If you've been waiting for a real mission of discovery into the unknown, this is it.
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We’re finally going to the Solar System’s most intriguing but unexplored frontier
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Yes, it's quite a striking omission given how successful it was.
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Yes, and no.
The "friendliness" of the environment is subjective. The building blocks of life can be formed in the most chaotic, unstable environments that can support them. By human standards, they are exceptionally unfriendly environments in that humans would not survive.
But what Earth had once all the bombardments and collisions were over, was a very long period of "stability". It's stability that allows life to form - a mostly unchanging environment wherein the chemical processes that create and preserve biological components can be maintained.
That's the extent of the "friendliness" the environment has to be. As we've found out, if an environment changes too much, or too fast, life that did emerge, and adapted to that environment, will die. 99+% of all life that ever emerged/evolved on Earth has gone extinct over the last billion years largely because of environmental catastrophes. We're in the middle of an extinction level event NOW. And depending on how WE react to it, it very well could include US as casualties.
So you don't need an environment that's friendly to life for life to evolve. You just need a stable ENOUGH environment where the chemical processes that result in life can happen and continue to happen. Add a few billion years without too many extinction events, and life will evolve and adapt to other micro environments. As long as conditions remain stable enough within the boundaries that allows life to perpetuate itself, it will survive.
And that can be in some pretty hostile (to us, and most life as we know it) environments.
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I was going to post that quote if it hadn't been posted already...
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"The Baby Boomers, who were born in time to not only see what the lunar surface looked like but to watch humans walk upon it in real time, were truly lucky."
Yes. I 100% agree with you.
We weren't there when PCs came into existence. I'm just old enough to remember not having a color TV, microwave, a toaster oven (just an oven or a toaster but not both together as one), or a PC in my family's house. There was no such thing as Linux. DOS, that was a complete rip off of CPM (Microsoft later settled for an undisclosed amount to Digital Research for that), hadn't been "invented" (ripped off) yet. The internet didn't exist yet. Electric cars were as exciting as golf carts. I could go on to list a thousand things that we take for granted every day but do because of what was "invented" or truly invented from 1960 to 2000.
If you took away everything that was created during that time period life would pretty much be a MUCH less technological place to live in now if say that COVID hit hard and 20% of the world's population died out which easily could have happened and been worse than the black plague because we had jets before 1960 flying people around the world.
When I lucked into a computer programming class, and lucked out even more because I got to learn at my own pace (faster, not slower) and I got to watch the moon landing where Boeing actually knew what the BLEEP they were doing with both hardware and software when everything worked as advertised (for Boeing). My programming class was me learning COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG and BASIC and a few others) and I saw my first PC (I hadn't ever seen an Apple ][) which was an Atari 400 with 4k of RAM. That's four THOUSAND not million or billion megabytes of RAM.
Yes, we were lucky. Politics was "as" corrupt back then. The future as a whole looked a lot better because we weren't divided into a billion different hate idiot hate groups and listening to someone who incoherently rambles on with nobody knowing what the person is talking about. Not even the person talking.
Yes, we were very lucky back then. Look what a mess we've made of things bringing up children to be what they became. I'm embarrassed for my generation. Things never should have come to what we have come to.
Don't get me wrong. There is a LOT to LOVE about life right now. But those days were much brighter with a much brighter future that we saw for ourselves.
We watched cartoons about the Flintstones and the Jetsons. Not the Rocketsons but the Jetsons. I never thought about that until right now. Anyway. Every middle class person was supposed to live in cool apartments in the sky and we were all supposed to have flying cars that could from from and into a brief case and a robot that took care of us. We would still have idiot bosses though who frustrate the hell out of us while stumbling around and getting in the way of us just trying to do our jobs.
In lots of ways the future is brighter except politics which is basically an idiot boss times a million and who happens to ramble on incoherently. I'm talking about the one NOT currently the president.
We have a future where we are not only planning to go back to the moon but to Mars. We have a future where we will be able to buy that robot for home and it will cost maybe 1/4th the cost of a new car or maybe ½ the cost. We have electric cars that are FAR better than gas or diesel vehicles (except for range which is quickly being taken care of). However MacOS and Windows both suck now and Linux does too.
Most likely I won't live more than 10 more years. I do hope the whippersnappers do a much better job raising their young than we did. Because we really did a horrible job raising our kids. Kids can barely go to the bathroom without needing a counselor.
Yes. I 100% agree with you.
We weren't there when PCs came into existence. I'm just old enough to remember not having a color TV, microwave, a toaster oven (just an oven or a toaster but not both together as one), or a PC in my family's house. There was no such thing as Linux. DOS, that was a complete rip off of CPM (Microsoft later settled for an undisclosed amount to Digital Research for that), hadn't been "invented" (ripped off) yet. The internet didn't exist yet. Electric cars were as exciting as golf carts. I could go on to list a thousand things that we take for granted every day but do because of what was "invented" or truly invented from 1960 to 2000.
If you took away everything that was created during that time period life would pretty much be a MUCH less technological place to live in now if say that COVID hit hard and 20% of the world's population died out which easily could have happened and been worse than the black plague because we had jets before 1960 flying people around the world.
When I lucked into a computer programming class, and lucked out even more because I got to learn at my own pace (faster, not slower) and I got to watch the moon landing where Boeing actually knew what the BLEEP they were doing with both hardware and software when everything worked as advertised (for Boeing). My programming class was me learning COBOL, FORTRAN, RPG and BASIC and a few others) and I saw my first PC (I hadn't ever seen an Apple ][) which was an Atari 400 with 4k of RAM. That's four THOUSAND not million or billion megabytes of RAM.
Yes, we were lucky. Politics was "as" corrupt back then. The future as a whole looked a lot better because we weren't divided into a billion different hate idiot hate groups and listening to someone who incoherently rambles on with nobody knowing what the person is talking about. Not even the person talking.
Yes, we were very lucky back then. Look what a mess we've made of things bringing up children to be what they became. I'm embarrassed for my generation. Things never should have come to what we have come to.
Don't get me wrong. There is a LOT to LOVE about life right now. But those days were much brighter with a much brighter future that we saw for ourselves.
We watched cartoons about the Flintstones and the Jetsons. Not the Rocketsons but the Jetsons. I never thought about that until right now. Anyway. Every middle class person was supposed to live in cool apartments in the sky and we were all supposed to have flying cars that could from from and into a brief case and a robot that took care of us. We would still have idiot bosses though who frustrate the hell out of us while stumbling around and getting in the way of us just trying to do our jobs.
In lots of ways the future is brighter except politics which is basically an idiot boss times a million and who happens to ramble on incoherently. I'm talking about the one NOT currently the president.
We have a future where we are not only planning to go back to the moon but to Mars. We have a future where we will be able to buy that robot for home and it will cost maybe 1/4th the cost of a new car or maybe ½ the cost. We have electric cars that are FAR better than gas or diesel vehicles (except for range which is quickly being taken care of). However MacOS and Windows both suck now and Linux does too.
Most likely I won't live more than 10 more years. I do hope the whippersnappers do a much better job raising their young than we did. Because we really did a horrible job raising our kids. Kids can barely go to the bathroom without needing a counselor.
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Nuclear reactors have been used in space since the 1970s, albeit mostly by the Soviets. Look up Cosmos 954, for example, which malfunctioned near the end of its life and whose (small) reactor reentered over northern Canada.Worse than an accident at launch, because fission daughter products had built up in the core.
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Republicans -- and Democrats! -- were different back then, in different ways.
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Well, we know that amino acids are ubiquitous in the cosmos. The real question is "Must they form RNA/DNA sequences? Or is there another alternative?" followed closely by "How long does it take for life to form from abiotic precursors?" (And completed by "So, what is 'life', anyways?")
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Then you need to expand your horizons. A clipper is a fast sailing ship (especially in the 19th century of a particular design.) The Cutty Sark is a well known tea-trade clipper, still moored (last time I was there, it might be drydocked now) in London. The DC in DC-X, the VTVL rocket prototype, stood for "Delta Clipper."
If all you can think of is Microsoft's abomination, you need to get out more.
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I don't know if you just skipped a step for brevity, or are confused, but amino acids don't form RNA/DNA sequences. They form proteins according to RNA/DNA templates. It takes three base pairs to code for a single amino acid.
RNA or DNA strands are formed by purines and pyrimidines (with a ribose or deoxyribose backbone). While there are many possible purines or pyrimidines, the only ones used in RNA or DNA* have the property that they are the fastest at shedding energy imparted by UV photons, thus less prone to damage. So it is probable that life-as-we-know-it is based on those particular compounds by selection of the fittest. If so, then the probability that life out there is RNA/DNA based is higher than random chance would suggest. Of course there may be other possible biochemistries.
*(RNA and DNA both use adenine, cytosine and guanine, but RNA uses uracil where DNA uses thymine.)
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The environment in which life begins to exist might be a very unfriendly one to us, later life. Maybe hot vents in a deep ocean are a very friendly environment for starting life.
Maybe our life is influenced by molecules inside Europa, because those eruptions might have ejected traces that have been picked up by earth. Or vice versa. (pseudo-panspermia)
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In life on Earth now, you are correct that RNA/DNA is used to guide amino acid synthesis. However, there has been considerable research done on going the other way. For example, Islam et al. found that a degraded form of an amino acid was able to create a ribonucleotide in certain solutions. Others have suggested that the amino acids act as a template on which existing RNA bases are assembled, leading to a bootstrapping effect.
About the only thing that is known for sure is that how life arose from prebiotic ingredients is a complex problem and we need more data and funding, please.
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Stability isn't the only condition. You can have stable conditions, not even particularly hostile from our perspective, where life will never emerge because all the building blocks needed for that can't be created. There is the very specific chain of events that gave the beginning of life. Some of the links of the chain are known and a lot of them are still a mystery. By saying a "friendly environment" I meant an environment where it's possible for the chain of events to occur.
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I agree about the subjectiveness of friendliness. But I wonder whether it is stability that is needed to spark off life. I think in order to go from no-life to primeval life a lot has to happen, which I don't see happening in a very stable world. Just before there are cells, at the brink of life, what do you expect? I expect to see a lot of processes in small environments, rich in ingredients, that form an entangled, chaotic web of reactions, until out of that chaos a simpler web evolves, with a slower evolution, and increasing homeostasis, until you get it in small, isolated compartments: cells. The first cells probably were not able to replicate themselves, natural conditions had to produce these chaotic webs over and over again. Only later, replicability evolved, and that froze the chaotic behaviours into a much stricter repertoire, with far less variation. From then on, evolution slowed down, driven by the rare random mutation, and further slowed down by evolving repair mechanisms in the genetic code.
In the first, chaotic stage, stability is not very important, but as life crystallized out, and as life evolves, the stability becomes much more important, because evolution got so much slower.
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To add to this, it would also be unwise to lock in a design for, let alone launch, a lander before the Clipper is able to fully characterize the surface and subsurface of Europa. Galileo, Hubble, and Juno data are insufficient and too coarse to allow for fine-tuned lander landing location selection. We need to understand the physical geography and geology of the Europan surface before we can start the design of the lander. Unlike Mars, Europa's terrain is highly fractured and challenging to navigate, in addition to being bombarded by the Iovan system's radiation. We need some initial observations before preliminary design work can start.
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And we are going back with the coolest mission in the Solar System, with a launch scheduled for Not Earlier Than (NET) July 2028: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly/ & https://science.nasa.gov/missions/d...raft-mission-to-saturns-moon-titan-confirmed/
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Pseudo-ninja'd by Time Vortex, but I thought the scene from the actual movie would be appreciated.
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When it comes to foibles that people happily overlook in Hero Doers that make Rockets Go Whoosh, Climate Denial doesn't really seem that big of a deal. We happily have and continue to excuse -- nay, praise -- bigots, fascists, and fraudsters.... this should come as no surprise.
What does actually surprise me is the level of schizophrenic compartmentalization that must be going on for a fundamentalist Christian to be excited about finding conclusive and final proof that their mythos is claptrap. You can't "metaphor" your way out of that one.
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Titan is a moon of saturn, so Titan is a Saturnine not jovian moon. Also it's a heck of a lot easier to land on a moon with a thick atmosphere. A Europa lander is quite a bit more work.
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We went on a JPL tour last year and saw the Europa Clipper waiting to be packed up for it's trip to Florida. It didn't have the solar panels installed at that time. That thing is huge!
I've been following space stuff since I was a kid in the 60's - my dad worked in aerospace/defense and got Aviation Week magazine, so I got to see all the neat pictures from space probes, manned missions, etc. These are exciting times and I can hardly wait to see what Europa Clipper finds out about Europa.
I've been following space stuff since I was a kid in the 60's - my dad worked in aerospace/defense and got Aviation Week magazine, so I got to see all the neat pictures from space probes, manned missions, etc. These are exciting times and I can hardly wait to see what Europa Clipper finds out about Europa.
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Photon_plumber
Ars Tribunus Militum
My mind automatically goes to 2010: The Year We Make Contact when I think of the mysteries Europa may hold. That ocean is going to give us some very interesting discoveries.
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It's great, and exciting, but look at the bigger picture: it's taking so long to do this, and it's still just relatively simple probes that take years to even arrive. There are so many 'simple' space-based things that you'd expect a half century after apollo, which those astronauts expected themselves; yet we have basically...nothing! ISS is about it and is unfortunately sort of uninteresting and unproductive at this point. (NASA has a list of things ISS has accomplished; look at it. Uh, if that's the BEST they can list, I dunno what to say!) At this rate, it would literally be centuries until people move out and into the solar system in a bigger way. But fortunately it seems it won't be at this rate, but rather it will increase. SpaceX, sadly with its now-nutcase leader, it seems has played a large part in that potential for progress.
I realize this comment will be downvoted but try to be objective instead of the irrational fan-type who seem to inhabit this area.
ISS isn't impressive. It would've been if it was built in 2 years or something just as a side project.
The underlying reason for the glacial progress is of course that overall, space exploration isn't a priority to people. In a way it's understandable: if vast portions of humans are living in unpleasant personal conditions, they've no interest in space - or anything else, really. We will have to figure out things on earth before people become more interested and progress can be made.
The era of tiny numbers of select sociopath "leaders" that determine the fate of billions and of the planet itself (i.e. the simple arrangement that has always been), warring over gods, resources and territory ad infinitum, needs to end.
I realize this comment will be downvoted but try to be objective instead of the irrational fan-type who seem to inhabit this area.
ISS isn't impressive. It would've been if it was built in 2 years or something just as a side project.The underlying reason for the glacial progress is of course that overall, space exploration isn't a priority to people. In a way it's understandable: if vast portions of humans are living in unpleasant personal conditions, they've no interest in space - or anything else, really. We will have to figure out things on earth before people become more interested and progress can be made.
The era of tiny numbers of select sociopath "leaders" that determine the fate of billions and of the planet itself (i.e. the simple arrangement that has always been), warring over gods, resources and territory ad infinitum, needs to end.
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The crazy thing is just how much money is wasted planning and scrapping those missions for decades, even if it’s just a few scientists and engineers. 25 x 20 x $100000 = $50 million, enough for Rocket Lab to build and send your 60 pounds anywhere you want, certainly post-Starship. Multiply that by every proposal that doesn’t even end in a funded mission. Better faster cheaper wasn’t entirely on the wrong track, more in the wrong venue at the wrong time.
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When NASA has tried to standardize probes in the past, they've ended up needing to modify them so much that it was no better than starting with a clean sheet. The problem is the mission requirements for different probes are VERY different. It's a bit like asking "why don't we just crank out one kind of airplane and use that for every flight?"
I think it would be interesting to see what conspiracy theories they came up with on X to explain it away.
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Bill Swallow
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
I dare to hope that the advent of Starship will usher in an age where we can keep a stockpile of common components on hand - frames, trusses, backbones, power supplies, thrusters and tankage, nav / comms electronics, advanced processors and storage, sensors, cameras and telescopes, and the like - and snap probes together like Legos for rapid deployment instead of everything being designed over decades and optimized for one very, very specific mission case and the tiniest possible budget.It's great, and exciting, but look at the bigger picture: it's taking so long to do this, and it's still just relatively simple probes that take years to even arrive. There are so many 'simple' space-based things that you'd expect a half century after apollo, which those astronauts expected themselves; yet we have basically...nothing! ISS is about it and is unfortunately sort of uninteresting and unproductive at this point. (NASA has a list of things ISS has accomplished; look at it. Uh, if that's the BEST they can list, I dunno what to say!) At this rate, it would literally be centuries until people move out and into the solar system in a bigger way. But fortunately it seems it won't be at this rate, but rather it will increase. SpaceX, sadly with its now-nutcase leader, it seems has played a large part in that potential for progress.
I realize this comment will be downvoted but try to be objective instead of the irrational fan-type who seem to inhabit this area.
The underlying reason for the glacial progress is of course that overall, space exploration isn't a priority to people. In a way it's understandable: if vast portions of humans are living in unpleasant personal conditions, they've no interest in space - or anything else, really. We will have to figure out things on earth before people become more interested and progress can be made.
The era of tiny numbers of select sociopath "leaders" that determine the fate of billions and of the planet itself (i.e. the simple arrangement that has always been), warring over gods, resources and territory ad infinitum, needs to end.
If only such as system had been in place for 'Oumuamua. We might have been able to get something out there to get a slightly closer look at it from outside the atmosphere before it was too late. I still dream that something like that will be in place if/when the next such opportunity comes along.
A 'standard Mk III probe, Mr. Worf' may not be perfectly optimized, but sometimes it will be good enough, especially on something time-critical.
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Bill Swallow
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
Thought I'd experiment with posting images into an Ars Technica thread, and thought this recent XKCD panel would go well in this discussion.
... Satellite Voltron LIVES!
... Satellite Voltron LIVES!
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Looking at the scientific instruments on both Voyager and EC, they both seem to have a reasonable set of common ones.
- Camera.
- IR and UV spectrometer
- Magnetometer
- Plasma detection
Surely it would have been possible to crank out maybe 10 basic platforms, and send them around the solar system? Maybe allow for customisation of power systems (bigger solar arrays if heading out further, RTG if needed). Allow one custom instrument per probe.
Edit: or am I being hopelessly naive?
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Small correction. I'm not aware that Microsoft paid Digital Research any settlement, nor that they owed one. MS-DOS was obviously a CPM clone, but it was written by Seattle Computer Products "clean room", ie on their own. It also had some improvements in how it handled disk sectors and file systems.
There are two similar stories as to why Microsoft ended up owning it and licensing it to IBM. Both agree that IBM thought Microsoft developed operating systems and asked Bill Gates for one when they met in Seattle to license BASIC for the (still secret) IBM PC. Gates was shocked and said, we don't do that, you need to talk to Gary Kildall at Digital Research to license CPM, and setup a meeting for the next day at Digital Research for the IBM execs.
Both stories agree that Gary decided to go fly his plane that morning instead of staying for the meeting. Where they disagree is one says that Gary's wife was left in charge of the negotiations, and she refused to sign the scary 100 page IBM NDA even after hours of negotiations with her lawyer present. This meant the IBM execs couldn't even tell her why they were there and what they wanted to buy. In contrast Bill Gates had signed instantly without even reading it, because he knew that any relationship with IBM was going to be huge for his fledgling company.
The second version is that Gary returned from his flight midway through the meeting, the NDA was signed, IBM told them they wanted to pay $250k for a license to CPM, and he refused, thinking it was too low. $250k may not seem like much, but this was back in the early PC days when Microsoft would license DOS for $50K to every new PC maker that popped up. And it ignored the massive ancillary profits that would flow from selling upgraded versions to IBM users and versions for other manufacturers 8086 PCs to make them "DOS Compatible", before even Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS to make "IBM compatibles".
Either way the IBM execs left frustrated, and called Bill to yell at him for referring them to intractible idiots (in their view). Bill already had stars in his eyes from the huge potential profits of selling his languages to a huge new PC platform being marketed by the biggest computer company in the world that would legitimize the nascent PC market. He already envisioned this making him worth millions and wasn't going to let it slip through his fingers. So he told IBM not to worry, that he would also get them an operating system, and immediately called up Seattle Computer Systems to buy their CPM clone for $25,000. And the rest is history as he parleyed that into licensing it to thousands of PC makers and into Windows, etc.
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Bill Swallow
Wise, Aged Ars Veteran
If you are, then I am, too. See my post two above yours. About the only difference is that in my approach, they aren't pre-deployed to space; launch as needed for desired target. I'm still frosted that even after 'Oumuamua, we still can't put together probe for a target of opportunity and get it flying in a month or two.
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'Oumuamua had a velocity at perihelion of 87 km/s relative to the sun, I don't think we could have built a probe with enough delta V to catch it.
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