
Abundant water likely to exist under ‘moon rabbit,’ Japanese research team says - pmoriarty
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/05/15/national/science-health/abundant-water-highly-likely-exist-moon-rabbit-japanese-research-team-says/
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tomashertus
As I have been growing up and reading about space exploration the narrative
had been same: the Earth is special because it has water which allows it to
have life. Today it seems like the latest technologies allows us to discover
that water in some form is everywhere we look. I believe that it will be the
same with life. Today the only known form of life is on Earth and I can’t wait
to read about all the discoveries of different forms of life on other
planets...

~~~
zokier
The distinction between (liquid) water and ice is pretty significant for
astrobiology. I feel more like we are very quickly reaching the point where we
have established that our solar system is barren of any (macroscopic) life[1].
And while we might be able to detect existence of life on other systems (by
some chemical signatures), I very much doubt that we are going to see any more
direct discoveries of extraterrestrial life during our lifetime simply due the
vast interstellar distances involved.

[1] Sure, even micro-organisms would be a major discovery, but ultimately imho
of limited interest and impact.

~~~
codeulike
The difference between nothing and micro-organisms is much greater than the
difference between micro-organisms and macro-organisms. The discovery of non-
terrestrial-origin micro-organisms in our solar system would be massively
significant.

~~~
jolmg
What is it about going from nothing to micro-organisms that is so much more
interesting than from micro-organisms to macro-organisms?

~~~
jdblair
Because it poses new interesting questions: If extra-terrestrial life exists,
do we have a common ancestor? This is the theory of panspermia. Or does life
spontaneously arise when conditions are right, but with variation?

It would be particularly exciting to discover life that is similar to Earth
but with an opposite chirality, or a genetic code that encodes amino acids
using different base pairs.

~~~
Baeocystin
I am willing to bet that whatever is eventually found will be remarkably
similar to what we are familiar with on Earth, assuming a liquid-water
environment, and the constraints that implies. Single-celled life appears to
have arisen so rapidly that it predates the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment,
after all.

(I'd be thrilled to be wrong about this, of course, just as I would be
fascinated with any xenobiological discovery at all. But I do think the
'endless forms most beautiful' are also strongly constrained by simple
physics, and thus the solutions found by an evolutionary random walk will
resemble what we already know.)

~~~
jolmg
This is what I suspect with microorganisms as well. Macroorganisms are much
more complex and they have common features that seem very arbitrary like
moving via cylindrical appendages called legs, or having faces that feature 2
eyes, a nose, and a mouth. It makes me think that it's much more likely to see
something wildly different between macroorganisms on Earth and elsewhere than
between microorganisms. It would be cool to see other forms of movement, other
forms senses, other forms of communication, other forms of anatomy, etc.

EDIT: It also makes me wonder how different an ecosystem could be. Imagine one
that did not require macroorganisms eating other macroorganisms, like ones
that feed on heat or wind.

EDIT 2: Maybe mating requires 3 genders, etc. There seems to be a lot of room
for variation.

~~~
hyperpallium
There's even wild differences between macroorganisms on Earth.

Invertebrates are much more relaxed about number of eyes etc.

We can go from "humans are the optimal form!", to "well, some kind of mammal",
"c'mon, it's got to be a vertebrate", then get into the Cambrian experiment,
go back further to different DNA (RNA anyone), then to different metabolic
pathways, then to different organic biochemistry, then to non-carbon... and
why should life have a chemical basis, anyway? So chemocentric.

How can we tell when he go from too anthropocentric to too anti-
anthropocentric? We have guesswork only. We're like a child rebelling against
its parents.

It seems to me, that elephants, dolphins, parrots, octipuses, and even spiders
could have undergone the rapid brain-size increase that happened to some apes.
(We don't even know why it happened to us.) They might still do so, in a few
million years.

~~~
Consultant32452
On the other hand, some physical features have evolved multiple times
independently. The eye is one key example. IMO this is a strong indication
that creatures that evolved in places other than Earth probably also have
something we'd recognize as eyes.

~~~
hyperpallium
Yes, a great procedure for getting parameters.

Note that some earth creatures - deep sea and underground - have almost lost
eyes. Like [blind mole
rats]([https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalax](https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Spalax)).
They have appropriately alien-like nose-antennae.

If there's light, they'll have eyes. Probably.

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ChuckMcM
Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in
1970 we would know all about this ice and other aspects of the Moon as well
:-).

I also agree with Tomas who opined that for a long time it was presented that
water was 'rare' and somehow special. And while we can agree that the triple
point is pretty narrow set of conditions that have to exist, we now know it
flowed on Mars at one time, is probably currently flowing on Europa, and that
ice is literally everywhere.

Time to rewrite our Science Fiction tropes.

~~~
mahranch
> Had we established the first Moon base in 1988 as NASA had on its roadmap in
> 1970 we would know all about this

You say that offhandedly, as if they decided not to move forward with a Moon
base due to bureaucracy or because some upper management people decided to go
in a different direction.

A permanent moon base in the 70s and 80s was largely impossible as far as the
technology is concerned. Hell, we're approaching 2020 and we _still_ have
several major hurdles before we could put a permanent base on a body or planet
that is not earth. Everything from radiation to supplies are still problems
that need solved. Expecting them to solve them in the late 70s or early 80s is
almost laughable.

I know HN and reddit likes to think it was congress who is responsible for the
shift in NASAs goals (after all, they control the purse strings so they get to
dictate/approve budgets & goals), but they did so precisely because NASA told
them it was impossible to establish a permanent moon base at that point in
time. On top of the insane cost, what more was there to be gained that
justified the immense cost? If they wanted to go to the moon and study rocks,
that's what the Apollo program was for. There was only so much we could learn
with the technology we had at the time. People forget, the rest of the solar
system awaited exploration too, but only so much money to go around.

"But we can use the moon as a base to launch further missions out into the
solar system and beyond!" It's a nice pipe dream, but getting the materials
there and/or manufacturing facilities to create everything needed is cost
prohibitive. Also, the logistics of doing something like that today is insane,
let alone 30 years ago.

~~~
osullivj
If the US had established a colony on the moon, would that colony have
eventually declared independence?

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narag
I would have believed that there's some tech that allows an orbiter to detect
water under the surface. It seems that such a thing doesn't exist. What's
next, droping bombs to study debris and ground waves?

~~~
reaperducer
I don't remember if the moon was the target, but I recall there was a probe in
the last 30 years or so that was deliberately crashed into something just to
study the debris that was kicked up.

~~~
Twisol
You might be referring to Deep Impact [0], which wasn't even quite that long
ago.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(spacecraft)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_\(spacecraft\))

~~~
kersny
or LCROSS:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCROSS)

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drzaiusapelord
I wonder if these water deposits are near craters that are in permanent shadow
and always below freezing. You could send a relatively small robotic setup
that would melt the deep ice into water and use it to form structures on the
crater. Now you have a permanent moonbase without bringing in tons of material
via rockets.

~~~
dbingham
...until you try to heat it to a reasonable temperature, the walls melt, and
all your atmosphere off gases in to space.

~~~
drzaiusapelord
You'd have to lay insulation against the ice so you can have a warmer
interior, but that's still a pretty good mass savings. You'd use ice for the
heavy structural elements and then only lift the lighter stuff.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
The more pressure you put on ice, the more it wants to turn into liquid. So
your "heavy structural elements" can't be bearing too much weight.

~~~
dotancohen
On the moon, it could bear six times the mass it would bear on Earth.

------
matte_black
If you put a fish in some heated moon water on the moon, could it swim in it
and live?

~~~
magduf
Maybe for a brief time, until the water turned to vapor or if it were in a
hermetically sealed container, until the water ran out of dissolved oxygen for
the fish to breathe.

~~~
matte_black
So for aquatic life, some of these worlds could potentially already be
terraformed?

~~~
jonshariat
I think the fish also need food. Alge, seagrass, bugs, crustaceans etc.

~~~
magduf
Not really. For the brief time the fish will survive in an un-enclosed
container of water on the Moon's surface, they'll be fine without any food. By
the time they get hungry, the water will all be vaporized and they'll be dead.

~~~
jonshariat
Oh I was referring the comment about "terraforming" other planets/moons that
have water by plopping fish into the oceans there.

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delbel
if there are rocks and gravity, there is water. the gravity crushes the rocks
and forces the hydrogen and oxygen out, and it forms water. So basically there
is water everywhere in the universe. The "we found water" meme is just tabloid
headlines recycled over and over again, much like "voyager leaves the solar
system" every year -- wine is good for you, wine is bad for you, antibiotics
are causing resistence, etc, etc. Go look at any Popular Science magazine from
the 90s and now, the same damn narratives repeated, rephrased, and re-rinsed.

~~~
dredmorbius
Given relative elemental frequency in the universe, and propensities to form
molecules, water is likely the third most common molecule whhich exists, after
molecular hydrogen and oxygen.

The second-most prevalent element, helium, doesn't form molecules (to any
meaningful extent, if at all).

Methane (CH4) likely comes next.

[https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-common-compound-in-
ou...](https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-common-compound-in-our-universe)

