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Which celestial bodies may have or had life?


juvilado

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Just wondering, after all this time, we still don't know for sure if Duna has or has life, for instance.

But as a community, we can wonder which ones could!

I ask the propositions for both present and past life. We can state it by scientific means or just of hearth or to eye.

We can also name modders bodies if you want. I believe most of the comunity want some life somewhere out there!

My state:

EVE past and present life (in the liquid)

DUNA: Past (just to help RL Mars :kiss:)

LAITHE: Ps and Pr

Minmus: Im suspixious of it. Too greenish!

Regards!

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I have my own theories based on the scientific writings of H. P. Lovecraft, but the creation myth seems to be centered on the idea that there was an ancient civilization that lived on a planet at the far reaches of the Kerbal system. As the planet slowly froze, the dwelling survivors sent out monoliths that they hope would spawn an intelligent life form in the Kerbal system. Their plan failed, and we end up with Kerbals instead.

We know that there were past civilizations on Kebral, as evidenced by the temple in the desert. There are creditable reports that there is a face on Duna and a Stonehenge like formation on Vall.

On a holiday, me and Valentina visited Bop along with her cousin. Gawd, you know I can't remember his name now, but he was a real cut up, and we took this admittedly touristy snap shoot of him.

32938412726_1b2cce294b_o.jpg

There is of course the saucer like anomaly close to the North Pole of Kerbin, and I swear I once visited a similar anomaly  close to the South pole on Duna.

The late eminent British scientist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle suggests in his essential work The Horror of the Heights that advanced life forms can  exist in the upper atmosphere of a planet. This makes me speculate if there is not a possibility of advanced life in the upper atmosphere of Jool..

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None of them. Kerbol is impossible, even scaled, so we really can't judge the system based on real world analogues.

But if we ignore that ... I'd say only Kerbin. Eve is clearly meant to be an analogue of Venus and Duna is clearly meant to be an analogue of Mars, so maybe Duna in the past but we haven't established any evidence of life on Mars yet. Laythe has no real world analogue, doesn't work out scientifically in the least, and is meant purely as a destination for speisplains so clearly it can't have any life. Eeloo might boast a sub-surface ocean, making it about the only good candidate of past or current life beyond Kerbin.

Edited by regex
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1 hour ago, Ty Tan Tu said:

that they hope would spawn an intelligent life form in the Kerbal system. Their plan failed, and we end up with Kerbals instead.

I laughed so hard at this. It reminds me about the SETI joke; the reason they are searching for extra terrestrial intelligence is because they can't find any here!

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5 hours ago, juvilado said:

Just wondering, after all this time, we still don't know for sure if Duna has or has life, for instance.

All of them.  Pond scum and extremophiles are everywhere, and that's just here on Earth.  And that's only considering "life as we know it".  There are quite a few other plausible definitions of life based on other chemistry sets.  And just like here on Earth, none of them are tied to particularly narrow "habitable zones", a concept that is such an humanocentric folly.

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Laythe definitely. The presence of an oxygen rich atmosphere almost confirms autotrophic bacteria in Laythe's oceans. O2 is a pretty unstable molecule so overtime it reacts with surface metals and silcates, that's why Mars has virtually no Oxygen in it's atmosphere, it's all reacted with the surface. The only reason Earth has significant oxygen is because it is constantly being replenished by photosynthesising organisms.

I say ALMOST confirms because there MAY be a chemical process which maintains oxygen in planetary atmospheres but so far we've found no such process naturally in our own solar system.

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6 hours ago, regex said:

Eeloo might boast a sub-surface ocean, making it about the only good candidate of past or current life beyond Kerbin

How would a planet have a Subsurface ocean with no other body near it to warm up the insides? It could be possible with OPM however.

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10 hours ago, Geschosskopf said:

All of them.  Pond scum and extremophiles are everywhere, and that's just here on Earth.

No, they aren't. And just about anywhere on the surface of the Earth is much more suitable for life than any known ET location except perhaps under the ice of Europa/Enceladus, etc.

Where life could survive != Where it could start, and panspermia chances are low.

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7 hours ago, NSEP said:

How would a planet have a Subsurface ocean with no other body near it to warm up the insides? It could be possible with OPM however.

vOv maybe volcanic activity? We're talking about an impossible solar system on pretty much every level, you can't even scale it up properly because the star is so out of whack. Seriously, we have a planet with atmospheric oxygen in the outer system because speisplains need a destination. The Kerbol star system makes very little sense on a scientific level, asking where life may be is an exercise in fan fiction, not science.

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Moho: Probably not, but it is periodically volcanic (see: 0.17 atmosphere) and may have a hot core.

Eve: At some point.

Duna: Past.

Laythe: Yes. There is oxygen, that must have come from somewhere.

Vall: Icy, probably has a subsurface ocean due to the proximity to Jool. Plus we've got that one easter egg...

Bop: The Kraken.

Pol: Those spikes look organic, like a fungus, but I don't know how they would have formed.

Eeloo: If we go by OPM, than it once had a subsurface ocean because it orbited Sarnus but then got ejected.

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1 hour ago, KerikBalm said:

No, they aren't. And just about anywhere on the surface of the Earth is much more suitable for life than any known ET location except perhaps under the ice of Europa/Enceladus, etc.

Where life could survive != Where it could start, and panspermia chances are low.

I dunno.  Every day it seems they find some new type of extremophile microbe that pushes the boundaries a bit further out from what we used to think.  And as mentioned, there are other plausible forms of biology which we've never yet seen but which could, in theory, thrive in environments where our type of biology could not.

As I understand the current state of knowledge, life as we know it kicked off here pretty much the day after the oceans formed:

  • Age of Earth itself:  4.5 By
  • Age of oceans:  4.4 By
  • Oldest evidence for life:  4.2-4.3 By

Of course, it was just microbes for about 3 By after that, so more complex life is pretty recent.  But pond scum has been around literally for only a few days less than forever,  That life got started here so fast implies that it's easy to do.  That life has continued to exist here ever since, despite RADICAL changes Earth's climate, geography, and atmospheric composition, implies that it's damn hard to eradicate.  Thus, I figure life's pretty much everywhere in the universe.

 

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The boundaries of where "our form of life" can exist are still being examined. There were surprises pushing the boundary... then people basically expected to find it everywhere on Earth, and then surprises came when places have been found on Earth without life. An example is a hyper saline lake in Antarctica. There are some microbes that tolerate very high salt concentrations, but even they have a limit and there is a hypersaline lake in antarctica where the only signs of life there appear to be blown there by wind, but then they die/go metabolically inactive. No life *grows* there. That does not bode well for the hyper saline RSL on Mars. Then we've found that in some samples from the Atacama desert... the soil is sterile, some samples had no detectable organics, nothing consuming nitrates that rain down from the atmosphere (normally their deposition is so low compared to the uptake by life that nitrates produced by lightning, etc never accumulate). Nothing could be made to grow from the samples, even under a variety of conditions. The atacama is a big places, and at the fringes you find plants and animals, more inward there are hardy extremophiles. Even more inward, there may be viable spores waiting for the brief moments of moisture, but in the driest places, there is no life. Its not merely that life won't *grow*, but its so dry and high altitude (stronger UV), that life dies.

On top of this, you have to figure that life adapts to many of these extremes, it doesn't start there. We've had billions of years for life to adapt, there are even gradients that allow for intermediates as natural selection should drive the evolution of forms that could survive there.... but it seems nothing is there, apparently, physics says "no".

Still, popular science articles like to present new discoveries as if they are surprising, when they really aren't, but they do help pin down where the boundary might be for conditions too extreme for life. We still see it portrayed that anyplace we see water, we see life, but that is not true. People act like anywhere on Earth's surface, you find microbes - not true. 

Thus, it likely does on other worlds as well.

Mercury - No

Venus - No (*maybe* in the past, but its surely all dead now)

Moon - No

Mars - probably not, maybe underground, maybe in the past, maybe around those geysers when the pressure builds up between the dry ice and water ice layers before geyser eruption.

Ceres - probably no, maybe if there is a warmer core with water ice below the rocky surface

Jupiter's moons: maybe

Titan/Enceledus: maybe

More distant bodies... very unlikely

 

Even if the ocean of Europa is habitable, that doesn't mean its not sterile due to a lack of conditions for abiogenesis. Microbes from earth would have to survive in an inert state for a very long time to get there, and the DNA would likely be too damaged during the journey when repair mechanisms would presumably be inactive.

Even if microbes made it there without being killed, the environment would probably be so different from the one on Earth that they came from, that they'd be unable to grow/be metabolically active, and would thus die in time. That's assuming they somehow made it under the ice intact. The surface of Europa is deadly thanks to Jupiter trapping all those charged particles. Such a transmission of microbes is a non-zero chance, so its worth considering for directed spaceflight, but its still pretty unlikely.

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