
Pluto’s dark side spills its secrets – including hints of a hidden ocean - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-020-02082-1/index.html
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8jy89hui
If you look hard enough, you'll find evidence of what you want. Life on Europa
or Enceladus seems like a far shot but relatively possible. Pluto feels like
an entirely different league.

This article seems to point more at our obsession with finding life than
anything else.

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behnamoh
Honestly, even if we find microbial life on other planets/moons, it wouldn't
make the news that much as we already know some forms of life actually came to
Earth by meteors.

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beamatronic
I think it would expose 2 camps of people. Like masks have. Some would react
with anger and disbelief. And for others, it would be Tuesday.

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AngryData
Biologists might lose their shit over seeing new forms of life. Of course it
would be decades at a minimum before anything useful came out of it.

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rwmj
Unlike many BBC "science" programmes, this recent one about Pluto was not
terrible:
[https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqm9](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000kqm9)

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throwaway_pdp09
Again, that question of life elsewhere when we have an abundance here but are
killing it with indifference. Can we prioritise.

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_Microft
This is a false choice. We could both protect life here and still seek out new
life at the same time.

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throwaway_pdp09
We _could_. But we're not.

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HeadsUpHigh
We are not trying particularly hard to find life elsewhere either.

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PaulHoule
Pluto is probably a better place for habitation than Mars.

Most of Pluto's mass is volatiles such as water, carbon monoxide and nitrogen:
things you can use to make plastics and pharmaceuticals, breathing air, trees,
and human bodies. Instead of supporting millions of people on Mars Pluto has
the resources to support trillions of people.

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ianai
Quick google and Pluto has something like a surface temp of 47 kelvin. That’s
cold enough that I think the material on the surface would turn explosively
energetic if ever exposed to something like the temperatures we humans live.
It also wouldn’t have soil. That far out, you really need good sources of
energy like fusion and fission as solar wouldn’t provide enough.

On the other hand, I’m sure there’s some incredible science to be done out
there. Like making gigantic structures (particle accelerators, telescopes,
etc) out of what ever can be scraped from nearby asteroids and such. I wish we
could park a satellite around it.

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philliphaydon
We're gonna need computers there so we will ship some 10th gen Intels to use
as heaters.

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stephenhuey
And run some Flash apps on them to keep the fires burning!

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manquer
Electron apps probably to keep up with times I would say

