Alien Life In Our Solar System
Europa Alien life may be a in a lot more places than we suspected. It is beginning to look like it might even exist in our own solar system. Right now the leading candidates are Europa, an icy moon that is about the size of our own and is the sixth moon of Jupiter and believe it or not, Mars. How come Mars is being mentioned again? Scientists are starting to believe that pieces of rock that came to Earth from Mars do indeed contain fossils of tiny organism that lived on Mars. You might remember that this was dismissed a few years ago by most of the scientific community, but it is now in vogue again. It has to be admitted that when you look at what they are talking about, it certainly does look like fossils of tiny life of the kind that exist on Earth. Is it a coincidence that it happens to look like that, or is it traces of life? I guess only time will tell on this one. There is more to this however, Mars really hasn't been explored very much and anything could still exist on it including intelligent beings. Scientists don't think so because of the fact that Mars is so inhospitable to life as we know it, but we are finding out that life can develop in conditions that we would have never have believed in the past. We have to remember that methane was found on Mars near some caves. While this in itself doesn't mean too much, it could mean that animal life does exist on the planet or even intelligent life. When we look at Europa we see a moon that seems to be completely covered with frozen water. It is believed to be water, because of scans that were made that break the light into elements with a prism like device. No one knows how deep the ice goes. Some say that it could be over 100 miles thick, others believe that it is only a few miles thick. Whatever the thickness is, plans are being made to send a probe there that will look on top of the ice for clues to life. Right now it is being said that the probe is scheduled for sometime around 2018. When I hear plans like this, I have to laugh. I can't help but feel that if the scientific community was serious, they would launch this probe within 18 months or so. This long range planning never really works out. How many times have we seen this before, only to be disappointed when it was canceled? Why would Europa be a candidate for life? It seems that the only reason is that it has water. Scientists believe that where water exists, there is life. They base this on what they have found on Earth. The conditions on Europa are different from those on Earth however. For one thing, the sun is much further away. It is believed by some that the deadly radiation coming from Jupiter may actually help create life on Europa. How could deadly radiation create life? Some scientists believe that this radiation could create chemical reactions that would hasten the creation of life. This is a relatively new idea. A paper was even published in Nature, a scientific journal, by Christopher Chyba from the SETI Institute theorizing how this could happen.
Jupiter Most scientists believe that we won't find any fish in the water, or anything that is of any size, but they do think that tiny life is quite possible. One thing that I have noticed over the years is a lot of mind changing by scientists, so I wouldn't bet on any of this. One has only to look at all the changes in the theory of how the universe was created to see what I mean. I think that if life does exist on Europa, it could be of any size, if there is enough food in the water, of course that assumes that these animals would eat. They might be of some unknown type that gets their energy using some other method. I have to wonder what we would do if we found intelligent creatures that lived in the water of that planet? Intelligence could develop in the water as easily as it could on land. These creatures would be so different from us that we might have a hard time realizing that they were intelligent, unless we found structures and devices under the water that they built. There could be hot vents under the ice that heat the water such as those on Earth. On Earth creatures exist in these hot waters, so scientists are supposing that if these vents do exist, due to friction from the pull of Jupiter, or by some other means, life may exist in them on Europa.
Mars One of the problems that I see is that we may be judging a planet or moon's ability to have life on it by the standards that we are used to on Earth. It could turn out that the most inhospitable place for humans could have life on it of a type that is completely foreign to us. Maybe a volcanic hot planet might contain life that has some sort of protective outer layer. Hey they might even get their energy from eating certain types of rocks containing ores and such. We should not eliminate any planet or heavenly body in our search for extraterrestrial life. I would even check comets and large meteors. It might be possible that somehow a meteor broke off from a body that had life and that life still exists on it. It would most likely be microscopic life, but would be interesting never the less. All this does present a problem for us. What if we pick up some alien germ and bring it back to Earth? When we went to the moon our government made a big deal about decontamination for returning astronauts. This was merely a show for the public. When that hatch was opened on Apollo 11 as it floated on the water, moon dust blew out of it, because the capsule was contaminated with it. Putting the astronauts in quarantine was really a joke, but it looked good. So far we have been lucky, but there could even be contaminates floating in space that we know nothing about. We do know that space can be deadly because of bursts of radiation and meteor strikes, but there could be a lot more hazards just waiting to snare us. Space is the unknown, and it is unknown for a reason and that reason is that we have not traveled very far into it. It could also turn out that hundreds of years from now the people that are alive at that time will say that we contaminated some of the planets with probes that were not sterilized properly, or that we irradiated some areas by sending nuclear reactors down to the surface of planets. The bottom line to all this is that I do not believe that extraterrestrial life will be discovered for another 50 years or more, but I hope that I am pleasantly surprised. |
