Prepare a message on the topic "Is there life on other planets of the solar system." extraterrestrial life

Recently I came across an interesting idea about life on other planets, and in particular, why we still have not found anything like it. Someone Schneiderman in his book “Beyond the Horizon of the Conscious World”, referring to an article from the distant 90s, talks about the concept natural cosmic frequency, which is abbreviated as SCH.

According to the academician, every body of the Universe has its own cosmic frequency. And it is the SCF that determines the nature of the space and time in which this body is located. For the Earth, this indicator is 365.25, that is, the number of revolutions around its own axis during the passage around the central luminary - the Sun. For each planet, the SCF is unique and unrepeatable. And this is precisely the answer to the question why we feel so alone in the space of the Universe.

Our own cosmic frequency, in which we are born, forms a certain individual pattern for us, through the prism of which we look at the world. All we can see is just a materialized image, transformed under our perception.

This is similar to how we perceive colors. After all, flowers, as such, do not exist. We see different wavelengths, which the brain interprets as color. And one more interesting nuance is that our spectrum is far from their entire possible range. There are vibrations that the eye simply cannot recognize. We do not see ultraviolet and infrared, and many more radiations are inaccessible to our perception.

By analogy, life on other planets in its real and objective existence cannot be recognized through the filters of an alien SCF. And even what scientists will probably find one day, according to this theory, will be very far from the truth and true only in a system where the central reference point is the planet Earth and the individual pattern or view of the Universe given by its sphere.

Contact with an objective alien is possible only through a change in the own cosmic frequency, through its adjustment and alignment with the object of study. However, this cannot be achieved by technical means alone. Moreover, the adherents of the concept argue that such an artificial change in a person's TSN, if possible, will certainly lead to tragic consequences. The reason is that the unprepared mind is not able to endure such a transformation in order to return to its original state without disturbance and damage.

Thus, extraterrestrial contacts will become possible only through the development of consciousness through knowledge and mystical practice. Today, for humanity as a whole, these methods are inaccessible, because the main measure of their accessibility is the level of ethics. And as long as there is “at least one military man on our planet who is eager to seize power”, high knowledge will remain hidden from the world community behind seven locks.

In recent years, there has been much discussion in astronomical circles about the search for life on other planets, so much so that a new term has been coined for this study - astrobiology, since there is no evidence that life exists elsewhere.

Astrobiology is the science of the origin of evolution and the spread of life for which there is as yet no data, or at least no data to support it.

Search for life in the solar system

Since there is no support for the claim that life exists on other planets, much attention is being paid to finding planetary conditions favorable for life.

Mars has been in the spotlight for a very long time and is now being planned for Martian soil samples. The red planet is about half the size of Earth, and it has at least a thin atmosphere. Water exists on Mars, though probably not in abundance in vapor or solid form. The temperature and atmospheric pressure on Mars are too low to support liquid water.

Exploring the surface of Mars since 1976, the rovers contained three very reliable experiments to detect signs of life. Two experiments did not show any signs of living organisms, the third experiment had weak but ambiguous data. Even the most optimistic seekers of extraterrestrial life agree that these slight positive signs were likely the result of inorganic chemical reactions in the soil. In addition to the terrible cold and the rarity of water, there are other obstacles to life on Mars today. For example, the thin Martian atmosphere does not provide protection from solar ultraviolet radiation, which is lethal to living things.

With these problems, interest in life on Mars has waned, although some hopes still hold and many think that life may have existed on Mars in the past.

Mars exploration

In recent years, the orbiter has detected methane in the Martian atmosphere. Methane is a gas often produced by living things, although it can also form inorganically. A gamma-ray spectrometer aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter detected significant amounts of hydrogen in the upper surfaces, likely indicating an abundance of ice. The famous rovers Spirit and Opportunity have obtained strong evidence that liquid water existed on the surface of Mars. This last point is a confirmation of what we have known for decades: photographs from the orbiter showed numerous features that are best interpreted as having a lot of liquid water on Mars in the past. It is possible that the Red Planet once had a much more substantial atmosphere than it does now, an atmosphere that provided enough pressure and heat to support liquid water.

This holds exciting promise for the pessimists of life on other planets.

• First, scientists have concluded that Mars, a planet without liquid water, once experienced a near global flood, all the while denying that such a thing could happen on earth, a planet with abundant water.
• Second, many believe that the earth's atmosphere underwent a tremendous change during the Flood. It is believed that the Earth has experienced catastrophic changes in its atmosphere.

Please note that in the study of astrobiology, water indicators occupy a prominent place.

As the universal solvent, water is absolutely essential to life, making up the majority of the mass of many organisms. And water is one of the most abundant molecules in the universe. While water has been directly detected throughout the universe (even in the outer layers of cool stars!), we have never found liquid water anywhere in the universe. Liquid water is the main standard for living things, as it seems that life is impossible without it. However, although water is a necessary condition for life, it is far from being a sufficient condition for life - much more is required.

Jupiter exploration

A few years ago, the excitement in the scientific community was caused by the announcement of the possibility of a small ocean of liquid water under the surface of Europa, one of Jupiter's large moons. Most of the cases for this water depend on Europa's surface features - there are large segment fractures that resemble polar ice pack features that result from upwelling of frozen between fractures. Also, if the water were salty, this could explain Jupiter's moon's magnetic field. It has since been suggested that a similar argument was made on Ganymede, another large moon of Jupiter.

Many scientists are now looking at the possible underwater ocean on the Europa moon as the most likely place in the solar system to find life outside of our home. This ocean, if it exists, is very dark and probably very cold. A few decades ago, living organisms in such a place would have been unthinkable. However, scientists have found that organisms live in very hostile environments, such as hydrothermal vents deep in Earth's oceans. In addition, underground lakes exist far below the Antarctic ice sheet. The largest and most famous of them is Lake Vostok, located 4 kilometers under the ice. While we don't know if life exists in these lakes, many scientists want to know. They believe that if life could exist in these terrestrial lakes, why shouldn't life exist inside Jupiter's moon?

The search for life outside the solar system

Whether there is life on other planets outside the solar system has always worried humanity. Therefore, in our time, scientists, astronomers, astrobiologists are constantly looking for the presence of life on other celestial bodies. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, NASA) has specially developed an astronomical satellite designed to search for planets outside the solar system near other stars, on which the Kepler space telescope is located.

Space telescope "Kepler"

Kepler is an entire space observatory launched by NASA in 2009. The observatory is equipped with an ultrasensitive photometer capable of analyzing signals in the light region of the spectrum and transmitting data to Earth. Due to its high resolution, it is able to distinguish not only exoplanets, but also their satellites with a size of 0.2 the size of the Earth. During operation, there were several emergencies, but it still operates and transmits information. Introduced into a circular heliocentric orbit

A planet similar to Earth where extraterrestrial existence is possible in size is called Kepler 186f. Kepler's discovery 186f confirms that in the area under study there are stars with planets, in addition to our Sun, where life is possible on another planet.
While celestial bodies have previously been found in the habitable zone, they are all at least 40 percent larger than Earth, and life on larger planets is less likely. Kepler-186f is more like Earth.
"The discovery of Kepler 186f represents a significant step towards the search for worlds like our planet Earth," NASA astrophysicists said at the agency's headquarters in Washington. Although the size of Kepler-186f is known, its mass and composition have not yet been determined.

Now we know only one planet where life exists - the Earth.

When we search for life outside of our solar system, we focus on finding celestial bodies with characteristics that are similar to Earth. WITH whether life exists on another planet will, of course, be revealed in time.

• The planet Kepler-186f is located in the Kepler-186 system, about 500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.
• The system is also home to four planetary satellites that orbit a star that is half the size and mass of our Sun.
• The star is classified as an M dwarf or red dwarf, a class of stars that makes up 70% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy. M dwarfs are the most numerous stars. Likely signs of life in the galaxy could also come from planets orbiting the M dwarf.
• Kepler-186f orbits its star every 130 days and receives one-third of the energy from its star that the Earth receives from the Sun, closer to the edges of the habitable zone.
• On the surface of Kepler-186f, the star's brightness matches that of when our Sun shines about an hour before sunset.

Being in the habitable zone does not mean that we know that this celestial body is habitable. The temperature on the planet is highly dependent on the atmosphere of the planet. Kepler-186f can be seen as Earth's cousin with many properties that resemble our planet rather than a twin.

This planet's four moons Kepler 186b, Kepler 186c, Kepler 186d, and Kepler-186e revolve around their sun every four, seven, 13, and 22 days, respectively, making them too hot for life.
The next steps to determine whether there is life on other planets include measuring their chemical composition, determining atmospheric conditions, and humanity's continuing quest to find truly Earth-like worlds.

conclusions

For a long time, scientists believed that life on Earth first developed in warm, very hospitable pools and then colonized more difficult environments. Now many people think that life began on the outskirts, in very hostile places, and then migrated in the other direction to better places.

Much of the motivation for this complete reversal of thought stems from the need to find life on other planets. Scientists should welcome the search for extraterrestrial life, although many experiments will continue to give zero results, while refuting the evolutionary theory of origin.

Is there life on other planets? This question has two sides: applied and fundamental. The fundamental question is of interest to those who are engaged in biology, astronomy, those who want to find life as such and see how different it is from the earth, how common it is in the Universe. The rest of humanity is interested in the applied side of this issue.

We still have only one point in the universe where life exists - this is our planet Earth. This is a reliable spacecraft, it has existed for 4.5 billion years, of which 4 billion years support life. But this does not mean that it will always be so. Earth is threatened by cosmic dangers in the form of asteroids, comets, supernova explosions, and so on, not to mention our own man-made problems. Therefore, it would be very good for future generations to find a spare planet, resettle a part of humanity and transfer there everything that has been mined by our civilization over the millennia of its development.

The main thing is the information accumulated by previous generations. Everything has disappeared, everything has decayed: the bones of people and animals, the buildings that were erected in past centuries. The only thing that has survived from the ancestors to the present day is the knowledge they accumulated. First of all, we must preserve knowledge for future generations. Therefore, a spare planet is needed, now a separate area between astronomy and biology, which is called astrobiology or bioastronomy, is engaged in its search.

Moon, Mars and the giant planets

Where can such a spare planet be found near us? I must say that it is quite close to us - only three days of flight on a spaceship. This is the moon. The absence of an atmosphere on the Moon limits our possibilities, but it is suitable as a repository of information for mankind. While we are creating such storage facilities on Earth - for example, in Svalbard there is a storage facility for cereal seeds in case of some agricultural disasters. But on the Moon, we could create a base and store knowledge there for future generations, all the giga-giga-gigabytes of information that mankind has accumulated, and thus pass them on to their descendants. For the settlement of people, the Moon is not an easy option, since only under the surface of the Moon can artificial cities be created, and this will be very costly and will not happen in the coming centuries.

More attractive are the bodies located even further: Mars, satellites of the giant planets. In previous decades, only telescope astronomers could explore these attractive bodies. Today, that is, for the past few decades, space probes have been flying to them. Mars is especially well explored - several satellites are constantly working around it. Landing probes and rovers have been constantly on its surface in recent decades.

There is an atmosphere on Mars, although, of course, it is rarefied and not suitable for us, but you can try to improve it, and there is also the main resource - water, without which no living creature and man can do either. Today on Mars it is in a frozen state, in the form of permafrost, ice polar caps. However, it can be melted, purified and used for drinking, for technical needs, for the production of oxygen, hydrogen - and this is rocket fuel and generally good fuel.

Unfortunately, we have not yet explored the most interesting thing on Mars - its bowels. On the surface of Mars, the radiation is quite high, it will be difficult to live there. But in the Martian caves, which have already been discovered from orbit, it should be much better. And we see the entrances to them, but so far not a single automatic device has penetrated there - this is a matter of the coming years. Literally at the end of this year or at the beginning of next year, a new Russian-European project will begin to drill the Martian surface and explore shallow Martian interiors to a depth of 1.5–2 meters. There is hope that in the coming years we will launch robots into the Martian caves that will explore life there or report to us that these caves are ready to receive our astronauts.

Even more attractive are the moons of the giant planets, such as Jupiter's Europa or Saturn's Enceladus. There are giant oceans. Normal, liquid, brackish water, as we now know, splashes under the ice crust of the satellites. And the ocean is where life was born and where it thrives on Earth today. And, in the end, a person could adapt to live in the ocean or on its surface. Such satellites have not yet been explored, unlike Mars. Spacecraft only flew past them, but not a single one descended. But in the coming years this will happen, and we will explore them, firstly, to search for life itself there - this is an interesting task for biology, and, perhaps, it will be solved, and we will see new variants of life; and secondly, to explore them as spare sites for the settlement of mankind.

There is another aspect in which these distant bodies are especially attractive. The fact is that the power of the radiation of the Sun is constantly growing and in the future it will begin to grow faster and faster. The earth will overheat and become unsuitable for life. It will lose its atmosphere, lose its liquid shell. And those distant satellites will, on the contrary, become warmer than today. Today it is cold there - -150, -180 °С. But in that era, when the Sun warms up properly, it is they who will become favorable for life. They must be kept in mind and studied as future spare planets.

exoplanets

Of course, someday engineers will invent a way to travel between the stars - so far there is no such way, but if it appears, an endless number of planets similar to the Earth in size, atmosphere, climate will open before us. Such planets have already been practically discovered, but only with the help of telescopes. These are Earth-like exoplanets, and there are relatively few of them. Among others, exoplanets make up maybe 1-2%. But already today, astronomers know thousands of exoplanets. Among them, dozens are quite reminiscent of our Earth. Whether there is life there, we do not yet know. But if it is not there, then we have the right to colonize these planets and use them to develop our civilization. The main thing is to learn how to travel to them. The interstellar distance is colossal, and our modern rockets will never cover them. It takes hundreds of thousands of years. But in the end, a way to quickly fly across the expanses of our Galaxy will surely be discovered, fast spacecraft will be made, and then these exoplanets will become truly copies of the Earth and spare planets for people.

extraterrestrial civilizations

In the search for life beyond the Earth, there is one method that, as it seemed to us, should bring very quick results. We are talking about the search for not just life, but intelligent life, capable of reporting its existence with the help of some means of communication. Special hopes were placed on radio communication, because it is able to overcome gigantic distances. We maintain radio contact with spacecraft that fly hundreds of millions of kilometers from Earth, and our modern technology gives us the ability to communicate with the civilizations of neighboring stars. There is a possibility, but it has not been possible to establish a connection or notice other people's signals for half a century. Since 1960, attempts have been made to receive such signals from intelligent inhabitants of other planets, other star systems, but so far they have not led to anything. And in this sense, pessimism is growing more and more, and we are becoming more and more convinced that our civilization, if not unique at all, is so rare that there are no other intelligent beings and planets inhabited by them next to us. This once again emphasizes the need to preserve our civilization as a unique fact, a unique phenomenon in the Universe. In this sense, it is important to find a place for resettlement, for the guaranteed preservation of our biosphere and especially its highest representative - man, our civilization. So far, we have not been able to find brothers in mind, although considerable efforts have been made for this and we have opportunities today. We could see them on the other side of the galaxy. But the universe is silent.

Over time, ideas about the diversity of worlds began to be supported by a theoretical base. Astronomer Francis Drake proposed the famous formula by which one can calculate the number of civilizations with a high level of technological development.

Drake puts the number of such civilizations in the observable universe at ten thousand. However, there are other assumptions. For example, astronomer Carl Sagan believed that only in our galaxy there are a million highly developed civilizations (!). According to the theory of John Oro, one of the first explorers of comets, the Milky Way contains no more than a hundred "intelligent" planets. And skeptics argue that the Earth, with its diverse life forms, has no analogues in the world of Cosmos at all.

However, science now knows that life can exist even without sunlight and photosynthesis. In the early 1990s, researchers found in a basalt slab buried deep underground in Washington state a huge number of microorganisms, completely isolated from the outside world. Life discovered in the most incredible conditions, so that its existence, say, on Mars, no longer seems impossible.

Probably, there is no more acute topic in the history of the search for extraterrestrial civilizations than the problem life on mars. The history of close study of the Red Planet began in 1877. It was then that the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli discovered that the surface of the planet was streaked with lines that he took for channels. The idea of ​​the Italian was picked up by the American astronomer Percival Lovell. In the last years of the 19th century, he announced that the channels he discovered were the work of an intelligent Martian civilization that surpasses us in development. In his opinion, the construction of a system of engineering structures covering the entire planet testifies to an unattainable level of technology for us, harmonizing the situation on the planet is proof of the high moral character of the Martians. H. G. Wells twisted this idea a little, portraying the Martians in the novel The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, as bloodthirsty monsters seeking to conquer the Earth.

However, the advent of more powerful telescopes closed the problem of channels - they turned out to be just a figment of the imagination. Until 1960, hopes of discovering life on Mars were associated with another phenomenon - the seasonal darkening of the planet's surface. There was a theory that these are signs of vegetation. Martian forests and steppes receded into the world of myths in 1965, when the space probe Mariner 4 took 22 photographs of the surface of the Red Planet. Mars turned out to be a desert with craters, reminiscent of the moon.

When the Viking 1 and Viking 2 ships reached the Martian surface in 1976, they found no signs of life or traces of organic molecules on the Red Planet. True, the results of the expedition cannot be considered final. “You can land Vikings on Earth and get to a place where there is also no life,” says astronomer Jack Farmer. The whole point, he believes, is to determine the areas of the Martian surface where, with the greatest degree of probability, could be preserved traces of life. One of these places may be the Gusev crater, which was once filled with water.

And yet the absence of visible objects on Mars signs of life predetermined the decline of exobiology (the science of alien life forms), which lasted two decades.
The situation changed in the 90s. Biologists began to find living organisms in such exotic corners of the Earth and in such harsh conditions that this gave a new impetus to the search. life on the planets of the solar system.

It is curious that at the time when life was born on Earth, Mars looked much more hospitable. About 3.8 billion years ago, the Martian climate was warmer and wetter. The red planet was similar to the Earth - it had water reserves and an atmosphere. Evidence that there was once water on Mars has survived to this day. Scientists believe that the Nanedi Vallis canyon, which stretches for a width of almost three kilometers, was once a full-flowing river. It meanders like a river bed and has a branch in the form of a narrow channel through which water once flowed.

Over time, Mars lost its surface water and atmosphere. As the sun got hotter, the habitable zone in our solar system moved further away from the central star. Mars is still within this zone, but its atmosphere, which is only one percent dense as Earth's, cannot hold enough heat to keep water in a liquid state.

However, if rivers flowed on Mars billions of years ago, and maybe the ocean raged, life could well exist there. It can even be assumed that life originated on Mars, and then was transferred to Earth with the help of meteorites.

In 1996, a team of NASA scientists announced that a famous Martian meteorite found in Antarctica, known as ALH84001, had traces of microbial fossils. This discovery was officially announced at a press conference held in Washington on August 7, 1996.

The researchers prepared a spectacular presentation, which showed graphs and sensational photographs of fossils, one of which was shaped like a worm. However, skeptics immediately raised their voices. They referred to the fact that all the facts presented by scientists in proof of organic
fossils, may also indicate their inorganic nature. In addition to everything inside the meteorite, particles were found that had already fallen on Earth.

Everett Gibson, a member of the NASA research team, believes that the arguments of the skeptics are a typical example of the rejection of the revolutionary idea by the scientific community. “Science,” he says, “cannot accept a radical idea overnight. There was a time when scientists did not believe that meteorites could fall from the sky. There was a time when the theory of the tectonic movement of the earth's plates was considered very strange.

Another celestial body with which hopes are pinned for discovering traces of life is Jupiter's moon Europa. Photographs taken by NASA show that the surface of Europa resembles the frozen expanse of the Earth's sea! It is dotted with furrows and cracks. Along with the other three Galilean moons of Jupiter, Europa is bound to this planet by gravity. Scientists speculate that Jupiter's gravitational pull could create enough heat to keep the water under the moon's ice cap from freezing. If, in addition, there is volcanic activity on Europa, the chances of finding signs of life on it increase.

The optimism of exobiologists seeking find life on other planets, is supported by the well-known fact that living organisms are composed mainly of hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon and oxygen, and these four reactive elements are the most abundant in the universe. However, the very origin of life, even on Earth, remains a great mystery. How can a set of chemical elements turn into a living entity without outside interference? “There is no such principle that would say that matter should come to life. Humanity has not yet discovered the Life Principle,” says physicist and writer Paul Davis.

Let's assume that life nevertheless arose in several corners of the Universe. The next question will be - how likely is it to evolve to a reasonable level? Some scientists believe that the development of the mind is programmed even in the simplest organisms that are able to touch the environment and look for food. Thus, they argue, if we find an alien entity looking for food, at some point it may evolve into an intelligent being.

It is also interesting to what extent the appearance of living beings from different worlds can be similar. How likely is it to encounter an alien with eyes, wings, or a tail? Although reality can confuse all cards: physical and chemical properties are universal, and it is logical to assume that any intelligent life should repeat the main features of the earth. For example, aliens should have a head, on which (next to the brain) the organs of sight, touch and smell are located in order to perceive light, sound and smells. To maintain and protect the internal organs, alien creatures will need a skeleton, and to move around, limbs. Naturally, this is all just speculation. Nature can be much more inventive than we are.

The scientific community continues to seek confirmation of the idea that we are not alone in the universe. In the near future, NASA plans to build a telescope - the "Earth-like planet finder", which will search for planets similar to the Earth, and examine them for detection. signs of life. In 2008, samples of Martian rock are expected to be delivered from the Red Planet, which will be sent for research to various laboratories. Flights of space probes to the region of Jupiter's moon Europa are planned for the next few years.

Along with the search for primitive alien organisms, scientists are looking for opportunities to get in touch with highly developed intelligent civilizations. Radio signals are emitted into space, which, moving at the speed of light, have already reached 1,500 stars within a radius of fifty light years. The world-famous SETI (Search for Alien Intelligence) project monitors signals coming from outer space in the hope of picking up an artificial message. Forty years of experiments have not yet brought the long-awaited result, but optimists are sure that receiving a signal from our distant brothers in mind is only a matter of time.

Recently, the idea of ​​the possible existence of intelligent life in remote stellar systems, and significantly ahead of the development of terrestrial civilization. It is possible that such a large gap in the level of understanding of the world and knowledge of the laws of nature is the reason for the “radio silence” of our distant “brothers in mind”.

Of course, it is impossible to directly observe the activity of extraterrestrial civilizations because of their great remoteness. However, the consequences of such activity can probably be seen by terrestrial astronomical instruments. At least, the Lithuanian astronomer V. Straizhys adheres to this point of view.

He drew attention to some stars, called "blue stranglers", which are found in different types of stellar communities (hence their name "straglers", which means "wanderers"). These stars, unlike “normal” stars, do not spend their substance on radiation, as if someone is constantly replenishing their “fuel” to maintain acceptable temperature conditions on nearby planets.

Such an operation would be quite within the power of the super-civilization adjacent to this star. In some ordinary stars, there are chemical elements in concentrations thousands of times higher than those in ordinary stars. Moreover, they are located in “spots”, reminiscent of industrial waste dumps. And, finally, special attention of researchers is attracted by stars with a tangible amount of radioactive elements with a half-life of hundreds of thousands of years. How did they get there if the stars are billions of years old? It is quite possible that these are products of the nuclear industry.

Progress in the creation of new means of astronomical research on our planet, including the construction of space observatories, inspires hope that sooner or later clear evidence of the existence of another mind in the Universe will be found.

In contact with

Did you know that there is a planet in our solar system that likely has more liquid water than our home Earth? But this is the main criterion by which scientists have been looking for life on other planets for many years, since on Earth, wherever there is water, there is life. The very name of this planet is very familiar to us, because this is the same Phoenician princess and Zeus's beloved Europe, in whose honor the continent on which most of our readers live is named. And this is the name of one of the 4 largest satellites of Jupiter, which have long been studied by scientists, since they are quite comparable in size to individual planets. Jupiter's moon Europa is the smallest of them and is almost the same diameter as our moon. However, inside Europe, most likely, hides such a huge number of secrets that, after their discovery, threaten to turn over all human ideas about the Universe.

Is life possible on Europa?

For the first time, Galileo Galilei saw Europe in his telescope in 1610. However, this planet attracted real attention to itself only at the end of the 20th century, when the Galileo spacecraft went to Jupiter. In 1997, he approached this satellite within 200 km, took a series of photographs, and also carried out all the necessary measurements. Since the satellite has a smooth and white surface, scientists have long hypothesized that it is formed from ice, but it was not possible to know for sure before Galileo's flight. The pictures taken by this device were able to confirm this hypothesis, and thanks to them it turned out that the ice on the surface of Europa is relatively young, and there are practically no craters on its surface. This means that under the ice there is a liquid that regularly comes to the surface and fills the cut craters and bumps.

One of the main discoveries made during the flyby of Galileo near Europe was the discovery of cracks on its surface, which in appearance are practically no different from those that can be observed, for example, in the Arctic. These observations could only mean one thing: there are places on Jupiter's moon Europa where surface ice is relatively thin, and as a result of various forces it cracks, and water flows out from under it to the surface. Thus, traces of the vital activity of organisms, if any, on Europa can be found not only if you drill deep under the ice, but even not far from the surface. The growth of such cracks leads to the formation of entire ridges on Europa, towering several hundred meters.

During Galileo's flight around Europa, a magnetic field was also detected, which indicates the presence of a salty ocean inside the planet. According to some estimates, its thickness can reach 100 km, which makes Europe's water reserves truly colossal. This interested scientists so much that today several missions to Europe are being developed in the world at once, the purpose of which is to detect signs of life on it, and perhaps the first aliens in the history of human civilization. Of these, one of the most promising is the Jupiter Icy Moon Explorer mission, the project of which is currently being developed with the participation of NASA, ESA and Roscosmos. With favorable circumstances, JUICE will reach Europe in 2030, after which it will have to take a series of photographs, as well as conduct a detailed survey of its surface from an altitude of less than 500 km.

The search for life on Ganymede

It is possible that another device developed by scientists in Russia will join the JUICE mission. More precisely, these are two whole devices with the common name "Laplace - P": one of them must explore the vicinity of the Jupiter system, and the second to land on one of its satellites. Only now we are talking not about Europe, but about the satellite Ganymede - the largest among the satellites of Jupiter with a diameter one and a half times larger than that of our Moon. According to many Russian researchers, this satellite is an even better candidate for the search for extraterrestrial life than Europa. It is located at a greater distance from Jupiter, which means it is less susceptible to the destructive effects of radiation emanating from the gas giant. The satellite Ganymede itself is a large icy body, which, due to the influence of gravity and subsurface forces, could well form a liquid ocean no smaller than on Europa. At the same time, there are many other geological sights on the surface of the satellite that scientists would like to study.

Let's hope that the search for life on other planets will not be stopped due to another lack of funding, since discovering the secrets of the Universe, in my humble opinion, is much more useful for humanity than spending money on tanks and aircraft carriers designed to destroy their own kind.

Economist, analyst. He studied at a special gymnasium, then at the Donetsk National
University of Economics and Trade with a degree in Finance. Graduated from magistracy and
graduate school, after which he worked for several years as a researcher in one of the
institutes of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. At the same time, I received a second
higher education in the specialty "Philosophy and Religious Studies". Prepared for
PhD thesis in economics. I write scientific and journalistic articles with
2010. I am fond of economics, politics, science, religion and many others.