May be a while before we see another Rant of the Week. In the meantime, enjoy this page full of sentimental romantic imagery. Nothing says “tenderness” and “love” like autoerotic strangulation and a face full of seminal fluid. There were several different approaches I had for this scene and these few pages, but in the end I decided to crank up the “weird” dial even more than usual. I'm not entirely sure why, but it seemed to fit with these two and the dynamics of their relationship.
Ask an exobiology enthusiast about places in the solar system where life may exist, and somewhere in their top three they will mention Saturn's diminutive ice moon Enceladus. For decades, it has been considered among the top destinations in our ongoing search for life in the cosmos. It's not hard to see why: With its familiar looking snowy white landscape slashed with deep blue ravines, it could almost be a picture out of an travel brochure to the arctic or Antarctic. It looks like a place you could go skiing, or ice fishing. Deep beneath its thick icy crust, there is almost certainly an expansive salty ocean, complete with thermal vents similar to those on Earth's ocean floors. And like Earth's deep sea trenches, it has long been suggested that these may be host to some form of life, and may even be the center of a vast benthic extraterrestrial food chain.
There's a very big problem with this theory though. A recent study of the dynamics of Saturn's moons and ring system suggests that Enceladus, along with all of Saturn's inner moons and rings, is probably somewhere in the range of only 100 million years old. This is based on the rate at which Saturn's inner satellites have been migrating outward at a steady rate. Computer modeling of Saturn's satellite dynamics suggests that Saturn's rings and inner moons were created by a collision within an earlier inner moon system sometime during the Cretaceous period. If true then this would mean everyone's favorite alien ocean world is younger than the dinosaurs.
This is bad news for the Life on Enceladus crowd, because 100 million years is not a lot of time to evolve life, and almost certainly not long enough for any complex life. Despite this, scientific interest in this otherwise not super remarkable moon has not waned. Russian billionaire Yuri Milner is still planning a privately funded Enceladus mission, and NASA has proposed an Enceladus Life Signatures and Habitability mission for the future.
The potential for life is a major driving force in generating interest (and thereby funding) for space exploration, so the belief in Enceladus as an alien spawning pool will die hard. The probable age of Enceladus receives one measly sentence on the moon's Wikipedia page – which also throws in that the crater evidence, depending on how you interpret it, still could suggest an age in the billions. A pop-sci article from late last year leads with the headline “Ocean on Enceladus May be Billions of Years Old,” and references a recently published study that “suggests the moon's hidden sea of water may be billions of years old – perhaps even as old as Earth's own oceans.” The study does not suggest that at all. The study says that the thermal activity within Enceladus can remain stable for billions of years. It does not in any way, shape, or form attempt to date the moon's formation. The verbal sleight of hand there is so blatant that it can only be intentional.
There's no need to despair, though. Jupiter's much larger moon Europa may be a much better candidate for harboring life in its subsurface ocean, and ditto for Callisto and Ganymede. But Jupiter is nowhere near as picturesque a backdrop as Saturn. It's a scary radiation bathed hellhole with an all-devouring gravity well, so I guess it's a harder sell?
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