Is There A Giant Life Form Lurking In Our Solar System? Possibly, Say Scientists

I&#x27;m still having a hard time contemplating the fact that WE exist.<p>Sitting in front of our flat monitors with access to nearly all information which is stored all around planet Earth.<p>Phones that connect us to billions of people.<p>Brains large enough to hypothesize the creation of the universe.<p>We can create rockets that send probes to other planets and even the edge of our solar system.<p>We regularly travel around in amazing personal vehicles that allow us to travel at over 100 mph in about 10 seconds.<p>The fact that each one of us had about one quadrillionth percent chance of even being born, yet here we are.<p>The fact that we can even talk and communicate effectively is amazing.<p>We can imagine future technologies and have goals to work towards such as immortality, brain-computer interfaces, teleportation, and mining asteroids.<p>We have so much to be thankful for. Everything is amazing.<p>WTF. [0]<p>I have a dog that can&#x27;t do anything but eat, pee, poop, and play fetch. What kind of activities do other organisms do that humans can&#x27;t do? Other than telepathy, and flight, and breathing without oxygen, and energy creation through sunlight.<p>Yet we still make fellow humans and animals suffer daily. We eat shit food and get depressed and some people even try to kill themselves. We have concepts like good and evil and actually hate other humans just because they are not exactly like our culture or have more stuff than we do. We have enough nuclear missiles in the ocean to eradicate life on earth.<p>Terraforming mars will be fun. I hope that I live to see the start of that adventure. The next 100 years in general will be very fun. I&#x27;m extremely glad that I get to be a part of this awesome world at this extraordinary time in human history. Please, nobody fuck it up too bad.<p>My point is, regarding the article, ANYTHING is possible. God is possible, ghosts are possible, flying spaghetti monsters are possible but until I see a video with convincing explanation or accredited scientists agree that something is very likely, is there really any point of just making up stuff?<p>Mars having a thriving self-sustaining human-like civilization underground is possible. Aliens living among us for several years is possible. No scientist will say that either of those hypothesis are absolutely impossible, but there is no point in proposing it unless you&#x27;re writing a science fiction novel&#x2F;movie&#x2F;comic book.

The entire article is based on this sentence<p>&quot;Thus, life on Titan could involve huge (by Earth standards) and very slowly metabolizing cells, in which case biomass densities would be higher than calculated above.&quot;<p>which the author interprets as<p>&quot;a life form in our solar system that&#x27;s not a puny, dumb little thing, but a huge dumb thing. Like dog-sized. Or maybe Volkswagen-sized.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m sorry.. but a &quot;huge by (earth standards) cell&quot; doesn&#x27;t mean dog sized. It means a few times an earth sized cell. Otherwise, why compare it to a cell at all?

I feel like I&#x27;ve been trapped in the corner at a cocktail party by someone who insists on showing me bad drawings on a cocktail napkin. This guy&#x27;s writing style is so annoying that I couldn&#x27;t even make it to the end of the article. Attempting to parse this has left me feeling slightly dumber than 5 minutes ago.

To be cynical, a lot of things are possible. It&#x27;s possible that anaerobic bacteria still live in small pockets beneath the surface of Mars. It&#x27;s possible, if unlikely, that extremophiles survive on the sweltering surface of Venus, or floating in its sulphurous clouds.<p>Of course, the fact that these things are possible is still incredibly cool. While this article lacks much technical substance, this is the kind of thinking that gave us Cosmos and Pale Blue Dot. I hope enough people retain this author&#x27;s sense of scientific curiosity and excitement for discovery. While cold logic, expected-value calculations, and cynicism are important in a research setting, outside of the lab it&#x27;s important for people to be able to get excited about little (or big!) things like this.<p>We <i>can</i> have scientific progress and childish glee coexist. Thank you for posting this.

Rarely have I wished so much for a downvote button on top-level posts.

Evolution.<p>It is why native alien life is unlikely to exist in our own solar system. You see, once life gets started, this process we call evolution takes place. Life takes on a myriad of complex forms. It covers the planet, gradually adapting to survive and thrive on nearly every patch of land. And behold, the planet is transformed.<p>There is only one planet in our solar system where this has happened. If life had started on some other rock in our solar system, it too would be visibly infested with lifeforms.

Why do articles like this always overlook the key scientific and historical issues?<p>If there&#x27;s life on Europa, and if it is not based on DNA, that would mean Europan life evolved along a separate path from ours. That would lend support to the idea that life is common in the universe.<p>If Europa&#x27;s hypothetical life was based on DNA, it would lend support to the &quot;panspermia&quot; idea, because it&#x27;s hard to imagine how Earth&#x27;s life could get to Europa, implying that Earth&#x27;s life, and Europa&#x27;s life, both arose somewhere else and traveled to separate destinations.<p>There are several other possibilities, none of which are discussed in the article.

It&#x27;s our biases that show in our implicit assumption that life must operate on the spatial and temporal scales of large animals on Earth. Cryogenic life might well be a lot slower than the typical animal on Earth. It&#x27;s a lot colder on Titan. Energy is a lot more diffuse. Why wouldn&#x27;t it be much larger and slower? (Or for that matter, smaller and slower?)

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE<p>I think I&#x27;ll stick to Arthur C. Clarke&#x27;s half tree, half animal lifeform in Europa which is better than a single-celled blob.

I like the illustrations. Especially the woman pushing the alien in a shopping cart.

Coincidence or clever irony that the second drawing of the woman inspecting the little life looks a lot like Felisa Wolfe-Simon (of arsenic based life fame)?

&quot;We have all been scientists at one point or another in our lives.&quot; - Cecil Baldwin

That would make me very happy.

I expected this to be from The Onion with that headline.

It doesn&#x27;t mean we can&#x27;t get sick from it, I think we need to be very careful with extra terrestrial life.

Dirk Schultzs-Makuch and David Grinspoon said if one day methane eaters are found to exist on Titan,<p>.5<p>and if they swim around in very, very cold ethane lakes or oceans,<p>.5<p>and if those oceans don&#x27;t have the pressure or weight of water,<p>.5<p>----------------<p>* .5 .5 .5<p>0.125, under stupidly generous assumptions.<p>Have you paid your complexity tax today?