OPTIMISM Wrestles PESSIMISM
John Shirley
A Moon Ocean!
Scientists learn that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has the only ocean beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed for life.“We now really have found that Enceladus’s subsurface ocean is the most habitable place in the solar system, at least as far as we know,” said lead author Frank Postberg, a professor at the Free University of Berlin.
The discovery of dissolved sodium phosphate, announced in a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, makes Enceladus all the more intriguing.
Probably carried out with remote robotics, the marvelous opportunity for exploration of the ocean on the moon Enceladus may bring the real possibility of discovering new forms of life and studying a primeval ocean–but it may also be a boon to humanity, in the next century, in other ways.…