Will we find life on Europa ?

Wed Jun 24, 2009 12:19 pm » by **Abyssdnb**

Jupiter's moon Europa remains one of the most promising possibilities for finding life in the solar system. The icy world is thought to have a liquid ocean underneath its frozen shell where life forms could potentially exist.

"Jupiter's Europa. One of the most interesting non-Earth locations in the solar system. Never mind ice and occasional puddles, this moon has entire oceans - and where there's water, we can't help but hope there's life. Recent results show that there are heat sources to drive evolution of such as well, but there's still debate over what's actually going on in there."

THE FULL ARTICLE http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/20 ... is-mo.html

Sat Jun 27, 2009 12:09 pm » by **Kenth68**

I would love to know what's under the ice. But one of the biggest problems is making sure we don't contaminate the environment. We've had different types of bacteria survive our trips into space. We could do all kinds of damage were we to unleash any contaminate or organism.

Sat Jun 27, 2009 1:36 pm » by **Babybear**

i think wherever there is water/ice in the solar sysyem there is gonna be life even if it is just viral or bacterial life. where there is sunlight as well as water/ice there`s gonna be primitive vegetation at the very least! that may not sound like much or very exciting to some but it`s all we need to know for certain that life exists off our planet.
once we know that...well anything is possible.
as for contaminating other worlds with our own bacterias, yes this could be a big ethical problem and in bringing back any rock/ soil/ water samples we may be exposing ourselves and other earth life forms to the same dangers unless all analysis of samples was done say on a space station.
personally i think they have already found life on mars and this was the reason for the vatican astronomer giving the views about the possibility of alien life being our brother whatever
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7399661.stm
notice how he says *intelligent* life forms?
looks suspiciously like they know about much more than bacterial life on mars right?
this looks like the start of real * disclosure* to me. :alien:

Sat Jun 27, 2009 2:14 pm » by **Crazynutsx**

i hope we find some kind of life there all tho human will end up killing in in some way no doubt

Sat Jun 27, 2009 2:38 pm » by **Eaganthorn**

There are several ideas of late to indicate we will find evidence of life, in some form or another, on every solid piece of celestial real estate. The idea is that life will find a way to exploit any and all energy sources and live where ever it can but we must also recalibrate what we call life.

Sat Jun 27, 2009 3:19 pm » by **Becks**

I have to lower the tone here,

I wonder how many "septics" got confused at the title of this post...ha ha

Sat Jun 27, 2009 5:52 pm » by **Crazynutsx**

it annoys me when people say life must need water to exist

Why does it ? just because we do does not mean other life on other planets do

Sat Jun 27, 2009 6:20 pm » by **Drextin**

Crazy I feel the same way. sure the presence of water is a wonderful clue and we know for a fact that water and life have been matched before.......

This is based on the fact that all microbial life needs water and since they believe that at one time we were microorganisms then everything MUST need water to survive even on an alien planet.

But here is where they are wrong.........not all microbial life needs oxygen. So if they can do without oxygen then why put so much importance on water?

Of course considering our present technology we should stick to water planets and moons where we have a better chance of finding life since we know what a water planet with life would look like and what types of gases it would emit.

Sooner or later they are going to have to drop all pretenses and accept that life might be able to survive anywhere.

Sat Jun 27, 2009 7:14 pm » by **Xenonymous**

how they gonna get through all that ice,lasers?

Sat Jun 27, 2009 7:37 pm » by **Babybear**

im not sure that all living things do need water to survive, but the point in looking for life in places where there is water is because here on earth, wherever water exists, life exists.
so it makes sense to look in those places first.
it`s true that alien life may have completely different requirements in terms of respiration or food and indeed there may be life that we simply couldn`t recognise as life, maybe we`d even need more senses to be aware of some life forms...who knows?
so for the time being its probably best to stick to what we know and we know that water offers the best chance of finding life. it`s funny to think that only a couple of decades ago we were told that there was no chance of finding water let alone life in our solar system and now it appears to be quite common