Does anyone else think that if news of underwater life on Europa being found is announced someday the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?”
New creatures being discovered in Earth’s deepest oceans don’t really even make most news. Europa is just a deeper ocean.
I think if you judge the general public by TikTok views, probably. But science isn’t a general public topic. That’s ok, there’s a few hundred million of us science fans which is enough for me to feel thoroughly socialized.
It was never a general public topic. I don't get where you think that it was. The only point where it was a general public topic when a science topic crossed politics. Like the us space program against ussr space program that was what got the publics imagination not the science.
Revisionist af. 40 years ago advancements in everything from particle physics to biology (and yes the space program too) were a staple of nightly news broadcasts. Hell there was an entire broadcast TV channel that featured programming on everything from cosmology to plate tectonics. The 80s were a thing my friend, don't discount them.
When i was young we didn't know for sure that planets outside the solar system even existed. There were even some theories that planets could be extremely rare and our solar system was special. I think life is in the same category as extra solar planets once were. So yes.
The most likely scenario is that it would be microbes, but even microbes would be pretty amazing if they turned out to be based on something other than DNA/RNA or proved sufficiently distinct from Earth life to suggest a second abiogenesis event.
Nobody is sure, but my guess is that perhaps DNA and RNA are inevitable, because perhaps they are the best/easiest solution for the problem. Even proteins and amino acids are probably inevitable, but there are more variants here.
The interesting part to detect a second abiogenesis event is the translation table from DNA to amino acids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code It's almost blocked, but as far as we know, the blocks are random. And there are even a few small variants here on Earth, that suggest in a second abiogenesis event it would work with a different randomization.
Self nitpicking: The DNA could be twisted in the oposite direction. As far as we know it should work if you have the "mirrored" version of all the helper proteins and stuff. This could be a strong evidence of a second abiogenesis event.
Some form of DNA, RNA, and proteins are all technically inevitable because they're just polymers built up of standard monomers just like complex carbohydrates, fiber, plastics, waxes, etc. It's just an accident of history that carbon based life on earth settled on the specific nucleotides and amino acids. What's likely to be the most different is the transcription and translation machinery.
On the nucleotide side there are synthetic creations like Hachimoji DNA [1] and xDNA [2] and a grand total of over 500 (!) amino acids have been found in nature but only 22 are encoded in DNA. IIRC it's mostly a question of the initial conditions on Earth, specifically the acidity and temperature that decides the possible chemistry available to evolving life.
IIRC the 4 bases of DNA are easy to produce before life reactions, and they can form steps of the same size so the chains of the DNA spiral can go parallel. Adding more bases make everything more complicated. You need more versions of ATP, TTP, GTP and CTP and you a huge number of versions of tRNA. If I'm allowed to guess, I'd prefer a version of DNA with only 2 bases and longer codons.
(Are long codons a problem? We have codons of length 3 but the last base is somewhat ignored. Is it to hard to have codons of length 4 or 5? With 4 bases it would be a problem because you would need too many tRNA, but with 2 bases the number of tRNA is similar to ours.)
It's not clear that the only option is DNA, but we will not know until we find a few independent live origins.
Anyway, even if there is a unknown biology law that says that DNA and proteins are inevitable and that confuses us when we detect a second planet with life, if they have an independent origin there is absolutely no way that they have a "genetic code" that can be confusing.
Between here and there is... a lot of cold, vacuum, and extremely intense radiation. I'd be surprised if anything that evolved here could survive the trip.
> In September last year, a team of scientists launched a squad of tiny animals into space aboard a Russian satellite. Once in orbit, the creatures were shunted into ventilated containers that exposed them to the vacuum of space. In this final frontier, they had no air and they were subjected to extreme dehydration, freezing temperatures, weightlessness and lashings of both cosmic and solar radiation. It’s hard to imagine a more inhospitable environment for life but not only did the critters survive, they managed to reproduce on their return to Earth.
Deinococcus radiodurans has enough radiation resistance to handle the trip from Mars to Earth (or vice versa). And that's just one we know about. We are very, very far from having ever performed an exhaustive catalog of all bacterial species, let alone one which determined the full range of bacterial radiation resistance.
One interesting thing I guess about Europa is that it doesn't really have much of an atmosphere, so I guess re-entry wouldn't be like re-entry to earth.
On the other hand, landing on the surface of Europa doesn't get you much. There's likely several km of ice and insane intense radiation before there's possibly anything looking like a habitable zone for earth-life.
it's more interesting if they're not that different from Earth life. many species of fungi, bacteria, and lichen can survive in space. it's not just tardigrades. they're not a fluke; they're part of a pattern.
I think it's extremely likely that we'll not only find life is very common, but that many species found on earth are also found on other planets.
species is probably the wrong word. maybe genus or phylum. apologies for the rusty biology.
but sharks have been sharks for 400 to 450 million years.
I'm sure sharks are terrestrial in origin, but that's an intergalactic timescale during which very little evolutionary change occurred, or was necessary, for a particular category of creature.
maybe tardigrades have been tardigrades for 450 million years too.
And maybe evolve into the dominant life or civilization. It may turn out that upright bipedal “5 star” form is very conserved in advanced civilizations. So maybe you have the Lion people planet, the lizard people planet, the wolf people planet. We are the chimp people planet haha :)
Hahaha. Maybe, maybe. But what if (at least some of) the lizard people are actually not from another planet but are from an alternate timeline dimension of Earth where the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event didn't happen and it was reptiles that evolved into a "humanoid" 5 pointed upright form? o_O
TBH if life is there or anywhere in our solar system it'd 99% chance be single-celled bacteria/archaea type life.. because that's what like 80% of Earth's history has been... and yes... I think you'll find most of the population would probably give it a shrug.
If you found multicellular crawly life "like us", sure, people would be excited. I also think that's exceedingly unlikely. If life itself here is a "fluke", eukaryotic life is wayyyyy more of a fluke.
> the reaction from the general public will be something like “Meh, cool. Now what about the economy or who is dating who?”
That wouldn't be annoying me much, if at all.
The possibly infinite conspiracy theories and misinformation making it probably impossible to follow the developments without getting confused on the other hand...
I think if we actually found irrefutable evidence of life on Europa (or some other celestial body) and that life was definitively non-terrestrial in origin, it would make global headlines.
Even if it's just microbes and not, like, some exotic whale- or octopus-type creature, it would be a momentous event.
shrug Different people have different priorities. They're judging you just as harshly for not caring more about the economy or socially relevent-for-them news. I'm glad someone's engaged with the economy and politics more than I, those things are important, and there are only so many hours in the day to doom scroll.
Nah. It’s easy. “The Bible is god’s word, for mankind, on earth. It wasn’t written to exhaustively document everything in existence. It didn’t mention extraterrestrial life because that was not relevant to the creation and salvation of mankind.”
Is it really surprising to you that people are more interested in things relevant to their lives? Whitey On The Moon is as relevant now as it was in 1970, hell arguably even more relevant.
I mean, it always is, but if you read the article, it’s more about exploration of the chemistry of Europa via Webb. Ice on the moon is already well established, hence the desire to build a lunar base on the South Pole. But nasas funding has more to do with which state it’ll be spent in than anything else.
New creatures being discovered in Earth’s deepest oceans don’t really even make most news. Europa is just a deeper ocean.