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

Hadean Eon

Unless you have a degree in geology or paleontology or something similar, you are probably as confused by the various Ages, Eons and Periods that get named when you look anything up about the History of Earth. I decided to take a look at one of them, and see if I could get it figured out as to when it happened, what major events happened during it... that sort of thing.

So, I had a list of these names, and I picked one at random: the Hadean Eon.

Turns out, I had picked the very first of Earth’s Eons; it started with the formation of Earth about 4.6 billion years ago and ended approximately 4 billion years ago. Other names for it are the Priscoan Period and the Pre-Archean Eon.

Obviously, since we are looking at the very first half billion years of the world, we won’t be talking about dinosaurs or super continents. What could there possibly be to discuss? Well, let’s dig in and see what turns up.

First, there’s the name, which gives us a clue about what was going on. ‘Hadean’ comes from Hades, the Greek god of the underworld. And that describes the conditions of what Earth was going through: The planet had just formed and it was very hot due to a number of factors, including frequent collisions with other Solar System bodies.

One important collision happened about 4.5 billion years ago, when a Mars-sized planetoid smashed into the infant Earth. The collision sent quite a lot of material into orbit around Earth, while the planetoid and the rest of Earth merged and tried to settle down. The orbiting material probably took less than a century to form the moon.

The big collision didn’t melt all of the Earth, but a fair fraction of material was vaporized, which created a rock vapor atmosphere around the young planet. But that rock vapor would have condensed out within 2,000 years, and left behind an atmosphere heavy in CO2 with some hydrogen and water vapor.

Apparently, there was a sizable quantity of water in the material that formed the Earth. After the moon was formed, the surface temperature was about 230C (446F), but even so, oceans of liquid water existed. That’s because the atmospheric pressure was over 27 times what it is today, because of the heavy CO2 atmosphere. As cooling continued, most of the CO2 was removed from the atmosphere by subduction and dissolving in ocean water, but the levels oscillated wildly.

One theory posits that between 4.4 and 4.1 billion years ago, the Earth’s climate was relatively cool, allowing for liquid water to be present at least that long. It was even suggested that the Earth may have been pretty much like it is today, except for the absence of flora and fauna.

One of the articles implied that life may have been getting started by the end of the Hadean Eon. But that was almost like a throw-away at the end of the last paragraph, so I’m thinking , one celled organisms? Maybe?

So as far as stories go, what if a spaceship gets too close to a forming star system and gets clobbered by tiny planetoids until it is forced to crash land on the nearest planet, which just happens to be vaguely Earth-like, but the only life it has are some quasi-amoebas swimming in the oceans. Maybe they have plants or seeds aboard, so they can grow some food. What about the stuff they don’t realize they’re carrying? Cockroaches, mice, fungal spores... What would those things evolve into, once there was enough food on the planet for them to successfully venture off the ship? There would be a whole lot of niches in the food chain for them to fill!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis

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

OrganPipe Cactus fruit

I have often wondered what kind of food chain there would be in a desert that would allow people to live there. Oh, yes, I’ve heard about certain rats, rabbits, coyotes, snakes, lizards... But the fact is that as you go down the food chain to smaller and smaller creatures, eventually you have to get to plant-life. On Earth, it seems a pretty likely bet, anyway.

I am often disappointed by authors and filmmakers who forget there needs to be some kind of food chain. In my latest viewing of “Dune” - I can’t remember which version of it I was watching - it occurred to me that the people on the planet were apparently colonists, or descendents of colonists. There was much talk about the great worms, with no talk of what they ate. One assumes that there was a mouse species on the planet, but they might have come with the colonists. One assumes there are mice, because the nickname the common people adopt for Paul was the name of a species of mice who fight back. And in one scene, I saw at least 1 beautiful butterfly. Nowhere did I ever see any kind of plantlife out in the wild. So... what did the butterflies, the fierce mice, the worms and the people eat? I don’t know. I don’t remember anything like that being mentioned in the book, either. Sigh.

By comparison, Earth deserts are veritable hotbeds of life. So let’s take a look at another desert food source that I’ve heard about.

The organ-pipe cactus grows in the Sonoran Desert and Baja California. It has a very short trunk, from which dozens of stems grow, producing what one might think of as a bush. Its root system only reaches about 10 cm (4 inches) into the ground, but are sufficient for sucking up monsoon water when it occurs. Otherwise, the plant is pretty water-tight, with a water-proof skin and plenty of thorns to keep from getting eaten. An individual cactus can live 150 years, but doesn’t produce fruit until age 35. Probably because a good growing year will see it add a whopping 2.5 inches a year to its height.

In May and June, the organ-pipe cactus develops white/creamy flowers that only open at night and usually close back up by mid-morning. That doesn’t leave much time for day-time pollinators to get to it, but bats do the job just fine during the night.

Just before the rains come in July and August, the fruit ripens and splits open to reveal bright red flesh surrounding lots of seeds. Or maybe the fruit was red and the inner flesh was purple; I’ve seen it described both ways.

I didn’t find a lot of recipes for preparing organ-pipe cactus fruit. Apparently, you simply mash the fruit flesh and seeds into a sweet paste, which could be eaten as it was. Or you could dry it out to make a spreadable jelly. Another way would be to separate the seeds and place them in storage. Later, you could grind the seeds into a flour to make seed cakes. So, you could have your seed cakes and fruit jelly both!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenocereus_thurberi

www.nps.gov/orpi/learn/nature/organ-pipe-cactus.htm

http://www.ethnoherbalist.com/southern-california-native-plants-medicinal/pitaya-fruit/

What is This World Coming to? 7

And we are back to water. It seems only fitting, since the globe is mostly covered by it.

As I was looking over information on Central America, one of my hard-copy magazines - Popular Science - had an entire issue on water. Including an article on the sudden and sustained lack of water in Colombia in the northern part of South America.

The northern part of South America is also definitely in the tropics, because that area straddles the Equator, and the tropics is generally 30° north to 30° south of the equator. That’s latitude degrees, not temperature degrees.

Colombia is also quite mountainous, but that doesn’t mean their water supply is assured. The article spoke of one city sitting in the heights below a ski resort. Until recently, that resort could exist because of a glacier that sat atop the mountain. That glacier also was the source of the water used by the city.

Guess what. That glacier is gone now. Not just receding, like so many glaciers are, it is GONE.

No more skiing on that mountain, no more water for that city. Now the water officials load up what water is available into tank trucks and deliver it around the area. When the truck pulls up and stops, everybody runs for whatever they have that will hold water; pots, barrels, bottles and jars. They may go home and empty those items into their sinks or bathtub and run back to see if the truck is still there. If it is, they fill their pots, barrels and jars again.

They don’t know how long it will be before the truck arrives to deliver more water, so they have to be stingy with every drop. It is all they have for cooking and possibly a sponge bath. In the meantime, they listen for notices from the government as to when the water in their taps may be turned on for a limited time.

At one point, the author was with a woman who had stayed home from work that afternoon. The water was supposed to be turned on in the pipes for 3 hours, and she wanted to get some laundry done. But the water never came from her pipes that afternoon. No laundry got done.

Did all the women in the city stay home that afternoon, hoping to get some laundry done?

The article ended with a brief mention of another Colombian city on another mountain, also depending on the mountain-top glacier for its water supply. That glacier is visibly shrunken, smaller than anybody has ever seen it before.

Perhaps they’ll figure out another source for water. The article didn’t mention any attempts to look, to figure something out. Everybody - even the water officials - just kept saying, “The rains will come.”

What are we, ostriches? Refusing to acknowledge a problem will not make it magically go away!

This is a depressing subject, and not the type I would usually spend time on trying to spin into an entertaining novel. I suffer from chronic depression and just found an anti-depressant that actually works for me. I don’t know if I’m done researching this subject or not... my constant companion - depression - keeps telling me to stick my head in the sand and think of pretty things. But the story for the novel is beginning to take shape in my head. I think I’ll start thinking out scenes and where they would go, and speak of other things in this blog for a while. If I need to, I can still do more research.

So, next time, the subject will be... Oh, who knows? Whatever I find interesting between now and then.

What is This World Coming to? 6

Food. We all need it. We all have our favorites. But what will be available for us to eat in the coming much-warmer world?

Like the topic of ‘climate change’, this sub-topic is just as broad a question and just as difficult to sort out.

My initial belief was that the tropics would probably become pretty uninhabitable. After all, at least one city in the Middle East has already come too-d****d-close to that with a temperature of 115°F with 50% humidity. Places that are NOT deserts could be even worse. Deserts at least cool off at night, because they don’t have any cloud cover to hold the heat in. But when the humidity rises, cloudiness increases, so that heat could be held close to the ground. Also, when humidity rises, that ‘drop-dead’ temperature is lowered. At least as low as 96°F.

But the more I’ve researched, the less sure I am of that. I recently spent a few days looking at the countries in Central America, because I figured they were definitely in the ‘heavily tropical’ part of the world. The thing is, Central America is pretty mountainous, so a lot of the land is actually ‘temperate’. The low-lying jungle might not be a place people would want to live, but the highlands could still be habitable.

Crops, on the other hand, might not like the new weather patterns that could come. Even without the global temperature rising, people living in those countries right now have trouble providing food for their families year after year. The rainy season and hurricanes can produce mud slides and flooding. If that doesn’t happen, they could lose their crops because of drought, like the one they’ve been suffering through the last few years.

Anthropologists believe the Mayan civilization crashed because of a severe drought. Now that area is facing another drought, and who knows how bad it will become? None of the articles I read mentioned wild fires like we’ve had in the western states, but will there come a time when Central American starts to burn?

These were my thoughts as I studied this particular area, looking for food crops that might not survive where they have been thriving and will need to be transplanted elsewhere. I don’t have any answers on that yet. The export crops grown here might be okay, as long as they can get enough water. I’ll have to research individual crops - for instance, bananas - in order to take a guess on their prognosis.

Still more to come!

What is This World Coming to? 3

So, what else is the Beaufort Gyre (which, you’ll remember, is north of Alaska) doing to The World As We Know It?

Well, it’s messing up the Arctic jet stream. Being from the midwest US, I’ve heard plenty of winter weather forecasts talking about the Arctic jet stream dipping below the Canadian border and bringing truly frigid blasts to the North American plains. Since I still have friends and family living in that region, I pay attention to the winter weather that happens there. Last year was particularly brutal, with that jet stream going much further south than I remember it doing in the past. It wasn’t just the northern states like the Dakotas, Michigan and maybe Nebraska hunkering down against Arctic-type temperatures, they were reaching into Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana...

How can that possibly mean the climate is warming? Let me remind you that climate and weather are not the same thing. Weather happens on a much smaller scale than climate. As for that Arctic jet stream coming south before returning north, that air gets (relatively) warmed up. Coming so far south, it gets a lot warmer than it normally does, so when it does go north again, it transfers the warmth it gathered to the area it goes; the arctic. More melting.

Earth’s polar ice caps serve a purpose; sunlight is reflected from their white surface, so they act as a ‘cooling’ agent for the entire globe. The more this ice melts and reveals darker-colored water and land, the less cooling is available for the entire planet. Get it? The more snow and ice melts, the more likely more snow and ice will melt. Until there is no more snow and ice to help keep Earth’s temperature moderated.

The really scary part is what happens to the land when all that snow and ice melts. If Greenland’s ice cap melts, the sea level would rise by 20 feet (6.1 m). At its current rate of melt, the Arctic Ocean could be completely ice free by 2040. That’s only 22 years! If all the ice of Antarctica melted, the seas would rise by 200 ft (61 m).

With a sea level rise of only 6 feet (1.8 m), most large cities would be flooded. So, where do you live? I currently live in the center of the Florida peninsula, which would still be here after 6 feet of sea level rise... but loooooong gone by the time all the ice melts. Maybe I should start cleaning out stuff I won’t be needing in my old age, so that it’ll be easier to move north, once that becomes necessary.

By then, New Orleans would be a bay reaching almost as far north as the Missouri boot. The Netherlands would be entirely below sea level, but much of it is now. Hope they have plans for building new, much taller dykes. Australia will be a doughnut, with land surrounding an inland sea. The Amazon rainforest will become the Amazon Sea, and Buenos Aires in Argentina will mean a huge bay. Those are the easy things to notice on the map.

At one time, I found an interactive map showing what parts of the world would be underwater, and the results would change depending on how much you chose to raise the sea level. It didn’t seem too alarming, but I think it only allowed you to raise the sea level by 9 meters.

Alas, I neglected to bookmark that page. When I went looking for it to link to this blog, I found lots and lots of pages with ‘interactive global sea level rise maps’. That means more and more scientists (and others) have been looking at this scenario seriously, and taking the possible sea level rise much higher. Much more ice than that covering Greenland has been and is and will melt, so 9 meters could just be a drop in the bucket.

Water isn’t the only thing that will change. Next time, I’ll examine something else from my research about climate change.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/9/5/1792312/-Warm-ocean-water-has-penetrated-deep-into-the-Arctic-interior-portending-year-round-loss-of-sea-ice

http://www.softschools.com/facts/environmental_science/polar_ice_caps_facts/2894/

What is This World Coming to?

I firmly believe in climate change. In my mind, it is here, and it’s going to get bad.

But I’m not here to debate that with anyone. So, for the purpose of this series of blog entries, let’s say I’m trying to figure out what could happen (climate-wise) in the next 50 years, and how it will effect the people who have to live through it. Well, try to live through it.

The sea level will rise. There has been and still is a lot of water on the Earth that is not located in the seas. It’s not a liquid, it’s solid in the form of snow and ice. Glaciers, sea ice, and so on. This has all been melting at an increasing pace, and probably will continue until snow and ice become rare items.

You can already see the sea level rising, if you look; Miami FL has streets that are underwater during high tides. Miami Beach, located on a barrier island that barely qualifies as dry land, is quietly raising its streets, particularly the ones that run along the edges of the island.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, there was much talk of how badly the shoreline was being eroded. If I remember right, there is an oil refinery or some such that was built on the shore. Now it is pretty much an island, and the road leading to it may or may not be passable during high tides. Those tides even reach 5 or 10 miles inland, making it hard to get in or out of small towns that dot that road. The road, I understand, has been raised in a lot of places, making it even harder to navigate in those small towns.

Parts of Amsterdam in The Netherlands are 18 feet below sea level. Much of The Netherlands consists of land ‘reclaimed’ from the sea and thus below sea level. They did this by building dikes, dams and canals to control where the water could go. This will be an ever increasing chore, as the sea rises.

So I find myself wondering, what happens when the sea rise reaches that critical point, whatever it is? Will The Netherlands continue building their dikes taller, until they loom and cast an ominous shadow over the land they are intended to protect? Is that possible? Does it make more sense to raise the land they are living on? Is that possible?

At what point do people simply give in to nature and move to higher ground? Do those who are displaced get any assistance from their government, or do they have to abandon the home they’ve had for who knows how long, take what they can to some other place, and try to start over again? I suspect the latter, because the former would probably bankrupt any government.

Even if Earth’s population doesn’t grow beyond what it is now, it’s possible the concentration of that population will increase, because there could be less land for us to live on.

Well, with the next entry, we’ll continue with the water theme. Yes, there is more about water to think about.

Martian Shelters Summation

Okay, so that was pretty much all I found for ideas about Martian shelters: tents of various shapes made of multiple layers of flexible plastic and insulation (probably foam), either buried in the sand or not; tunnels and rooms dug deep underground by robots; and a top-side shelter shaped like half a bagel with a layer of ice between the sheets of plastic.

I did see some reference to making a spun glass (fiber glass) insulation from sorting the Martian sand and melting a particular type of that sand. I’m not sure that would be available for the very first shelters, but maybe it would be a useful building material later on.

For that matter, rocks have been used to build human home for centuries, perhaps millennia. Sand could be combined with other materials to make a type of cement or even mortar. That assumes the colonists can find a supply of calcium silicate nearby, or some other binder to use. If not, they could use polymers, but that would need to be shipped to them from Earth, or they would have to make it on Mars, and I have no idea how complicated a process that might be.

One other idea, briefly mentioned, was to dig holes into a large boulder to create a small shelter, perhaps a type of emergency shelter. I kept thinking about today’s ‘tiny homes’ and thinking a sufficiently large boulder might make a nice small home for someone who really liked his/her privacy.

So, if you are going to be one of those first colonists sent to Mars, don’t expect a mansion. Of course, if you were expecting a mansion, you probably wouldn’t be one of those chosen to colonize Mars. Or anyplace else.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/a-new-home-on-mars-nasa-langley-s-icy-concept-for-living-on-the-red-planet

https://phys.org/news/2016-12-nasa-ice-house-mars.html

Martian Shelter 5

I was beginning to think we had run out of ideas, but it turns out I was wrong. So, how about an ‘ice home’? They’ve been used in the Arctic Circle for centuries, haven’t they? But, the ones proposed for Mars are a bit more complicated than igloos. They are, once again, inflatable, but... in the shape of a doughnut. The body of the doughnut would be where people would live and work.

The ‘skin’ of the doughnut would be a double-wall, flexible, of course. The interior wall would hold in the air and provide the space for people to occupy. The space between the 2 flexible skins would be filled with water and allowed to freeze. That outer wall and the ice under it would keep the radiation out, and protect the inner sections from any nasty weather Mars can produce.

Despite recent findings of water of Mars, it is not nearly as omnipresent as it is on Earth, so where does that water come from? No, it won’t be shipped from Earth. What they would ship from Earth is robots with the equipment to find, mine, and transport the water to the shelter area so it could be melted, pumped inside the walls and allowed to re-freeze.

Presumably, this store of water could serve a second purpose; that of being turned into fuel when it was time to leave. To me, this seems counter-productive. It assumes the people will be leaving, abandoning their colony to return to Earth. Even if they were ‘only’ there for a shift of a couple years, wouldn’t more people be expected to arrive to take over, like is done with the space station? On the other hand, keeping options open can be a very good idea.

Of course, with proper timing, those robots could be sent out to mine more water to replace what’s been turned into rocket fuel. You’d just need to make sure the equipment doesn’t get clogged with sand in the meantime.

The biggest drawback I see to this design is that it could take 400 days to fill and freeze the shell. So those robots had better know what they are doing in order to get it ready before humans start arriving.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/langley/a-new-home-on-mars-nasa-langley-s-icy-concept-for-living-on-the-red-planet

Martian Shelter 4

We’re going to look at a different style of shelter this time. Something a little more complicated to build, I suppose, but which could be more... comfy, should we say?

This shelter is underground. Deep underground, not just some sand kicked over it. Building it would take tunnel-boring machines, which are quite heavy. Perhaps these would be shipped before people were sent, along with some robots to use the machines to bore out a network of tunnels and living quarters. Yes, apparently, some people are ready to go back to living in caves.

But ‘underground’ does not need to mean dark and unwelcoming. I watched an episode of a science show on Netflicks a couple weeks back, where the people were digging out a series of tunnels under New York City. They had some complicated equipment on the roof of a warehouse that gathered and concentrated sunlight before it was piped into the tunnels. Yes, I did say concentrated and piped. The tunnels they created were fully lighted, and with smooth, level floors, ceilings and walls, seemed far distant from a creepy cave.

The theory about living in man-made tunnels on Mars is that the gravity is weak and Mars doesn’t have any quakes, so you wouldn’t need as much support to hold up the ceilings; and there ‘probably’ would not be any moisture seepage. But, this plan does call for some heavy-duty insulation. Martian air may be thin, but Martian dirt and rocks are cold! Even without that insulation, the dirt and rocks would keep that nasty radiation out.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to this idea. There always are, right? All that equipment would be expensive to get there. And once it finishes digging out that first small habitat, then what? Oh, if there’s a big influx of immigrants, the equipment could be busy for years or decades, forming a city here, a city there... But eventually, one assumes, it will become obsolete or unneeded. A lot of money to just let rust away.

And it’s possible there’s more water on Mars than we think, so seepage could be a problem. With all the insulation installed to keep the internal temperature agreeable, we might not even know if seepage was occurring. I hear some of you thinking ‘Then it’s not a problem,’ but that’s not necessarily true. There could be some kind of mold, fungus or other organism that could start growing, possibly leading to health problems for our colonists. Water flows, and ice can expand and create cracks. This could - over time - undermine (so to speak) our efforts at adequate support.

If you own a house, you know you need to keep an eye open for such things, and if you don’t deal with small problems that crop up, you’ll eventually pay for it with a huge repair bill. But these tunnels would not be for an individual’s use; it sounds more like they would be cities, as least to begin with. Owned by committee, you might say. Would that ‘committee’ have the foresight to watch for and deal with these types of problems while they were small? Or would they be political entities, always kicking the financial can down the road?

Okay, if you don’t like the idea of a cave-dwelling, we’ll keep looking. I’ll see what else I can ‘dig up’ for you to consider.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

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

Water, Water Everywhere

Earth has a lot of water; it covers roughly 75% of the planet’s surface, and it gets pretty deep - not quite 7 miles deep at one point. And for a long time, it seemed maybe Earth was the only planet in this solar system that had water.

If we sent people to explore or colonize any of the other planets, we would have to send water with them. The more people we sent, the more water they would need. Did Earth have enough? Would we completely drain the oceans?

Thankfully, we’ve learned better than that by now, since we are - tentatively - thinking about how best to colonize other planets. A brief recap:

1989 - Voyager studied Neptune’s magnetic field, leading to the conclusion that it has a subsurface ocean of water that is 4000°F (Hot!) and is under tremendous pressure.

1998 - Recent discoveries convince scientists that Callisto (a moon of Jupiter) might have a subsurface ocean.

2006 - Neptune has a large amount of water mixed in with its hydrogen/helium atmosphere. This is true also for Uranus, and since its density is only slightly higher than water, there is speculation that most of Uranus is water, in all its forms, with only a tiny rocky core.

2009 - Traces of water were found on the moon, then a ‘significant’ amount of water. Plans are being made for mining it, should we ever decide to colonize or set up a station there.

2010 - Water ice was found on two asteroids. Some surmised that there might be lots of water ice in the asteroid belt.

2011 - It was concluded that dark streaks on Martian slopes were made as salty water (ice) melts and slides down the slope. Water ice is also trapped in Mars’ polar caps, which can reach halfway to its equator during the winter. And a huge slab of underground water ice has been found in its northern hemisphere.

2014 - Ceres, the dwarf planet in the asteroid belt, was found to be spewing water vapor into space. It was speculated that Ceres might have more water than Earth does.

2014 - Gravity measurements suggest that a huge ocean sloshes around under the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which also spews water vapor from vents in its south pole. Titan, another Saturn moon, has an under-crust ocean saltier than Earth’s Dead Sea.

2014 - Scientists re-examined data from 1989, and now wonder if there is a subsurface ocean on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon - even if it does have the coldest surface in the solar system.

2015 - Using the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists found that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede has a huge salty ocean buried under a thick crust of ice. Laboratory experiments lead to the conclusion that there’s a subsurface salty ocean on Europa, another of Jupiter’s moons.

2015 - Water ice sheets were discovered on Pluto.

You get the idea - there’s plenty of water out there. It’s so fascinating a subject because life AS WE KNOW IT needs water. So when we find water - especially liquid water - in places you would think would be too cold, the next question is, Is there life there?

Let’s go find out.

Martian

By now, I'm sure you've heard there's water on Mars. Free-flowing, very salty water. The announcement came a day or two after I saw "The Martian", and I decided to dig deeper into this Martian water issue.

In the late 19th century, Giovanni Schiaparelli reported seeing 'canali' on Mars' surface, meaning channels. A few years later, Percival Lowell confirmed long lines on Mars' surface, and suggested they were an attempt by an advanced Martian culture to save their drying planet by moving water from the poles. Ultimately, these canali / canals did not exist. I haven't found any explanation for why or how they were 'seen' in the first place.

Most of Mars' northern hemisphere is fairly flat with few impact craters; the southern is covered in impact craters. In between is an area of mesas, flat-floored valleys with cliff walls, and other rough terrain. Some features imply that water was present in the distant past, that free-flowing water created paths through the stones. Where did it all go?

Some is still there. Surrounding the bases of those mesas and at the bottoms of those cliffs are what appear to be masses of rock, called lobate debris aprons. In Alaska, we saw a glacier that was so covered in dirt and rocks (picked up during its travel), it just looked like a muddy pile on the edge of the bay. That's what these debris aprons are... solid ice covered in rocks and dirt.

Recent reports from SPICAM, which is circling Mars to study its atmosphere, show that the Martian atmosphere is super-saturated with water vapor. Water vapor doesn't just form droplets when it gets chilled, it needs a speck of dust or something to condense around. If there isn't enough dust, the vapor keeps pushing upward. Eventually, that vapor gets so high, it splits into hydrogen and oxygen, which escape into space, but the article I read said even at 50 km, the atmosphere was super-saturated.

So, Mars is not the super-arid place we thought it was.

How would that have changed the survival techniques used in "The Martian"? In his attempt to produce water to grow crops, could he have 'mined' it from one of these rock piles? Devise a method to condense it from the air? Purified the salty stuff?

What do you think?