I just checked but NASA has done loads in recent years and some of it very important stuff like Climate imaging etc.
I think their greatest challenge is justifying the cost. Average Joe on the street sees the eyewatering figures NASA gets and rightly questions it, then quickly argues against it while ignoring the benefits like the phone in their pocket.
Personally I’d be looking at the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, but the moon race is becoming a thing again. Water ice at the poles would be massive.
Why? Because they dont launch one and blow it up every week?
Think of the end game with it. Who controls the moons polar regions gets access to water (if theres enough ice there) which gives you moon base capability. Water makes fuel and you can drink it.
Starship is about to leap 50 years above SLS. You don’t like their methods, I do. They work, they’re cheaper and provide results. SLS is a DODO that’s blown up every 2 years. Space X lands orbital class boosters every week and will soon be landing interplanetary ones. Fucking glorious.
the issue they are having for further missions is how to penetrate the 10km plus ice cap to access the ocean below, they need to penetrate and seal at the same time whilst obviously contamination is a massive issue
Well Europa is the one that they are most interested in. Effectively they are looking for slime, but if it exists it would indicate that life is not so much possible, as inevitable.
Mars had the conditions for life to arise probably around the same time as Earth and the fact that it is not obviously still there is a worry. Indeed, on Earth, life is thought to have come about within a couple of 100 M years of formation, where it stayed single celled for nearly 4 billion years thereafer.
Even if life exists on Mars now, it is likely to be single celled, This would mean we will likely never meet another civilisation because if after 4.5 billion years of existence it is stuck as single cells on Mars, then the filter to get to multicellular life (let alone tech capable) is very slim indeed. If that is the case then the expanse of space and time will likely preclude technological civilisations from meeting.
My take is that on Mars, life formed but was not able to reach a balance with the geography and eventually receded to the periphery - a trajectory likely for most instances of genesis. On Earth, life has come to eventually shape geography itself (or at least contribute enough to it to drive a balance) - from O2/CO2 production to rock/soil and gas deposits, ther presence of life is everywhere.
Titan is another interesting destination and seems « more accessible » operationally. There was an acetylene detection a few years back which generated a few discussions around whether it was a result of xeno-biotic output but I’ve not heard anything for a while… Titan is cold but has seas, precipitation and an atmosphere. If there is biology there it would be quite alien indeed.
There are still articles being written about the possibility of life on Venus (the phosphine traces.) All of these are down to biosignatures and it’s a really interesting field, because they have a direct impact to studying life on Earth.
The original thinking was that life can only evolve on an Earth like planet, whereas life will actually evolve to suit its native environment. That has a huge implications for us, as we are very adept at altering our own planet’s environment.
For me this is the rub. Life likely can appear quite readily but can it get much beyond emergence is the question. Why the difference between Earth and the others we’ve mentioned?
Maybe the difference between Earth and Mars (or Venus) is that on Earth, life gained the upper hand over the planet’s geographical trajectory and on these other planets it was only able to get started and then literally hang on for dear life…
I think one factor is stability. If an environment is changing rapidly then that favours lifeforms with a very short reproduction time (e.g. hours). Life forms that require years to reproduce can’t evolve that fast.
The other factor is sexual reproduction (by which I mean the genes of two cells can mix) as that rapidly increases the rate of evolution. But for that to happen there must already be a level of complexity and relatively long lifecycle to happen.
There is also symbiosis between organisms. I expect that takes a good while to evolve.
Agree that there are many (many) factors in play but on Earth it took nearly 4 billon years for life to get past single cells. This seems a filter that compounds (or is the result) of those factors. Tech capable life is likely rare, in the region of one per galaxy per (generously) 100 million years… Currently this seems to point to us staying lonely.
This for me. Even though the Earths climate has changed its never been in a position where nothing could survive for any significant length of time, cosmologically speaking.
We as a species have also been fortunate that a big rock hasnt fallen on our heads.
My take is that on Earth, life formed quickly and spread everywhere - also quickly. A global arching ocean probably allowed for this. Once life had spread, Gaia was born!
I wonder if this is a limitation for places like Mars - a lack of a global ocean allowing for the complete spread of life fast enough to survive global changes.
Mars did have oceans by all accounts. I suspect Mars was well on the way but something happened that created the runaway greenhouse effect. Venus too perhaps.
I think im right in saying Mars doesnt have a magnetic field like earth so has limited protection from Cosmic rays. So maybe it was there initially? Im speculating
It had oceans but I’m not sure they circumvented the planet as they do here. I think you’re right, it doesn’t have a magnetic field and on another note, Mars I think is tectonically more quiescent - having both, a magnetic field and more tectonic activity, can be positive for life.