Lastly, Ceres is tiny-more than 13 times smaller than Earth. And even if that occurred, finding that life means we have to drill at least two-dozen miles into the ground to access that water and study it. Even if those things are there, it would need some source of heat and energy that could actually help encourage that water and organic material to react in such a way that it leads to life. The evidence of subsurface water and the organic materials is still very new. Dawn even found evidence of organic compounds on Ceres that could act as raw materials for life.īut Ceres ranks second-to-last on our list because its habitability has too many questions attached. It would almost certainly be extremely salty-which would keep the water from freezing even well below 0☌. Scientists are still unpacking and analyzing that data, but tantalizing studies in the past few years suggest there’s an ocean sitting 25 miles below the surface, and could stretch for hundreds of miles. Ceres, a dwarf planet that sits between Mars and Jupiter, was studied by NASA’s Dawn probe from orbit from 2015 to 2018. The largest asteroid and smallest dwarf planet in the solar system could be home to liquid water, sitting deep underground. NASA / JPL-CALTECH / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / JUSTIN COWART 9. And lastly, the horrendous cold tempers hopes that life could stay unfrozen for long enough to make a home for itself. The best opportunity to visit Triton would be the proposed Trident mission (which seems unlikely to get launched after NASA just greenlighted two new missions to Venus later this decade). The window for such a mission opens up only every 13 years. The only mission to ever visit the world was Voyager 2 in 1989. But in spite of that, it seems to get some heat generated by tidal forces (gravitational friction between Triton and Neptune), and that could help warm up the waters and give rise to life through any organics that might exist on the moon.īut actually finding life on Triton seems like a very distant possibility. Its surface is mostly frozen nitrogen, and its crust is made of water ice, and it has an icy mantle. It’s one of only five moons in the solar system known to be geologically active, as evidenced by its active geysers that spew sublimated nitrogen gas. Triton is the largest moon of Neptune, and one of the most exotic worlds in the solar system. And still other places that seem to be too exotic for life continue to surprise us. Several of the icy moons that hang around Jupiter and Saturn might have underground oceans that could sustain life. Our rocky neighbors of Venus and Mars may have once been temperate and Earth-like, and some of the life might have lingered on after these planets’ climates took a turn for the worse. At the same time, our cursory understanding of these obscure worlds has expanded tremendously.
![life on top 3 life on top 3](https://www.phillyyoungplaywrights.org/uploads/4/3/7/7/43779537/things_that....jpg)
We now know that life on Earth is able to thrive in even the harshest, most brutal environments, in super cold and super dry conditions, depths of unimaginable pressures, and without the need to use sunlight as a source of energy. Earth seemed to be a miracle of a miracle.īut life isn’t that simple.
![life on top 3 life on top 3](https://simkl.in/episodes/50/502586b8032b7bcf_w.jpg)
The other planets were gas giants, and life on those worlds or their satellite moons was basically inconceivable.
![life on top 3 life on top 3](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wvNHnvHOVyo/sddefault.jpg)
Rocky neighbors were too dry and cold like Mars, or too hot and hellish like Venus. Where are we going to find that life? It was once thought the solar system was probably a barren wasteland apart from Earth. But a discovery like that would nevertheless be a sign that we are not alone in the universe-that life elsewhere is a possibility. No, it’s not going to be little green men speeding through space in flying disks-more likely microbes or primitive bacteria. If you want to believe, now is the time: the hope that we might one day stumble upon alien life is greater than it ever was.