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by PaulHoule
1203 days ago
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Could be either tidal or geothermal. It’s been conjectured that even Pluto could have liquid water inside. The point is that generic small outer solar system bodies have liquid water, whereas the generic inner solar system body doesn’t. If you think liquid water is the most important requirement for life then most of the habitat in the universe is outside the frost line. It’s totally plausible that simple life could form around geothermal vents on such a moon but harder to believe you could support a complex ecosystem enough to evolve intelligent life without sunlight. At the high pressures in such an underground ocean I wouldn’t expect our proteins to work, you can kill bacteria with very high pressure. I suspect that proteins that evolved in that environment could work just fine. I can picture a creature from that kind of world drilling up to the surface somehow, but the low pressure would be deadly and in a system like Jupiter where Io ‘breeds’ radiation (vapor from volcanos gets ionized, gets accelerated, ionizes more vapor) the surface could be a dangerous place. Such a creature though might have a leg up on starfaring as getting into orbit might be easier (never mind building a beanstalk) and rather than being tempted by boring destinations like Mars (smaller planet, smaller civilization) they might go straight to cutting up wet/carbonaceous asteroids to build large (100-1000x more habitable area than Earth) habitats and if they developed D-D fusion they might be quicker to see the advantages of a comet-hopping lifestyle. |
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