What Makes Enceladus so Attractive in the Search for Life in Space?

  Enceladus is considered to be one of the most promising places to search for extraterrestrial life in our solar system. Researchers suspect that under the moon’s icy crust there is a global ocean of liquid water and a rocky core further below. Due to cryovolcanic activity, gigantic plumes break through cracks in the crust at the moon’s south pole, ejecting ice particles hundreds of kilometers into space.

  NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed through these plumes multiple times to analyze its composition. Enceladus’s ocean is the only extraterrestrial “body of water” from which scientists have been able to directly analyze samples. The samples revealed traces of various salts and organic compounds. Furthermore, previous analyses conducted by Cassini gave indications of hydrothermal processes on the seafloor and other conditions that are significant in supporting life.

So it seems the people whose job it is to study these things do have reason to think it might exist.

Why not? Friction from tidal forces keeps the moon got enough to contain liquid water under its ice cover. This makes it similar to Europa in some ways.

Oh, but there is. One reason is that life on Earth seems to have appeared almost immediately after the crust cooled enough and the primordial ocean formed.

The $10 trillion will be spent regardless. Whether it's on luxury yachts, private islands, and political capital or health care, education, and exploring the solar system are choices.

Strictly from an economic standpoint: The $10T goes right back into the economy. That's $10T worth of STEM jobs and manufacturing and so on. Arguably, it should be spent more directly on schools and universal healthcare and so on, but $10T also creates a lot of jobs and healthcare benefits and funds public schools and so on so it's a tricky comparison to make.

From a non-economic standpoint: Aside from ensuring we don't destroy this planet, what is more important than finding out if we're alone in the universe? Not much, if you ask me.

(I realize finding algae on Saturn's moon doesn't definitively answer that question but it's certainly a uh... pretty big data point)

I am all for space exploration, but just in the interest of fairness, I would be surprise if the innovations for the entirety of space exploration approaches even 10% of what the US military has developed.

I have a premonition that even if extraterrestrial life is discovered, and even if intelligent, hostile extraterrestrial life is somehow discovered, humans are not going to leave it alone.

After all, everyone involved can just say it's inevitable! If we don't do it, someone else will.

  > Seriously want to know what people really think...

(in a vacuum) i think we would all be saying thats amazing and fundamentally change the way we see ourselves and place in the universe (science fiction becomes science fact) and open new possibilities for research and discoveries

  >  find "life". So? Why is this important to people?

when there are more down-to-earth problems right in front of us, i get this as well; why not use that money to fund free college for a couple years for all citizens etc etc

"~$50 Billion"

Are you saying people would rather have an apartment? It would house 250,000 people for 10 years. But the slime is cooler.

My honest reason (and this is coming from a guy with no stake in the game or significant physics or biology knowledge) is that it would just be cool as fuck, and that exploration is valuable in itself.

I'll acknowledge that that is wishy-washy language, but that's kind of my point. I'm not sure I can point to an objective "good" that comes out of it, but I also don't know that that's the norm for these kinds of things either. It might have been hard to say that going to the moon was an objective "good" outside of one-upping the Russians, but I do think it's good that we did it, even if I don't really know how to quantify why.

A majority of the planet thinks life started here. Finding it elsewhere would culturally be a cosmic (puns) shift of before alien life existed verifiably and after.

Benjamin Franklin is said to have replied, "What use is a new-born baby?" in response to a skeptic of the utility of some of the first balloon launches.

I suspect that you won't be swayed by the abstract benefits of intelligent life on Earth finding not just proof of life on another body in our solar system but actual life that we could perhaps even launch retrieval missions to return to Earth for analysis so I won't talk about Darwin and his voyages and the theory of evolution that it resulted in as people often do in these conversations.

Instead I'll ask you what you think the dollar value of studying and reverse engineering an alternate or similar biochemical system survives in a world totally different than our own. What sort of applications could this have in materials science? What kind of new materials could we discover from alien life? What kind of novel bio-mimetic applications could we derive from this?

I look around the room I'm in and I see a hardwood floor, I see a differnet species tree making up woodpaneling on the walls. My clothes are made of cotton and rayon, there's some sort of grass woven lampshade above me. books made of paper, paintings with linseed oil paint -- what's the commercial and cultural value of all that stuff to our species?

For the very same reason why the wisest of the ancient and medieval rulers were patrons of science, even if the value of scientific discoveries was not immediately apparent at the time.

It is called enlightenment and the discovery of knowledge. Otherwise, we would still have been running around with pitchforks and flaming torches, waging crusades in the name of one deity or another.

Besides, humans spend $50 billion or – equally arguably much more – killing or trying to kill each other. If that gets spent on new discoveries and knowledge, it becomes apparent that the $50 billion investment into science is a substantially better value proposition.

Bet their civilization's 'Hello World' is still stuck in an infinite loop. Fascinating possibilities though.

Not really, there has been a lot of crossover of organic-carrying meteors within our own solar system, it's pretty plausible that multiple bodies in our solar system have life from a single origin event, which doesn't say anything about the rest of the universe.