I get all that, and the fact that they were concerned about the possibility of contaminating one of the moons, especially the ones like Titan and Enceladus, which could harbor life. But was the Huygens probe sterile? And when Cassini repeatedly flew through the jets of vapor coming off Enceladus, why would that vapor not pick up some Cassini “germs,” and then fall back to the moon?
Maybe future robotic missions should be more thoroughly sterilized before they’re launched. A little bleach should do the trick.
I thought I was posting an upbeat consideration of how we’ve learned to better take into consideration our impacts of space exploration. Lesson learned: TPM attack dogs will swarm all over you for anything they can.
Oh, c’mon. You should know me better than that by now. I was just struck by the fact that no mention was made of the Huygens probe, in particular. After all, it parachuted in, and made a reasonably soft landing. And it probably breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t land in a methane lake, which sounds like no fun at all.
I recall some discussion about the Viking landers. Their search for life on Mars was restricted to looking for liquid water and for certain organic compounds, because we assume those are necessary for life. But of course that risks missing life forms with an entirely different chemical basis. The landers were equipped with cameras, however. Carl Sagan said that he was glad about that. “If a silicon-based giraffe had walked by the Viking Mars landers, its portrait would have been taken.”
You think I should have made some comment about the Huygens probe in an article about the end of the Cassini mission? Why would you think that?
I made one small comment that there was an interesting and noteworthy consideration about the mission’s end that TPM had left out. Something nice and upbeat. And I get a massive amount of flak for that. What is it I’m supposed to know? I mean seriously, this is ridiculous.
If you’re saying you were snarking me, please accept my apologies. I’m just blown away that such a benign little comment was the subject of so much back and forth.
I thought I was just adding another tidbit worth considering. I had no idea it was an amphibious assault in force.
Just had a related thought. The whole question of both avoiding contamination, and of detecting alien life, could be way more complicated than any of us imagines. Think about something along the lines of the Andromeda Strain. We could be coexisting with some forms of life of which we’re completely unaware, and blithely spreading them all over the place. I’m not saying we should stay home, but maybe we should do some hyperventilating before we take off, or drink a lot of Sterno.
Pretty sure NASA hasn’t overlooked something that was the subject of a blockbuster movie…
If you want more interesting ideas than that about “what is life”, I recommend Arthur C. Clarke’s short stories and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy in which the possibility that a planet’s geology could itself be considered a form of life is suggested.
