
We have chemosynthetic bacteria on earth that use chemical energy rather than light. There is also a hypothetical biological process called radiosynthesis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiotrophic_fungus
I am not a biologist - but I find biology fascinating!
If "Europa" is modified with an 'n' to form the demonym "Europan", is the star Vega properly modified the same way with an appended 'n' to form the demonym "Vegan"?
Reading this link, I'm wondering if my initial formulation wasn't correct after all? It depends on how you categorize "vegan" but in the link they state that "material" is the only group of adjectives that comes after "nationality", and of the categories listed, I'd say vegan fits the "material" category best?
Or am I misinterpreting something?
English is my second language, but I do want to speak it as well as possible, hence my efforts to understand this topic. I do apologise for pestering you all with these questions tho.
It's amazing: I only learned about that when I when I was middle-aged, reading some internet article. But as a native English speaker, I subconsciously already knew this rule, somehow, like it's hard-wired somehow. They never taught this to us in school.
That's what I mean: you just learn it by being immersed in the language and hearing it every day and only knowing that language, so you learn to use it the way everyone around you uses it. So there's actual rules to the language that, as a native speaker, you're not even aware are rules. It probably took some ESL person to notice this rule even existed, and to figure out how it actually worked and write it down.
I mean... Barring some pretty big catastrophes occurring, Europa is likely to outlast Europe by several orders of magnitude. If the moon is happy to wait, they'll inherit the name regardless.
Well, it does say: "“We don’t really know how much oxygen you need to make life,” she said. “So the fact that it’s lower than some earlier, wishful-thinking estimates is not such a problem.”.
If there is life on any of the gas giant moons (particularly Europa and Enceladus) it's tidal heating that sustains it. There are basically four ways a planet can be heated:
1. Latent heat of formation. As the planet forms, denser materials sink down to the core and lighter materials float up to the top. This releases their gravitational potential, heating the planet. Over time though, this heat radiates into space. Icy moons are too old for this to be enough heat to support a liquid ocean.
2. Radioisotope decay. Particularly stuff like Potassium, on long time scales, decays and releases heat energy. This is a significant source of heating on Earth. Less significant on a small moon since radioactive isotopes are pretty rare, all things considered.
3. Solar heating. Sun hot. Planet kinda hot.
4. Tidal heating. The planet gets physically flexed by interacting orbital resonances between another moon and the host planet. This can be powerful enough to drive large amounts of volcanic activity on the surface of Io.
Europa Clipper is a mission that will fly high-precision magnetometers over Europa relatively soon (by NASA standards). It's possible that those magnetometers could pick up on induced magnetic fields from the interaction of charged salt ions moving in Europa's ocean with the magnetic field of Jupiter. If that signal can be detected, it may be possible to map the sub-surface ocean and start to do some sort of astro-oceanography.
In the universe, and outer planets, yes. But the hotter (and smaller) inner planets have a hard time of keeping hold of lighter elements, so it's much rarer and only really available when bound to heavier compounds such as water.
Probably a bit yeah. But there is an argument that it is hard to store a lot of chemical energy without abundant oxygen in the environment. Oxygen stores a ton of energy, and it's quite difficult to achieve comparable energy density without it. This is the basic reason why gasoline has so much more energy than batteries, and people are developing batteries that use oxygen from the air to increase energy density. I remember reading in a Wikipedia article that Earth's atmosphere before it became oxygenated would likely not have been able to support multicellular life with energy-intensive things like muscles and complex brains.
But without knowing if Europa has any life at all this is probably putting the cart before the horse.
> Oceanic hydrothermal vents teem with anaerobic life which uses a lot of interesting chemistries instead, e.g. based on sulfur.
Yeah, but none of that anaerobic life is "multicellular life with energy-intensive things like muscles and complex brains." It's all bottom of the food chain bacteria.
It’s not that it needs to be, it’s just that—based on our knowledge of the chemical elements—life based on some combination of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen is by far the most likely.
Other forms are certainly possible, it’s just that they are highly highly unlikely to form and remain stable, and develop into complex intelligent life.
So all of that informs where you should focus your efforts on research and searching.
But none of it is intelligent. Anaerobic processes are drastically slower and less efficient than aerobic ones. I wonder if a functioning brain could even work anaerobically. 20% of our oxygen consumption is done by our brain.
If we find any life at all on Europa, intelligent or otherwise, it proves that earth is not the only planet with life. It’s an obvious conclusion but if we find alien life even in our own solar system that says something about the prevalence of alien life.
There are some multicellular anaerobic organisms, such as a few species of Lorificfera. It is worth noting that they all appear to be descended from aerobic ancestors that lost their ability to process oxygen. Multicellularity is very difficult to evolve, and has only happened a few times.
