Wednesday, April 23, 2014

What Interests Me?

Today I am breaking from the trend of posting about prompts, and instead I am posting on my own accord about something I find interesting. What do I find most interesting? Basically anything and everything scientific! But that's a little bit too broad, so lets narrow the focus a little bit. This is a bit of old news, but take a quick glance at this article I stumbled upon a while back about water plumes on Europa. If you don't feel like reading in too deep, here's some of the key points from that article. Europa is one of Jupiter's many moons. Its shooting out plumes of water into space. This must mean there is liquid water under the surface of its icy shell. Oceans of water could mean life? Lets Go!

Probably the most interesting question ever (to me at least) is the question of life in our universe. To me, the answer is that there is undoubtedly other life, and I think many people share that viewpoint, but many do not. Some see our earth as one special rock out in space that just got lucky, but many people don't think of it the way I do. The universe has hundreds of Billions of galaxies with hundreds of trillions of stars. There are even more planets than stars, and moons outnumber the planets. There are 170 moons in our solar system alone and only 8 planets. Outer space is divided into many intricate levels of gravity bound systems, with moons being the smallest, and most plentiful (Yeah! You knew there were lots of stars, but I bet you never even thought about how many moons! Let that sink in...). If we find life on one moon, that opens up the possibility that there are life on all the other moons in the universe. If it is possible, it has surely happened, and happened everywhere. Our universe could be literally crawling with life, like an infection that takes hold anywhere it can. Just thinking about this makes me excited, and the fact that a mission to Europa is being planned by NASA currently is the icing on the cake.

Please feel free to share your thoughts on the issue, do you share my excitement?  What kind of impact on the world could a discovery like this have? Or do you think Europa is a false hope. Maybe we are alone?
Anyway, I hope you enjoyed.


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