The closest world to discover

Of the entire known universe we only know of one place where life has emerged and prospered, that place is the earth and although we may not yet have all the ingredients that participated in the creation of life, we know that there is one that is essential , Water.

Other forms of life not based on water may exist in the universe, perhaps, but as I said terrestrial life is the only one we know of and we know that our planet where there is water there is life, therefore, if we look for water outside the earth perhaps Let's also find living beings, if it worked here because it can't work in other places with water.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was thought that we would find seas and rivers on Venus and Mars, in fact Venus was represented in science fiction with a hot and humid climate with jungles and even with dinosaurs, Mars was home to canals, rivers and civilizations mysterious but space exploration has revealed to us that in these worlds there is no liquid water on its surface, Venus is a toxic hell and Mars is a cold and dusty desert, but we have found oceans of water in places where it was not thought possible in the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Before space exploration it was thought that these natural satellites were icy worlds full of craters and without any interesting activity, however, the ships sent to investigate discovered that under the icy surface there are global oceans and in some cases with more water than all the what is on our planet.

The large moons of Jupiter, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto are worlds with subsurface oceans, although with very different characteristics. Europa would be the moon with the thinnest icy crust, with an approximate thickness of between 10 and 30 kilometers and a liquid ocean with a depth of about 90 kilometers, while Callisto would have the thickest crust between 100 and 150 kilometers thick.

But the most interesting moon, due to the most accessible with our current technology, is Saturn's moon Enceladus, it is small, it is just over 500 kilometers in diameter, the important thing is that its crust is the thinnest of the known icy moons, it is believed that the ice thickness is only about 10 km, it may be even less in some areas, under the ice there would be an ocean about 30 km deep with high salinity and an alkaline pH of around 10 or 11.

These latest data are known because in Enceladus there are numerous cracks through which the exterior is sometimes expelled, the water from the interior comes out in the form of jets of steam that, when in contact with the cold of space, transform into snowflakes, so missions towards Those worlds must be prepared to face totally icy environments, perhaps very similar to ours here on earth.

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)

! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!