[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

I have setup a new blog (actually my old one just renovated) called the Titanese Times at http://volcanopele.blogspot.com . I will cover Titan news as well as other outer planetary satellites except Europa. Hope you all enjoy the site and post a comment once in a while

[azstrummer]

Nice blog. Are you from Tucson originally? It's my hometown. Going to be down there this weekend for an old friend's 50th birthday.

[djellison]

I didnt know anyone 'came' from Tuscon. I just thought people went for a conference and forgot to leave

Doug

[Decepticon]

Why not Europa?

[volcanopele]

Actually I'm from Kansas. I'm in Tucson for college. Decepticon, because....:-D

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, as I understand it, Jason has two reasons for leaving Europa off his blog. (1) The "Europa Icepick" website already covers it in detail. (Time I got back in touch with them, by the way.) (2): Jason hates astrobiology -- and that's infinitely the most important reason for exploring Europa. (Of course, given the way Titan now seems to be turning out, the prebiotic part of astrobiology is also by far the most important reason for exploring Titan.)

[azstrummer]

Actually I'm from Kansas. I'm in Tucson for college. Decepticon, because....:-D

You don't have a dog named Toto do you?

[volcanopele]

Actually, as I understand it, Jason has two reasons for leaving Europa off his blog.  (1)  The "Europa Icepick" website already covers it in detail.  (Time I got back in touch with them, by the way.)  (2): Jason hates astrobiology -- and that's infinitely the most important reason for exploring Europa.  (Of course, given the way Titan now seems to be turning out, the prebiotic part of astrobiology is also by far the most important reason for exploring Titan.)

.... well, it's not astrobiology I don't like. In the Titan context, looking at the chemistry on Titan as a window into the pre-biotic chemistry that took place on the early earth is one thing. Using it to justify missions to Mars and Europa I do have a problem with. That's a little bit less the case for Mars (since eventual human exporation is also a driver) but it certainly is for Europa. Maybe it is an important driver for some people, but not for me.

And no, I don't have a dog named Toto. My name ain't Dorothy either...

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Any time you want to drop a house on the Space Station, it's all right by me...

As for the relative importance of Martian and Europan astrobioolgy, I've already repeatedly stated my reason for thinking that the latter may be a lot more important than the former. (I've also run it by several scientists, all of whom so far have agreed with it.) To wit:

If we find evidence of past (or even present) life on Mars, there is still a very serious chance that we'll never be able to prove that it evolved on the planet, as opposed to descending from carpetbagging microbes transported from early Earth via meteorite. (Indeed, our only hope of proving this is if we can prove that Martian life had such an unearthly biochemistry that it could not possibly have developed ion earth -- even during the planet's earliest days -- and that will be hard to do.) Alternatively, it may be possible in that case that life originally appeared only on Mars and got transferred here via meteorite -- but in either case there will still be a real chance that life appears only as an extremely rare pure-chance fluke in the Universe, and that it just happened to make one of its rare appearances on one world in this Solar System and then got transferred via meteorite to another one.

By contrast, meteorite transfers between any of the inner worlds and Europa are extremely rare -- so the discovery of Europan life, while it wouldn't quite rule out the possibility of life originally evolving only on one world in this Solar System, would show that life is likely to evolve in the Universe wherever conditions make it possible and is thus very common (at least on the microbial scale).