Anyone know, thanks. I kinda dreamed at times of moving to my own planet but no offense to Earth and its inhabitants though, haha, that's alright, yes?
shareNo. Kowalski's home planet is a piece of crap, but it's possible to live there.
shareWe may find out in 2030.
Many scientists believe that Europa (one of Jupiter's moons) may have an ocean under its icy crust which could possibly support life. A probe called the Europa Clipper was launched on October 14, 2024.
The goals of Europa Clipper are to explore Europa, investigate its habitability and aid in the selection of a landing site for the proposed Europa Lander. This exploration is focused on understanding the three main requirements for life: liquid water, chemistry, and energy. Specifically, the objectives are to study:
• Ice shell and ocean: Confirm the existence and characterize the nature of water within or beneath the ice, and study processes of surface-ice-ocean exchange.
• Composition: Distribution and chemistry of key compounds and the links to ocean composition.
• Geology: Characteristics and formation of surface features, including sites of recent or current activity.
The spacecraft carries scientific instruments which will be used to analyze the potential presence of geothermal activity and the Moon's induced magnetic field; which in turn will provide an indication to the presence of saline rich subsurface ocean(s).
(from Wikipedia; see the full article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Europa_Clipper)
Save the holiday season.
What SaveTheSeason said.
shareAt the moment, yes. Earth is the only inhabitable planet in our solar system. But that could change in the next few centuries.
According to what we have learned in the past 60 years, it seems the Moon and Mars are our best bets for space colonization.
Despite the possibility of maybe inhabiting some of Jupiter's larger moons, the trouble with the Jupiter system is the fact that the planet gives off a lot of radiation. In fact, there's a reason the probes we've sent don't last very long. Even with proper shielding, eventually the electronics get screwed up by the radiation spewing off of the gas giant. Europa has been considered a possibility because of the hidden ocean beneath its ice. Real scientists viewing from a hard-sci-fi author's perspective would think it would be a great idea in a century or two to drill through the ice and maybe build an underwater colony on that world, because the thick shield of ice might provide some protection from the radiation of Jupiter. Plus, there's been speculation that Europa is geologically active enough that the perceived ocean under the ice might have life down there, similar to our deep ocean vents gardens.
Honestly, I think we'd have better luck with Saturn's moons instead. At least that planet doesn't give off such dangerous amounts of radiation as Jupiter does, and a few of them are large enough to have a reasonable amount of gravity.
Some sci-fi authors think we'd have a chance at colonizing some of the larger asteroids in the asteroid belt, though that would be a bit chancy, considering they're less stable than an actual planet would be. However, it would be a good place to mine precious metals for industrial use on earth.
There has been talk of colonizing Venus in the next century or two as well, but we'd have to give up the idea of building anything on the surface. It would be safer if we had floating cities that could hover above Venus's cloud deck, where there is both sunlight and no sulfuric acid. That, of course, has its own dangers, but it's a fascinating concept.
Aside of candidate planets like some moons in our solar system where scientists believe there may be liquid water underneath the surface, it's been known for decades that there are microbes that could survive millions of years in space on asteroids, there are even some theories that say life might not have originated on earth but might have been brought to earth during an asteroid impact.
Afaik, so far there is no evidence for that, all of the asteroids scientists have found on earth or captured during some space missions and examined were either found without any life on them or it turned out they had been contaminated with life from earth.
Other theories say such microbes from earth could have been transported from earth to other planets and we do not know yet whether they might have found an environment on any other planet where they could have gotten an evolution started that would lead to multicellular life adapted to that environment and if so then what that life would look like.
Even if we would find life on other planets, that doesn't automatically mean aliens, it could also mean some asteroid may have transported microbes from earth to that planet.
Science simply doesn't know enough about what different forms of life could look like and under what conditions it could exist, therefore they cannot tell where in our solar system such life could exist. Even the idea that life requires liquid water to exist isn't for sure.
Not sure if it can be applied to just our solar system, not even sure who said it first, there are several quotes going around, by Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and others, all saying more or less the same, something like "If there's no life elsewhere in the universe, it would be an awful waste of space."
But it will most likely look so different from any form of life we know from earth, that we might not even recognize it as life.