How would a future space colony be ruled?

[[deleted user]]

J.J. wrote: "And at least now the US will have a space military to quell it. :D"

Uh, when American astronauts what to go up to the International Space Station or down back to Earth, they have to beg for a ride on a Russian rocket, and this for many years already. Right now, that 'US Space Force' is nothing but a sad joke and a political hot air balloon by Trump to appear to 'make great things' as a President. The USA may finally be able to launch by itself astronauts into space next year, if all goes well, but it won't be thanks to NASA but more probably thanks to a civilian corporation: Space-X. What is this 'US Space Force' going to do? Rent a Falcon 9 from Space-X when they will need to conduct space exercises?

[Scout]

Wait now, Graeme. Why a mutiny? Are there no programmers who are smart enough to put in a fail-safe against independent thought?

[[deleted user]]

Great news, guys! A scientific report just released says that a radar on the Mars Express orbiter has detected what strongly appears to be an underground lake of liquid water some 20 kilometer-wide. That lake is about 1.5 km under the South Polar ice cap and is probably made of brine. The article is titled:

Radar evidence of subglacial liquid water on Mars
R. Orosei1,*, S. E. Lauro2, E. Pettinelli2, A. Cicchetti3, M. Coradini4, B. Cosciotti2, F. Di Paolo1, E. Flamini4, E. Mattei2, M. Pajola5, F. Soldovieri6, M. Cartacci3, F. Cassenti7, A. Frigeri3, S. Giuppi3, R. Martufi7, A. Masdea8, G. Mitri9, C. Nenna10, R. Noschese3, M. Restano11, R. Seu7
See all authors and affiliations

Science 25 Jul 2018:
eaar7268
DOI: 10.1126/science.aar7268

This is one more reason to go explore Mars one day. Maybe we will find Martian fish swimming in that brine.

[Graeme]

Scout wrote: "Wait now, Graeme. Why a mutiny? Are there no programmers who are smart enough to put in a fail-safe against independent thought?"

Programmers are not perfect.

[Scout]

:-)

[Scout]

What do you think, Ian? Could fish be swimming in that brine?

[Ian]

Scout, in my opinion not fish as we know them. First there is no oxygen. Second, if the water is brine, to be liquid at that temperature the salt would need to make the Dead Sea look almost dilute. If, however, it was liquid due to dissolved ammonia, or a derivative, that could in principle hold life. My guess, though, is that any life would be most likely to be single cell organisms, like bacteria, and it would probably have a metabolism we don't recognise. It would almost certainly be anaerobic, and maybe spit out methane - as methane is emitted from below the surface.

I have seen comment from a physicist in California who warns that the radar signal could conceivably come from something else, so I guess there is still caution needed, but it is most certainly an important discovery. Exactly how we could drill down something like a mile to find out with the current type of robotic rovers is somewhat questionable because having a robot that could assemble a mile of drilling pipe would be quite an achievement, and powering the drill would probably take a lot more than solar power from the arrays that are usually sent, so it may take a while before we find out.

So an exciting find, but it may be a while before we know more.

[Scout]

So, this is based on a radar signal?

[Graeme]

There is lots of weird life in the burgess shale fossil record, a lot of which never (apparently) survived.

REF: http://burgess-shale.rom.on.ca/en/sci...

If there is anything alive on Mars. It is more likely to be completely bizarre than anything we might find familiar.

[[deleted user]]

It would still be life, which would throw a whole new light on life beyond Earth.

[Ian]

This has got a bit off-topic, but yes, the "water" is detected by radar. There will be something there with a high permittivity, which leads to a reflection at that depth. Water is the most likely source but maybe not the only one. You would probably need to be a radar expert to know how firm that is.

If there is life Michel is correct - if it is based on something wildly different that would throw a lot of spanners in theories, while if it had clear similarities before the differences start to appear, we would know quite a bit about how life starts.

[Graeme]

Michel wrote: "It would still be life, which would throw a whole new light on life beyond Earth."

Indeed, it would be a fascinating development.

My POV is that life is hard coded into the physical laws of the universe, and hence inevitable wherever it is feasible for life to survive long enough to develop. I.e. we live in a life bearing universe.

What is rare is intelligent life, most life forms get by on speed, camouflage, high reproductive rate, etc, and don't rely specifically on intellect and problem solving to survive.

(Although there are some amazing examples of smarts out there, but I'm talking as a dominant feature).

[Ian]

Given the laws of chemistry and physics are the same everywhere, it would be expected if the same conditions occurred for long enough, life would evolve.

The issue of intelligent life is a deeper question. In my opinion, since intelligence does give substantial advantages I would expect it to evolve, given time. Technology falls into the same category, but will fail on water worlds (fire under water hardly works) and it probably needs an opposable thumb, and it is possible that on any given planet nothing will evolve grasping "hands". It is a fascinating thing to speculate on, but it could be a very long time before we find out if there is extraterrestrial life,

[[deleted user]]

We just need to look at all the new, bizarre lifeforms we keep discovering close to abyssal thermal vents at the bottom of our own oceans to see that life can take about any form and use every possibility to exist and adapt. We also can think about what the environment and first life forms were like in Earth's primitive times, billions of years ago to understand how diverse life can be. I don't expect us to find intelligent life within the Solar System (is Humanity really intelligent when we consider its history?), but I expect us to find simple life in many places, including Mars.

[Graeme]

Yeah - abyssal thermal vents - that stuff is crazy. Don't they survive on heat rather than light?

[Ian]

Graeme wrote: "Yeah - abyssal thermal vents - that stuff is crazy. Don't they survive on heat rather than light?"

You need heat to be at a temperature where you can operate, but life cannot operate as a heat engine unless it were big enough to have two ends at different temperatures. Sorry to get technical, but this comes from the second law of thermodynamics. To get a process to go, or to make a desired change, you need to expend work, which is ordered energy. The reason can be thought of as you wanting the change to go in the direction that makes whatever you want. Heat is simply random kinetic energy, and you cannot make it do anything useful without a temperature difference, which makes the heat flow in the given direction. (Then you still have to have some means of making it do work. Tossing an ice cube into a glass of water will give you a temperature difference, but apart from the ice melting, you can't get anything useful from it without something extra.)

The life forms near those vents get their energy by doing chemistry on what comes out of the vents - like using the hydrogen to make something or digesting sulphur compounds. They do not use the heat, and survive in spite of it.

[Ian]

One more point - if life gets its energy from processing chemicals (which all life will have started out doing) then those chemicals are one-off uses. Like running your car - you can't capture the exhaust gases and reuse them. Once the petrol is used, either refill of the car won't go. On Earth, life got around this by using photosynthesis, and hence more or less indefinite energy. For life in a pond deep underground on Mars the energy source would have to be chemical, which would require some sort of geothermal venting or the life would run out of fuel and all die.

[Graeme]

Ian wrote: "like using the hydrogen to make something or digesting sulphur compounds. They do not use the heat, and survive in spite of it...."

I'm thinking there' no photosynthesis, so what's at the bottom of the food chain - they simple eat Hydrogen and Sulphur compounds. Amazing.

[Scout]

If these organisms survive despite the heat, then why aren't they found elsewhere? Or are the vents the only places that provide the necessary hydrogen and sulfur?

[Ian]

Scout wrote: "If these organisms survive despite the heat, then why aren't they found elsewhere? Or are the vents the only places that provide the necessary hydrogen and sulfur?"

Because they have adapted to that niche. As you say, other places don't have that source of nutrients, and of course the second reason is the number of carnivores around these vents is pretty close to zero, but go anywhere else and they might get eaten before they starved. Finally if you have adapted to survive in this conditions, the chances are your enzymes etc won't work and will be far too cold at more general temperatures.

[Scout]

Are the conditions around these vents similar to the conditions when life began on earth? It was certainly very hot.

[Ian]

Scout, we don't actually know when or where life started, but when it did, the surface was not that hot, and was probably not much different from today. I saw one paper where a leading US geologist claimed that the amount of stuff coming out of the ground through volcanic eruptions was never more than nine times as much as now. How often have you seen a volcanic eruption? There would be fumaroles, but again, not everywhere.

So most of the land would be like what you see, more or less. There has been found some seawater/salt remains enclosed in rocks in Sth Africa that are over 3 billion years old and they have bicarbonate in them, and that can't survive more than about 75 degrees C. So the land would be cool, even if was very hot not that deep below. The reason is that the surface radiates heat well to space, but rock is a very poor conductor.

There were plenty of vents, both below the sea, but also on land, like now (e.g. Yellowstone). The view I tend to agree with expressed at that conference was that it may well have started in cooling hot pools adjacent to such land-based vents, where the splashing and drying of the developing "cells" would help by delivering fresh nutrients and polymerising them in the drying stage (because that process gives off water, and it does it better if the environment is drying.)

[Scout]

Going back to the water hopefully discovered on Mars, Ian said, "My guess, though, is that any life would be most likely to be single cell organisms, like bacteria, and it would probably have a metabolism we don't recognise." So, there could be life there unlike any we've seen, but still life? That's pretty exciting.