None of the responses actually provides a reason to think that life exists there.
> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)
And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:
> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe.
That was absolutely terrifying.
Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.
Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.
> So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.
"reason to think it might" is not at all the same as "reason to think it does". Basically it says that they don't think it's impossible. (The heading is "Could Life Really Exist on Enceladus?", and the experiment showed that the simulated environment didn't kill an existing microorganism. They acknowledge "that doesn’t mean that there is life on Saturn’s moon" and reiterate that if there is, they've shown that future space missions "might have a good chance of finding traces".)
And people are making whacked out inferences, like the first utterly insane comment:
> If life really exists there, it implies that life is everywhere in the universe. That was absolutely terrifying.
Er, no, what implies that life is "everywhere" in the universe is the plain mechanics that make microorganic life on Enceladus plausible and the vast numbers ... it's not like the solar system is super special and rare; in the ~ 10^26 planets and moons in the observable universe (and why limit it to that? The actual number might be unbounded), there is certain to be a vast number that are similar, and a sizeable number of them will have some sort of microorganisms. Are such microorganisms terrifying? No remotely rational person would think so. Do they imply higher lifeforms that might be dangerous to us? Not at all ... surely such lifeforms do exist, again by the vastness of the numbers, but physics prevents any interaction with them.
Detecting microorganisms on Enceladus won't change any of the probabilities ... it would effectively be neutral in a Bayesian calculation, swamped by the knowledge we already have. It would produce a cultural change, but many factors will mute even that. Even the increased motivation to explore will be swallowed up by the impending end of human civilization due to global warming.