Future: Frozen Fish Orbiting Jupiter

Flash · 318052. Wed Apr 16, 2008 6:03 pm

Which are you more likely to find orbiting Jupiter: a chocolate teapot or tons and tons of frozen fish fingers?

Jupiter’s moon Europa is covered with water, so is regarded as the best place to look for extra-terrestrial life in our solar system. A direct search into the oceans below the frozen surface would be unimaginably expensive, but every impact that takes place on Europa splashes water into space – and with it maybe some creatures, which would instantly freeze-dry and then settle into orbit, so Freeman Dyson has suggested that the most accessible evidence for life may indeed be fragments of frozen fish orbiting Jupiter.

Dyson is a distinguished American (though English-born) physicist, polymath and futurologist, amongst other things the inventor of a mathematical model called the Dyson Series and the man who worked out why two bits of wood left on top of each other don’t coalesce into one bit of wood (it’s the Exclusion Principle which underlies the Normal Force – don’t ask). Many of his predictions seem quite far-fetched, but he holds that “it is better to be wrong than to be vague”. They include:

• The Dyson Sphere: technologically advanced societies can be expected to eventually completely surround their host star so as to capture all of its energy. Such systems would need to radiate waste energy out into space as infrared radiation, so one way of searching for intelligent life would be to look for large objects radiating in the infrared range.

• The Dyson Tree: a plant genetically engineered to live on, or rather in, a comet. He thinks comets could be inhabitable if hollowed out and filled with air, with sunlight channelled in through portholes, and with oxygen provided by these trees through photosynthesis.

James Dyson is no relation as far as we know, but he did invent the dual cyclone bagless vacuum cleaner as well as the ballbarrow (a wheelbarrow with a ball instead of a wheel) and managed to build a working model of the famous Escher illusion in which water apparently flows downhill around a continuous circuit (by using pumped bubbles to create the illusion that water is running the opposite way to its actual flow).

And this is for a supplementary notecard:

Chocolate Teapots
The chocolate teapot provides the proverbial gold standard of total unfitness for purpose (“about as much use as a …”), but it does have one useful function, as an argument against the necessity of agnosticism. The orbiting (china) teapot image was originally invoked by Bertrand Russell in 1952: “If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion …. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.”

WB · 321381. Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:01 pm

The Cambridge-educated Physicist Freeman Dyson would have us look for “freeze-dried fish in the ring of space debris orbiting Jupiter”.
His argument is essentially economic but relies on several other recent observations. On seeing fragments of Mars rock which had fallen to Earth as meteorites, Dyson realised that examining space debris for signs of life might be a lot cheaper than going to its place of origin. (At Dyson’s prompting, the rocks were later examined and some interesting molecules were found – but not ‘Life’). The recent Galileo spacecraft showed us that Jupiter’s moon Europa is a world covered by ice, but is internally heated by tidal effects from Jupiter. There may well be a lot of liquid water beneath the surface of Europa and this would make it a prime location for the existence of life in our solar system. Sending a probe to Europa armed with enough equipment to bore through the ice surface of unknown thickness and then probe the depths for life would be extraordinarily expensive. However we know that Europa has and continues to be hit by asteroids and the like. Every time such an impact occurs a vast quantity of water is thrown up into space around Jupiter and some condenses into ice. Any creature living in this water far enough from the point of impact has a chance of being splashed up intact into space and immediately freeze-dried. Sending a spacecraft up to survey Jupiter’s ring would be economically viable (we’ve already sent Galileo) and hence his answer.

In another context Dyson proposed a small spacecraft built at the intersection of AI, biology and microelectronics for use in space exploration. At a lecture one of his students christened it the Astrochicken and the name has stuck.

dr.bob · 321789. Tue Apr 22, 2008 5:44 am

WB · 322994. Wed Apr 23, 2008 11:16 am

Frederick The Monk · 323060. Wed Apr 23, 2008 12:13 pm

Flash · 323405. Wed Apr 23, 2008 5:47 pm

True, so then Stephen says: "Brilliant! You're right, and must have some points. To earn the bonus, though - could you just explain that to the folks at home?"

Then later he says "So, what about the chocolate teapot?", giving us two questions for the price of one.

So I think it would be OK, but I'm always up for a better question if anybody has one. I'll steal a good idea from anywhere.

dr.bob · 323507. Thu Apr 24, 2008 3:52 am

dr.bob · 323513. Thu Apr 24, 2008 3:56 am