Alien Life on the Moon?

Scientists are reassessing some ideas that have been long dismissed.

The Moon has long been considered unlikely to host any life. Its various lacks—atmosphere, liquid water, and geological activity—made the idea seem ridiculous. However, new findings and reanalyzed data have complicated things. While the discoveries do not confirm life, they do reopen questions about chemical activity, subsurface environments, and just how dynamic the Moon may be.

Craters near the Moon’s poles are colder than any environment on Earth. Data now shows that stable water ice is inside these craters, having likely accumulated over billions of years.

Water ice changes everything. When mixed with regolith (which is everywhere on the moon), it forms microenvironments that are cold and radiation shielded. Such pockets slow molecular decay and preserve volatiles for a long time. They aren’t habitable, but neither are they chemically inert. This makes the poles more of long term storage units instead of barren voids.

Modern instruments have identified simple organic compounds within lunar regolith that was brought to Earth decades ago. The likely source is meteors, but the survival on the compounds is key. Radiation, vacuum, and extreme temperatures should have destroyed the organics rapidly, yet they persisted. If organics could endure, more complex chemistry have advanced further than thought.

Billions of years ago, explosive eruptions formed lunar volcanic glass beads which held trapped gases inside. Research shows that some samples still retain measurable volatile content. This suggests that chemically rich environments existed repeatedly rather than momentarily. Though ancient, these environments supported complex reactions, so the Moon’s past may have been less static than once assumed.

Only meters beneath the Moon’s surface, temperatures experience relative stability. This is important because chemistry takes time. When shielded from radiation and temperature swings, molecules degrade slowly, extending the lifespan of compounds. The moon shifts from destructive to preservative below the surface, so chemistry can persist.

Meteor impacts melt lunar rock, which creates glassy regions that cool slowly. These melt zones trap heat and gases. Countless impacts created temporary chemically active pockets. These recurring windows increase the likelihood that complex molecules formed, survived briefly, and accumulated over billions of years.

The Moon has no global magnetic field, but localized patches of magnetism produced uneven radiation shielding, meaning that some regions have far less particle bombardment. This lower radiation slows molecular destruction. Rather than one hostile surface, the Moon has patches where compounds last longer. Earlier models assumed blanket destruction.

Extensive lava tube networks provide shielding from radiation, micrometeorites, and extreme temperatures. Here, conditions remain stable for millions of years. Organics would persist longest in these tubes.

Extremophile research has expanded our known biological limits. Dormancy, radiation resistance, and minimal water needs challenge older assumptions. Which doesn’t make lunar life likely. But it does weaken absolute dismissal.

This debate isn’t just about the Moon. It challenges how science defines sterility across all of space. A world may be chemically persistent even if it is biologically inactive.

That distinction matters. Declaring a world lifeless requires stronger evidence than silence. The Moon teaches restraint when labeling environments dead. Absence of life does not necessarily mean absence of complexity.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/alien-life-on-the-moon-is-back-in-question-after-new-findings/ss-AA1SY55x?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=694ef86d21f24808a384583e500579cf&ei=22#image=11

Life on Earth is Old

Life on Earth began somewhere. Scientists think that there was one single ancestor, which they call LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor). This would have been a unicellular organism that eventually diverged to create every living thing we have today. And I mean everything, from tiny bacteria to blue whales. And LUCA began a long, long time ago.

About 530 million years ago, the Cambrian Explosion saw the major expansion of complex life. It’s been estimated that LUCA appeared 4 billion years ago, about 600 million years after Earth’s formation.

But one study pushes that arrival back to about 4.2 billion years ago. It also indicated fascinating details of what life for LUCA might have been like.

To find exactly when life appeared on Earth, scientists had to work backward. They first compared genes in species living today and counted the number of mutations that have occurred since the common ancestor. Using a genetic equation, they worked out that LUCA must have existed as early as 400 million years after the planet’s creation. That would put his organism in the middle of the Hadean Eon, which was a hellish geologic nightmare. During this time, Earth experienced frequent collisions, including the one that created the moon. The surface was unstable, with lava bubbling to the surface.

The evolutionary history of genes is complicated. Scientists had to use complex evolutionary models to reconcile the history of genes with the genealogy of species.

The team also retraced the physiological characteristics of living species to discover what LUCA must have been like. Surprisingly, even though it was a unicellular organism, it appears to have had an immune system. This would indicate LUCA was already fighting off primordial viruses, which makes one wonder if viruses are truly alive.

While LUCA was exploiting and changing its environment, it’s likely it didn’t live alone. Its waste would have been eaten by other microbes such as methanogens, which produce methane as a by-product of their metabolism. Such arrangements might have created a recycling ecosystem.

Although this is the oldest common ancestor known, scientists don’t understand how life evolved from its very origins to the early communities that LUCA was part of.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/all-life-on-earth-comes-from-one-single-ancestor-and-it-s-so-much-older-than-we-thought/ar-AA1So3MH?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=694052ebf2b54b488c496cce3ccd1493&ei=107

New Timeline of Life on Earth

Evidence of ancient life on Earth is tough to find. But some scientists think they’ve found some of the oldest. Previously, it was estimated that the oldest biomolecules known by man were about 2.5 billion years old. However, the oldest biosignatures are actually 3.3 billion years old.

The authors of a new study claim to have deepened our understanding of Earth’s earliest biosphere and, at the same time, will provide new avenues for potentially finding past life on Mars and other planets.

The team studied the world’s oldest rocks. High-resolution chemical analysis broke down organic and inorganic materials from the rocks, producing molecular fragments. An artificial intelligence system was used to recognize the chemical fingerprints left behind by life. The system learned how to do this by analyzing 406 samples of plants, animals, fossils, and meteorites. The AI can distinguish between biological and non-biological material with over 90% accuracy.

The biggest splash was the detection of photosynthesis in 2.5-billion-years-old rocks. It seems that ancient life leaves more than fossils. It also leaves chemical echoes, which the AI can now reliably interpret. Computers have been trained to recognize any molecular trace left by living organisms, even after the biomolecules were gone.

Earth’s earliest life hasn’t left many traces behind, since ancient cells have been swallowed by Earth’s crust. This has pretty much obliterated clues about the origins of life. But the researchers hope ancient rocks can reveal glimpses of that history.

Most organic molecules from the past have been altered by geological processes but are still useful to study. And this process isn’t restricted to Earth-formed rocks, either. It could help guide the search for life on other planets.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-just-upended-the-timeline-of-life-on-earth/ar-AA1RczqG?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6927488fa04e4b7fb9572d1e90909288&ei=71

Life on Mars?

Do you believe there was past life on Mars? Here’s what new NASA evidence indicates.

Dry, cold and barren. Mars doesn’t seem like a haven for life—at least not the kind humans are familiar with.

Scientists have wondered for decades if microbial life could have inhabited Mars in the distant past. One study, based on data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover, is peeling back a layer of the mystery. Researchers measured the isotopic composition of carbon-rich minerals found in Gale Crater. This region is laced with dried rivers and gullies and was explored by the rover.

The findings Curiosity sent to Earth were not optimistic about the potential for life above ground. But that doesn’t rule out the possibility of an underground biosphere or even a surface biosphere that began and ended before the carbonates were formed.

This suggests two possible ways carbon-rich minerals could have form at Gale crater: a series of alternating wet and dry periods or salty-ice conditions. These two climate scenarios could be called ‘bleak’ and ‘bleaker’ when it comes to supporting life.

In an environment that swings from wet to dry, the region would shift from more habitable to less habitable. In the frigid temperatures near Mars’ equator, that environment would be hostile for life because most water would be frozen and inaccessible for chemistry or biology. Plus, what water was there was extremely salty, not pleasant for life.

This isn’t the first time scientists have theorized these climate scenarios for ancient Mars. Previous computer models have indicated these conditions before, but now they have isotopic evidence from Martian rocks.

Scientists have sought life on Mars since the first spacecraft touched down there in 1976. Mounting evidence from robotic explorers has shown the Red Planet to have been warmer and wetter, perhaps more than 3 billion years ago.

The Perseverance rover discovered a spotted rock with compelling signs of ancient dead Martian life, but a sample would need to be shipped to Earth for confirmation. A research team also reported evidence of a vast ocean of water below the planet’s surface. On Earth, where there’s water, there’s often life.

Scientists are interested in Mars’ carbon-rich rocks because they can hold clues about the environment in which they formed, such as the temperature and acidity of the water, and ingredients in the water and air.

The sampled rocks indicate lots of evaporation, suggesting a climate that could only support transient liquid water—that is, ice that melts when temperatures rise and the surface pressure is right.

The heavy isotope values in the rocks are much higher than what’s seen on Earth. They are the heaviest carbon and oxygen isotope values recorded for any Martian materials. Although evaporation can cause oxygen isotope changes on Earth, the changes in the Martian samples were two to three times greater.

But this doesn’t negate the possibility of life. Mars has a network of deep caves formed by ancient volcanic vents. Within the caves could be liquid water, traces of long-deceased bacteria or fungi, or perhaps even existing microbial life.

Caves can host complex ecosystems, including extremophiles that munch on rocks and convert the material into energy for life. So, many astrobiologists want to go spelunking on Mars. Would you like to join them?

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/past-life-on-mars-here-s-what-new-nasa-evidence-points-to/ar-AA1rWIgJ?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=5432d20e554e4f3ea664d26edcf277ee&ei=74

How Life on Earth Could Have Started

Scientists redid an experiment and found a new possibility of how life on Earth could have started.

In the 1931 movie “Frankenstein,” Dr Henry Frankenstein howled his triumph as massive bolts of lightning crackled and Frankenstein’s monster stirred on a laboratory table, its pieced-together corpse brought to life by the power of electricity.

Electrical energy may have also sparked the beginnings of life on Earth billions of years ago. Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and the oldest direct fossil evidence of ancient life is stromatolites, microscopic organism preserved in layers known as microbial mats. These are about 3.5 billion years old. However, some scientists suspect life originated even earlier, emerging from accumulated organic molecules in bodies of water, a mixture sometimes referred to as primordial soup.

But where did that organic material come from? Decades ago, researchers proposed that lightning caused chemical reactions in the oceans, and spontaneously produced organic molecules.

New research suggests that fizzes of barely visible “microlightning,” generated between charged droplets of water mist, could have cooked up amino acids from inorganic materials. Amino acids are life’s most basic building blocks and would have been the first step forward in the evolution of life.

For amino acids to form, they needed nitrogen atoms that could bond with carbon. Freeing up atoms from nitrogen gas requires severing powerful molecular bonds and takes an enormous amount of energy. Even microlightning has enough energy to break molecular bonds.

In 1953, chemists Stanley Miller and Harold Urey combined ammonia, methane, hydrogen and water inside a glass sphere to mimic the atmosphere of ancient Earth. They then jolted that atmosphere with electricity, producing simple amino acids. This experiment supported the theory that life could emerge from nonliving molecules.

Scientists revisited the 1953 experiment but directed their attention toward electrical activity on a smaller scale. They looked at electricity exchanged between water droplets measuring between 1 micron and 20 microns in diameter. (The width of a human hair is 100 microns.) The big droplets were positively charged. The little droplets were negatively charged. When oppositely charged droplets are close together, electrons can jump from the negative charge to the positively charged.

The researchers mixed ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen in a glass bulb, then sprayed the gases with water mist. A high-speed camera captured faint flashes of microlightning in the vapor. When they examined the bulb’s contents, they found organic molecules, including the amino acid glycine and uracil, a nucleotide base in RNA.

For the first time, scientists have seen that little droplets of water emit light and a spark. And that spark causes all types of chemical transformations.

Lightning is a dramatic display of electrical power, but it sporadic and unpredictable. Lightning may have been too infrequent to produce amino acids in quantities sufficient for life. Water spray, however, would have been more common than lightning. It is more likely that mist-generated microlightning constantly zapped amino acids into existence from pools and puddles, where the molecules could accumulate and form more complex molecules.

However, questions remain about life’s origins. An alternative abiogenesis hypothesis proposes that Earth’s first amino acids were cooked up around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Yet another hypothesis suggests that organic molecules didn’t originate on Earth at all. Rather, they formed in space and were carried here by comets or fragments of asteroids, a process known as panspermia.

What do you think is a likely explanation?

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/scientists-redid-an-experiment-that-showed-how-life-on-earth-could-have-started-they-found-a-new-possibility/ar-AA1BPYjK?ocid=mailsignout&pc=U591&cvid=55f7946bb40046bca0f5c028e2b5ca06&ei=38

Life Goes On

Every once in a while – I’m sure you’ve all experienced it – life decides to kick you, just to see how you react. And there are times when life decides to repeat the experiment (ad nauseum) for an extended period of time. It’s a real bummer, and the longer it goes on, the bummier it gets. (I know, ‘bummier’ is not a real word. Blame the creative artiste within me. I think it gets the thought across.)

Well, for the past 8-9 months, that’s what this household has been going through; one of the bummiest rough patches I think I’ve been through that didn’t involve people dying. Lots of illness in the house, some of which we are still working our way through, a treasure trove of doctor’s appointments to schedule and then get to. Sometimes as many as 3 appointments in one day. A car accident that killed one of our cars, 2 air conditioners going out (one in our remaining car) and computer equipment dying.

There’s an old saying I’m familiar with, about insanity being to repeat the same action, expecting a different outcome. And it occurs to me that in a way, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been getting up every morning, doing what I had to do, and expecting things to get better.

Maybe insanity wins, because I’m beginning to believe things might be getting better. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I’ve now had 2 weeks where I did not call the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment for one of us. No urgent care or emergency room visits. Just working our way through a number of appointments that I set up when I was ‘doing what I had to do’.

It’s kind of been the same in my endeavors to market our books. For a lot of those same months, I worked diligently at marketing, but nothing seemed to make any difference. This past couple of weeks, I started looking at a different angle on my marketing. It involved laying out a bit of money, but hey, it takes money to grow money, right? (At least that’s what the rich people say.) But about a week ago, it occurred to me that I could do the exact same thing by making use of the outlets I already have established. Without putting out any large sum of money. So the last few days, I’ve been designing new business cards and coupons to hand out at the next science fiction convention I go to. Which happens to be in September. Wish me luck, okay?

Life can be a bummer for a while. But at the same time, life goes on. One has to be ready for the bummerness to go away, which it eventually will. Then you can reach up for the goodness, take a deep breath, and move on in relief.

Cambrian Period

 The Cambrian Period was the first geological period of the Paleozoic Era. It lasted 55.6 million years, from 541 million years ago to 485.4 million years ago. The Cambrian is known for sites of exceptional preservation where even 'soft' parts of organisms are preserved, so our understanding of the Cambrian biology surpasses that of some later periods.

A profound change in life on Earth happened during the Cambrian Period, in that mineralized multicellular organisms became common. The rapid diversification of life-forms in this period—known as the Cambrian Explosion—produced the first representatives of all modern animals, probably from a single common ancestor.

Although life prospered in the oceans, the land is thought to have been comparatively barren. Shallow seas flanked several continents and were relatively warm. Polar ice was absent for much of the period.

Large, high-velocity rotational movement of Gondwana appears to have occurred in the early Cambrian, and may have resulted in Laurentia (North America), Baltica and Siberia being 'tossed away' and forming isolated land masses. Most continental land was clustered in the Southern Hemisphere, but was drifting north.

With a lack of sea ice, the sea level was high, which led to large areas of the continents being flooded in warm shallow seas, which were ideal for sea life. The sea levels fluctuated, suggesting there were pulses of expansion and contraction of a south polar ice cap.

The article stated that the Earth was generally cold during the early Cambrian, and then said the average temperatures were 7 degrees Celsius higher than today. That doesn't seem very cold to me.

The Cambrian flora was little different from what had existed in the previous period. Primarily, there were marine macroalgae in the seas, and that was pretty much it. There were no land plants known from the Cambrian, although biofilms and microbial mats were well developed on tidal flats and beaches 500 million years ago. There were also microbes forming microbial Earth ecosystems, comparable with modern soil crust of desserts, which contributed to soil formation.

It was once thought that trilobites were the dominant life form of the time period. But it turns out that these had a heavy armor which fossilized far more easily than the bodies of other animals, so there were plenty of trilobite fossils, even though trilobites were only a minor part of the animal diversity.

Earth suffered a mass extinction at the start of the Cambrian Period. It is thought that animals that burrowed into the sea bed, destroyed the microbial mats covering the seabed, and many organisms dependent on the mats became extinct, while other species adapted to the changed environment.

Despite the 'Explosion' at the start of this period, the later half saw a sharp drop in biodiversity. 500 million years ago, oxygen levels in the oceans dropped dramatically, while the level of poisonous hydrogen sulfide increased, producing more extinction events, making the latter half of the period surprisingly barren.

However, some organisms did venture onto land, producing trace fossils of their movements. Some of these fossil trackways suggest a large, slug-like mollusc.

Just when you thought Earth pre-history was going to get interesting, it takes one step forward and two steps back. Dry land is still pretty barren, except for an occasional slug-mollusc looking for some tasty soil microbes.

Well, we're pretty sure humans arrive on the scene eventually, so we're just going to keep slogging forward until we find us.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambrian

Paleozoic Era

 The Paleozoic Era is the earliest era of the Phanerozoic Eon. It is the longest of the Pahnerozoic eras, lasting from 541 to 251.902 million years ago. (I am left wondering why such an odd date for an ending? Why not 252 million years ago? I hope they offer an explanation.)

The Paleozoic was a dramatic time, incorporating geological, climatic and evolutionary changes. There was an explosion of variety in lifeforms, in which almost all modern families appeared. This began in the ocean, but eventually transitioned onto land. Great forests of primitive plants covered the continents, and towards the end of the Paleozoic, the first modern plants (conifers) appeared.

The Paleozoic Era also saw the largest extinction event in the history of Earth. This catastrophe was so devastating that it took life on land 30 million years into the next era to recover. Life in the sea may have recovered much faster.

During the early part of this era, the climate was probably moderate, becoming warmer as the second-greatest sea level rise of the era occurred, where the sea level was 200 meters above today's levels. Gondwana moved south until West Gondwana (Africa and South America) lay directly over the South Pole, while most of the parts that now reside in the northern hemisphere remained in the tropical zone, and China and Australia lay in a temperate zone. This warm period ended rather abruptly with a short but severe ice age that caused the second-greatest mass extinction of the Phanerozoic time. This ice age was only 30 million years long, and occurred 445 million years ago.

Sea levels dropped, of course, during the ice age, but slowly recovered over the middle of the Paleozoic. Bits and pieces of Gondwana moved northward, which created numerous new regions of warm, shallow sea floor. As plants took hold on the continental edges, oxygen level increased and carbon dioxide dropped. The far southern parts of Antarctica and West Gondwana became less barren.

Then a spike in atmospheric oxygen (while carbon dioxide plummeted) destabilized the climate and led to one or perhaps two ice ages. These were even more severe than the brief one already mentioned, but the effects on the world biota were mostly inconsequential. The oxygen and carbon dioxide level returned to more normal levels, but the assembly of Pangaea created huge inland areas that were subject to temperature extremes. The end of the era saw a huge mass extinction event.

While macroscopic plant life possibly appeared before this era began, plants mostly remained aquatic until about 420 million years ago, when they began to explore dry land. They reached a point where towering lycopsid (a type of plant that includes clubmosses, firmosses and quillworts) rainforests dominated the tropical belt of Euramerica. Climate change caused this rainforest to collapse, fragmenting this habitat and diminishing the diversity of plant life.

Nearly all of the invertebrate animal phyla appeared in great abundance at the beginning of this era. The first vertebrates were primitive fish, which lost no time in diversifying. Some fish had lung and powerful bony fins that allowed them to crawl onto land about 367.5 million years ago. Their fins evolved into legs about 390 million years ago. Amphibians were dominant for a time, until the climate change that reduced the rainforests also greatly reduced the amphibian diversity. Then reptiles prospered and increased in number and variety by the end of the era.

I'm sure we'll get even more details when we study each period of this era.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleozoic

What the heck is Lagerstatte?

When I first read about fossils found in ‘Lagerstatte’, I thought it was the name of a place or region, probably in Germany, that had a plethora of fossils residing there. Everything I assumed was pretty correct, except it’s not a place or region, it is a type of place. It turns out that in German, ‘lager’ means ‘storage’ and ‘statte’ means ‘place’. What this word indicates these days is a particular type of sedimentary deposit with fossils of exceptional preservation. I mean, sometimes even the soft tissue has been preserved, which is pretty darned exceptional.

This may have happened when a carcass was buried in an anoxic (without oxygen) environment with minimal bacteria, which would have delayed the decomposition of all biological features until a durable impression was created in the surrounding mud or whatever.

There are 2 types of Lagerstatte beds. The concentration type holds a lot of disarticulated hard parts, such as bones. Invariably, the accumulation of bones without a lot of other sediment takes time, so this type displays a large time period.

The 2nd type is conservation Lagerstatte, which hold exceptional preservation of fossilized organism or traces. Each of these sites can provide answers to important moment in the evolution and history of life. It’s like a snapshot, allowing the viewer to see the entire animal, even what the skin was like. Or the texture of a feather or shape of a footprint, in the case of a trace.

My first thought after reading about lagerstatte was that the now-fossilized creature must have fallen into water or mud, but there is oxygen in water (and thus in mud also), so that would not necessarily provide an anoxic condition. Still, there were places for them to land in order to be truly well-preserved.

Several types of inorganic replacement of the organic remains were mentioned in my reading; phosphorus, silica, pyrite (iron) and microbial mats. But in all these cases, this chemical change happened underwater. And if I read things rightly, under seawater.

The articles did have some pictures of these fossils, but they weren’t of T Rexes or stegosaurs, so I didn’t know what to look for. I gather that the large majority of these fossils are from way back when most creatures didn’t have bones, so they weren’t very large, and they hadn’t been well known before Lagerstatte beds were found.

I would have preferred to see one of these fossils first hand. Not to touch it, but when you have a picture, you can’t change the angle of how the light hits it and bounces into your eye. Sometimes just changing the angle a little can let you see details you otherwise wouldn’t notice. So I feel like having the item in front of me - even if in a display case - would let me study the tiny nuances that make these discoveries so exciting for those in the field.

Now, how could I use this knowledge in my writing? I don’t know. One of the beauties of writing fiction is that you get to use bits and pieces of knowledge in unimagined ways. So now that I have this knowledge, I can look for ways to use it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagerst%C3%A4tte

http://www.fossilmuseum.net/fossilrecord/Lagerstatte.htm

Gone Fishing on Ganymede

In the past, fishing was a skill used to provide food for the table. Whether or not ancient man enjoyed the process, they needed to be good at it – or at hunting – in order to thrive. Today, fishing on a personal level has become a pleasurable activity for some. They don’t need to do it to put fish on the dinner table, but they find the experience rewarding. Some go so far as to try for ‘a big fish’ out in the middle of the ocean.

What do you suppose will happen when humans find their way to other planets?

Water has been found on our moon, Mars, Ceres, even Pluto, as well as various other places. On Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, salty water is hidden under a thick (about 95 miles) crust of ice. There is probably more water on Ganymede than all of the Earth’s surface water combined. Scientists believe that ocean is 60 miles deep, about 10 times the deepest part of any Earth ocean.

I can envision future tours being organized to take die-hard fishers to Ganymede to drill a big hole in the exterior ice to facilitate fishing. I doubt if they’ll dangle a 100-mile-long fishing line into that hole – think how long it would take to reel it back in! So maybe their spacesuit for leaving the space boat would also be a diving suit, and they would ‘hunt’ for ‘fish’ with a spear gun.

Hmm. There’s problems with that vision, according to some of what I read. The Ganymede’s ocean is not only covered with ice, it also rests on ice, pressurized into a crystalized form. On other moons, the ocean bed is rock, which apparently keeps the water warmer, and provides various minerals as it is eroded by the salty ocean. The theory is that those warmer, rock-bedded oceans are far more likely to produce some kind of ‘life.’

Still, we keep getting surprised, the more we look around our neighborhood, don’t we? And science fiction writers like to take the science we know now and extrapolate possibilities we don’t – yet - have any proof for.

So, how about this? There’s a lot of different salts, besides table salt, which could be helping Ganymede’s ocean remain liquid. Nobody definitively stated the only salt in Ganymede’s ocean was NaCl (table salt), so these other salts could provide minerals for building ‘life’. I’m not sure the temperature of the ocean is that big a deal, but the salty ocean of Ganymede reacts to the magnetic field of Jupiter, and I’m thinking that reaction might produce some heat, although probably not much.

Sounds good to me. So good, I anticipate someone will make some money someday, selling signs that say, “Gone Fishing on Ganymede.”

http://www.space.com/28807-jupiter-moon-ganymede-salty-ocean.html

http://earthsky.org/space/underground-ocean-on-jupiters-largest-moon

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2015/03121716-ganymede-ocean.html

Best Made Plans

Have you ever made plans that just didn’t live up to your expectations? Even vacations have bumps when things don’t go your way. Our last vacation ...

In Florida, every time I lay down, my sinuses immediately plugged up and I was soon mouth breathing. My cpap mask only covers my nose, so it was no help.

John had signed up to march in Disney’s StarWars weekend parades. He was up at 6 AM that first Friday in severe pain and unable to bend one knee. I took him to ‘urgent care’... which didn’t open until 8. He had to scoot in and out of the back, with the leg stretched along the seat. It was gout; they prescribed steroids and ice packs. (He did get to march the next day, and for the rest of the parades while we were there.)

To see the parade, I had to be at the gate by 7:30 (one never knew what time they were going to let people in), rush to one of the (2) benches along the parade route and park myself. The parade happened at 11. The humid heat did nothing for my stuffy sinuses.

I got a page written for my ‘Mac’ serial, but Open Office kept crashing and finally refused to open my ‘Mac’ file again. Unable to think, having no OO specialist to consult, I gave up. John, however, got his 2nd novel rewritten (2nd draft).

I finally let John take me to ‘urgent care’, and I waited 3 hours to see a doc. Then the pharmacy didn’t have the medicine! Augmentin was on back-order? The doc changed the prescription. To sulfur pills. My brother has to take sulfur pills. They work, but not quickly. Another week before I started feeling almost decent.

Friends spent weekends with us. On the last parade day, as everyone was getting ready, the wife fell and struck her head. The husband took her to urgent care, so John went alone to do the parade. Long story short, it was much more than a bump on the head; she ended up in the hospital for 2 nights before they could go home.

Wednesday, I started home, stopping to call my mother-in-law to say I was on my way. She had been taken to the hospital that morning. Frantic phone calls and text messages dogged me all the way home.

Thursday, the radio talked about severe rain and some flooding ‘in Missouri and along the Mississippi.’ I was in Illinois, about to turn west to St Louis. I called my son and asked him to research this, in case I needed to continue north and go through Des Moines. He said it was located south of I70 (the road I would travel).

East St Louis, Friday morning, heavy rain. Happily, the worst was over by the time I left St Louis. But EVERY river and creek I crossed was definitely over its banks! Like I wasn’t nervous enough.

NOT a good vacation. It wasn’t a bump, it was a series of steep cliffs the entire time. I suppose there’s bound to be a bad one every so often, right? But I haven’t given up; we plan to head for Washington (state) and an Alaska cruise in August. Hmm. Maybe it’s good we got this ‘bad luck’ over during this vacation.

Aliens Among Us

The other day, I read an article in Popular Science that scientists have discovered alien life. And they didn’t find it on some other planet, a moon or an asteroid; they found it right here on Earth.

Now, don’t get your nerves tied in knots. They found bacteria that is definitely alive, but isn’t life as we know it. Yeah, that old disclaimer. How many times have we heard some scientist say, “Well, if we do find life on ____, it certainly won’t be life as we know it.”?

And they didn’t even have to go off this world to find examples of life as we don’t know it.

When I was growing up, some of my favorite authors wrote about all sorts of aliens, from 3-legged, 3-gendered crabs to creatures where the male was about 1/8th the size of the female, attached himself to her, and his only purpose was to father children. And some tried to imagine creatures that didn’t use biology as we knew it, rock creatures that could move through the soil of their planet, crystals, intelligent energy.

I found them all great fun to read.

What’s so alien about this bacteria they’ve discovered? It doesn’t have the type of biology we are familiar with. It doesn’t eat carbohydrates or protein, and it doesn’t expel the type of waste products an animal or plant would. One strain eats electricity, or rather, electrons. Another expels electrons as waste.

Yes, there are probably several types of these ‘alien’ bacterium. Based on this article, at least two strains have been named, with one graduate student trying to culture at least 20 more. Even that has to be done differently, because it doesn’t grow on petri dishes. You have to supply an electrode of some kind. Or something that they would see as food.

They aren’t really aliens. They are part of Earth’s eco-system, and have been for billions of years. But they are alien from us, even more than the creatures that grow in the super-heated vents of water rising from underwater volcanoes.

That old phrase, ‘life as we know it’, always did irritate me. We would be on a different planet, so why would we expect to find Old MacDonald and Betsy the cow? Why not keep our minds open to all sorts of possibilities, and just see what’s out there?

Something a little smarter than bacteria, I hope.