Life in our solar system?
As a Microsoft developer, most of my time is spent thinking about and writing code. However, because of my unique position as a developer on a team of Windows technical evangelists I often get to think about bigger picture things and play with prototype platforms that try to define our vision of the future programmatically. I provide feedback directly to the respective product teams and really enjoy the role I am able to play for Microsoft platform development strategy. Now, this all has nothing to do with the title of this post, but since this is my first post I thought I would preface it with a brief explanation of who I am and what I do. Much of what I come into contact with is confidential, however, and so I can't share many of the details about what exactly I do at Microsoft. But I can, and will, discuss the bigger picture of our vision of the future as it pertains to developers and the technologies we will create to make the lives of developers even more interesting and productive than they are today. Most importantly, I want to get feedback from you. What can we do better? Does C# expose enough of the CLR? What are we doing in terms of code analysis and verification tools? What advancements are we making in compiler technologies? You get the idea... Now, on to the topic at hand which is near and dear to me as I was a student of planetary science (and math) with an emphasis on the advent and evolution of the geobiological property of rocky planets.
We know of only one planet in our solar system with surface dwelling life forms or, more technically, an active and homeostatic geobiologic surface property. It's a rocky world that's quite active geologically. Its atmosphere is rather dynamic in great part due to the biological activities (respiration, metabolism, pollution, etc...) of the macrobes and microbes that it harbors. But there are some other very interesting worlds out there in our home system.
Much attention has been focused recently on one of Earth's sister planets, Mars (the other sibling rocky planet being Venus). There is no denying that getting remote-controlled mechanical rovers to Mars from Earth successfully is an amazing technological accomplishment. It's mind bending. Still, the really interesting planetary bodies in our solar system, from a geobiologic point of view, are a couple of the moons that orbit the giant gas planets Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter's Europa, an icy world that may contain a salt water ocean beneath its wildly scarred surface. And Saturn's Titan, the only planetary body in our solar system besides Earth with an atmosphere composed primarily of nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is so thick in fact that we really have no idea what's on the surface! NASA's Cassini mission will help to illuminate what's happening on Titan as it will deliver a probe to Titan sometime in 2005. I can't wait for the details. My hunch is that the probe will return much more exciting information to Earth than the Mars probes. After all, Mars is a dead planet that may have once possessed a geobiologically active surface when it was “alive” (I think it probably did based on the theoretical evolutionary path taken by geologically active terrestrial planets that orbit G-Class yellow stars at a distance that allows for liquid water on the surface. Proof will be in the pudding which will be really really really hard to find on Mars) Stay tuned.
Keep up to speed on the Cassini mission and the Titan visit here:
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm
A very interesting discovery in November 2003 was that gravitational waves exist in Titan's atmosphere as they do in Earth's atmosphere leading to atmospheric perturbations (the Titan atmosphere does not appear to be static (like Venus and Mars, for example). This alone is incredibly interesting from a geobiological perspective.). What systems on Titan's surface are interacting with the Titan atmosphere to cause these observable fluctuations? Bring on the data!
