This headline – NASA discovers possible signs of alien life on Saturn’s moon – must have made everybody excited!
Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun. It only has gas with an average radius of about nine and a half times that of Earth. Saturn is having the highest number of moons in the solar system – 145 total! If you were to describe your beloved’s face looks like moon, you will be trouble!
A spacecraft named Cassini has found methane in one of the Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. It also found a relatively high concentration of dihydrogen and carbon dioxide molecules – which cannot be explained by any known geochemical processes. Enceladus is the sixth-largest moon of Saturn and is about 500 kilometres in diameter. The meaning of this world is rooted in a Greek Myth. Enceladus is a giant who was punished for his rebellion against the gods by a fatal blow from a stone cast by Athena.
Methane, high concentration of dihydrogen and carbon dioxide molecules may suggest signs of extraterrestrial life (not in the sense of Stephen Spielberg’s ET) in the Saturn’s moon, Enceladus. This is further suggesting the existence of Earth-like microbes that ‘eat’ the dihydrogen and produce methane. This moon has a subsurface ocean that is covered by a layer of ice, which provides a warm climate for life to grow.
This means the data given by Cassini is consistent either with microbial hydrothermal vent activity, or with processes that do not involve life forms and are different from the ones occurring on Earth. In one word, either there if life or there in not. This finding doesn’t confirm that life exists on Enceladus.
The idea that the God is sitting in the heaven, supervising us all gives us phenomenal mental satisfaction. In a movie, the hero bashing up 15 bad men together gives us huge mental satisfaction. Similarly, the headline – NASA discovers possible signs of alien life on Saturn’s moon – gives similar satisfaction considering the huge strides man has taken in understanding nature! All are but Fiction!
Consider this: the distance between the Earth and Saturn is about 793 million miles. And a spacecraft leaving the surface of Earth has a speed of about 25,000 miles per hour. In other words, to reach Saturn it takes about 5 years! What else is all this crap, but a mentally satisfying expensive game like that of the Movies and the God!
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional.
What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
