Icy Moons, 1: There’s phosphorus on Enceladus!
From alchemists to ice volcanos: an attempt to understand, and explain, the liquid water oceans sloshing about deep inside the icy moons of Saturn, & Jupiter, &, well, everywhere we look...
(OK, this is a long one, to enjoy at your leisure…)
The first in a series of three posts exploring how, and why, cosmological natural selection (evolution at the level of universes) could eventually lead to there being so many icy moons with liquid water oceans in our own specific universe. More interesting than it sounds…
INTRO: HOW TO ACHIEVE SCIENTIFIC IMMORTALITY BY BOILING YOUR OWN PISS
In 1669, under conditions of great secrecy, a German alchemist called Hennig Brand (also known as Dr. Teutonicus – what a great supervillain name!), collected 5000 liters of piss (his own, and that of his neighbours) left it to age until it stank, then boiled it for several days, before processing the resulting bright yellow paste, hoping to create gold.
Instead, he became the first person on earth to isolate pure phosphorus – an element so reactive, it did not exist (and never had existed) as a free element anywhere else on the planet. In doing so, he became the first named individual to discover a new element at a specific time in history. (No one now knows who discovered gold, for instance, or silver, or mercury.)
End of intro…
OK, this post did not strictly need that historical intro, but your life would be the poorer if you didn’t know phosphorus’s glamorous origin story. Plus, it’s a nice reminder that, although the self-image of science involves making breakthroughs by the cool and objective application of reductionist materialist logic to carefully formulated problems, the actual history of scientific breakthroughs involves alchemists boiling vast quantities of their own piss in the search for the elixir of life. So, the next time a scientist of your acquaintance objects to the clichéd Hollywood depiction of the mad scientist in his laboratory (a German accent! Lots of steam rising from glass containers! A deeply peculiar smell!), simply point, with a sorrowful sigh, to Hennig Brand.
BACK TO ENCELADUS
Back to Enceladus. I can understand if you are underwhelmed by the recent news that there’s lots of phosphorus on Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, sloshing around in its hidden liquid-water ocean, deep beneath its bright, icy surface. You pee up to half a gram of phosphorus every morning – the ocean under your icy surface is awash with phosphorus, so what’s the big deal about finding the chemical element known as P on some random moon?
Well, the discovery of phosphorus on Enceladus is a big deal because it is so infernally reactive (as I just mentioned – see, that historical intro was useful). Its reactivity meant that, until recently, it was assumed all the phosphorus on Enceladus was locked up in rocks – not dissolved in the water, and thus available to life. So, finding lots of phosphorus in that hidden ocean is HUGE news. It means a universe jammed with life now looks far more likely. And it’s strong evidence for an evolved universe – for a universe fine-tuned by evolution at the level of universes to generate the conditions for life. But you need a bit of background to understand why.
So let me answer some obvious questions…
1.) What exactly is so interesting about Enceladus?
2.) Why is finding phosphorus there such a big deal?
3.) Indeed, how the heck did we find out Enceladus has so much of it, seeing as nothing has ever landed on its surface, and its ocean is hidden beneath miles of ice?
4.) And how does this change the odds for finding life throughout the universe?
Let’s start at the beginning.
ENCELADUS IS A MOON OF SATURN… WHAT, START FURTHER BACK? OK…
I’m going to take a moment to locate ourselves, relative to Enceladus. That is partly because distance from the Sun is an important part of this story (and of the story of icy moons generally, which we’ll be exploring over these three posts). But it is also because I have slowly come to realise that most people’s mental map of the universe is built from three half-remembered science documentaries, two conversations with a knowledgable friend held while lying on your backs looking up at the Milky Way at 3am incredibly stoned, and Star Wars; it can, therefore, lack a certain accuracy.
Take for example, the UK’s current Minister for Space:
The Conservative space minister has apparently confused Mars with the Sun.
Andrew Griffith, who has been in charge of the space sector since November, also mistook Jupiter for Saturn.
On a walk around the Science Museum in London, Mr Griffith pointed to an exhibit showing the surfaces of different planets, the House magazine reported. “Now we have got Mars,” he said, before being told by a member of museum staff that it was actually the Sun.
He went on to say “that one is Saturn”, after the display changed, before the employee said “no, no, that is Jupiter”, according to the magazine.
Insisting he is learning on the job as space minister, he said: “I’m not an encyclopaedia.”
–From The Independent, January 15th 2024, “Tory space minister mixes up Mars and the Sun”
If that’s the current state of knowledge of the Minister for Space, then I may need to revise my internal mental model of What Everybody Probably Already Knows.
I am, therefore, going to go back to basics here.
BASICS
So, that big, bright, yellow thing in the sky is a star that we call the Sun, right? (Don’t touch it, it’s hot.) Really fucking massive. (Weighs more than 300,000 Earths). Because it’s so massive, with a huge gravitational pull, any small things nearby orbit it. (OK, more accurately, the Sun doesn’t “pull” anything; it bends the surrounding spacetime, so the planets fall in a curve around it – but let’s not go there today.)
Thus the Earth is one of eight known planets orbiting the Sun, in this order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars (all pretty small and rocky), then Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune (much larger and gassier and waaaay further out, with immense amounts of hydrogen and helium surrounding their small rocky cores).
This planetary layout, by the way, may be due to the sun boiling off the hydrogen and helium layers from the inner planets shortly after they formed, while those light, gassy layers remained intact on planets further out, where it is much, much colder. (Lately our telescopes have grown good enough to spot some of the planets orbiting nearby stars – yeah, exoplanets – and so we now know that young stars with young planets can have big, hot, Jupiter-like gassy planets orbiting really close to their star – but that might be just because there hasn’t been time for their hydrogen and helium to boil off yet. If we came back in a few billion years we might just see their rocky core – a former hot Jupiter would look much like Earth, or Venus.) Anyway, all the gas giants in our solar system orbit the Sun way the hell out – beyond the Frost Line, the point where volatile substances (like water, methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide) are far enough away from the sun that they can get cold enough to form longterm, stable solids. Including icy moons…
A TIMID READER WRITES: Er… did you forget Pluto?
No. Pluto – small, and more icy than rocky – used to be considered the ninth planet, but it got demoted in 2006, because it turns out it’s really small (only two-thirds the diameter of Earth's Moon) and light (just 1/6th the mass of our Moon), and also has a pretty eccentric orbit around the sun; sometimes it swings even closer to the sun than Neptune, sometimes it’s much further out. Which means it doesn’t make the cut for planets.
AN ASIDE ON PLANETS, GODDESSES, NAMES, AND CHAOS
That cut is kind of artificial, by the way: “planet” wasn’t officially defined until 2006. That was the year the International Astronomical Union realised, after the discovery of Eris (which is more massive than Pluto!) and several other almost-as-big rocks/planets/whatever-the-hecks, orbiting the Sun far beyond even Neptune, that they were going to end up with, potentially, dozens of really weird little planets (chaos!) if they didn’t come up with a tight definition. So they did it, basically, to stop Eris from becoming the tenth planet.
This was a harsh blow to followers of Discordianism – the belief system based around the original Eris. (Who was, of course – as I’m sure you know, Minister – the Greek goddess of chaos, strife, and discord.) Wikipedia despairingly attempts to define, describe, or somehow verbally corral Discordianism thus: “… variously defined as a religion, philosophy, paradigm, or parody religion.” All of these are true, and I know, because I am myself a Discordian. It is possible you are too, though you may not know it yet. There are, possibly, many others, but…
“It is difficult to estimate the number of Discordians because they are not required to hold Discordianism as their only belief system, and because there is an encouragement to form schisms and cabals.”
–Wikipedia, Discordianism
It also doesn’t help that all Discordians are automatically, on joining, made Popes. Just as a Catholic Pope can issue a dogma – which is infallible, and must be believed absolutely – Discordian Popes can issue catmas, which are extremely relative meta-beliefs. And, according to the Discordian Wiki, the central Discordian catma is:
“All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”
–Sri Syadasti
Discordians thus have considerable latitude in defining, and redefining, their religion, and indeed, reality. (I have also found this catma extremely useful in navigating scientific language during my research.)
You may think this aside is entirely unconnected to the sober business of NASA and ESA missions to the moons of Saturn, but you would be wrong. Discordianism has infiltrated NASA itself, as Wikipedia slyly hints:
The "five-fingered hand of Eris" (…) is one of several symbols used in Discordianism. It was adapted as an astronomical/astrological symbol for the dwarf planet Eris. Initially, the planetary symbol, designed by Discordian Denis Moskowitz, was rotated 90 degrees and had a cross-bar added so that it resembled two lunate epsilons (Є) back-to-back…
…with epsilon being the Greek initial of 'Eris'. The cross-bar was later dropped, but the vertical orientation retained. (The Discordian symbol has no set orientation, but is most commonly horizontal.) The symbol has seen use in public-outreach publications by NASA, though planetary symbols play only a minor role in modern astronomy.
–Wikipedia, Discordianism
But the connection goes deeper than even I realised when I began writing this post…
“On September 16, 2006, famed Discordian Louise Lacey, aka Lady L., F.A.B., sent the following letter to Michael E. Brown, the Caltech astronomer who named the dwarf planet “Eris,” thus ushering in the Aeon of Discord.”
–Historia Discordia
Sigh. That pesky Aeon of Discord. It could all have been so different, if the International Astronomical Union had just allowed Eris to be the tenth planet…
Anyway, subsequently, Professor Michael E. Brown of Caltech called his book about this turbulent era in planet-finding-and-abolishing-and-naming-and-renaming How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. A sly reference, perhaps, to the subheading of the Principia Discordia: How I Found Goddess And What I Did To Her When I Found Her.
An aside to the aside: If you guessed, from the subtitle, that the Principia Discordia was written in the 1960s, you would be correct. If you also guessed that the two young authors included, coincidentally, a close friend of the young Lee Harvey Oswald, and that the first Discordian writings were printed out at the very start of the 1960s using the mimeograph machine of, coincidentally, Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney who was later to investigate the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy by, coincidentally, Lee Harvey Oswald, you would also be correct. Chaos, once unleashed, is hard to contain... If you were to furthermore guess that this stack of coincidences led to extreme paranoia in at least one of the authors of the Principia Discordia, not helped by his later prosecution by Garrison, and that researching this whole area is a great way to waste an incredible amount of time while slowly but surely losing your fucking marbles, you would also be correct. But, if you are intrigued by this particularly weird chunk of spacetime, and are happy to risk losing some marbles, then let me point you to The Prankster and the Conspiracy: The Story of Kerry Thornley and How He Met Oswald and Inspired the Counterculture, by that upstanding historian of conspiracy theories, Adam Gorightly (with a forward by Robert Anton Wilson). Oh, and also Gorightly’s Historia Discordia: The Origins of the Discordian Society.
End of aside to the aside. Back to the original aside.
A TIMID READER WRITES: Wait! Excuse me… Does any of this have anything to do with astronomy, and icy moons?
ME: Yes, a lot, ultimately.
A TIMID READER WRITES: Um… could you tell us what the connection is?
ME: No. Not yet. Trust me.
A TIMID READER WRITES: But there is definitely a reason for all this, yes?
ME: Well… Perhaps, at this point, a quote from acclaimed American record producer and barefoot bearded Zen sage Rick Rubin might help settle your nerves.
“The artwork is the point where all the elements come together – the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh. And if these lead you into contradiction – into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknowable – that doesn’t mean they aren’t harmonious.
Even in perceived chaos there is order and pattern. A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.
The universe never explains why.”
–Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
A TIMID READER WRITES: Oh... When do we get back to the icy moons?
ME: Soon. Hang in there…
Professor Brown might not have had deep connections to Discordianism when he first named Eris, but he does now: He was admitted to the prestigious Order of the Pineapple on 18 January 2020. Only two people per year can be so honoured: the other person admitted to the Order that day was Robert Shea – co-author, along with Robert Anton Wilson, of the Illuminatus! trilogy, a satire of the 1960s in which all the conspiracy theories of the era are simultaneously true, and whose presiding goddess is of course Eris.
Previous winners include Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Alan Moore, Zeus, Steve Jackson, and Monty Python. (Has Discordianism – like astronomy, cosmology, and astrophysics – historically been dominated by A Certain Kind of Person? Sure. but feel free to adjust that in the glorious future. Eris Needs You.)
End of aside…
So anyway, Saturn is a big gas giant planet – the one with the spectacular rings – orbiting way the fuck out, beyond Mercury and Venus, beyond Earth, beyond Mars, beyond the Asteroid Belt (a big ring of rocks and dust, and roughly where the Frost Line begins), beyond Jupiter…. almost one and a half billion kilometres from the sun (so, nearly ten times further from the sun than we are here on Earth). And because Saturn is the most massive thing out there (it weighs more than 95 Earths), any small things nearby orbit it. And so Saturn has, at the last count, 146 moons. (I’m sure it will be more by the time I hit “Publish”; with telescopes and probes and analytical software all improving all the time, they keep finding new ones.)
FINALLY, ENCELADUS…
Enceladus is the sixth largest of these. (Named, by the way, after the Greek mythical giant Enceladus, whose mum was Gaia and whose dad was… well, Enceladus was born from the blood which gushed out after Uranus was castrated with a stone sickle by another son of Gaia-and-Uranus, Cronus, who then chucked his dad’s testicles into the sea, thus instituting a golden age in which "everyone did the right thing, and immorality was absent”. Yes, Greek myths would have hugely benefited from a stern-but-fair script editor who made the writers go back and do another draft.)
Enceladus is only five hundred kilometres in diameter; Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, by comparison, is over five thousand kilometres in diameter – even bigger than the planet Mercury, or Earth’s moon (which is just 3,474 km across). Or, for people who don’t like trying to visualise numbers; if Titan is a grapefruit, our Moon is a nice juicy apple… and Enceladus is a rather small grape. (Which would make Saturn, uh… there isn’t any fruit big enough… OK, Saturn is the transparent plastic ball that Wayne Coyne of Flaming Lips climbs into and uses to crowdsurf… These are all extremely rough relative approximations to aid visualisation, don’t get mad if they are out by 30%.)
Oh, and Enceladus is located right in the centre of the E-Ring, a rather dim but very broad ring of Saturn. Enceladus drives around that ring slap bang in the middle of the road, like a car full of stoned teenagers – probably recently-converted Flaming Lips fans, who stumbled on “Do You Realise??” last week, via TikTok – concentrating intently on circling a roundabout, without hitting the edges, at 3am.
Yeah, right in the middle. INTERESTING COINCIDENCE, HUH? More on that later…
ICE SEA THE MOON (AND THE MOON SEAS ME)
Because Saturn is nearly ten times further away from the sun than Earth is, being one of Saturn’s moons is a really fecking cold job. Sunlight drops off as the square of the distance (so – and I am addressing Andrew Griffith, the Minister for Space, here – move twice as far away, you get four times less light; three times further away, you get nine times less light; four times further away, you get sixteen times less light, and so on). So Saturn and her moons get almost 100 times less sunlight per square meter than we do on earth. (In figures: the top of the Earth’s atmosphere gets a maximum of 1,413 watts per square meter from the sun; Enceladus gets less than 17.) Cold!
That means the surface of Enceladus is ice: nice, old-fashioned, frozen water; H2O in a crystal lattice. And, before we sent probes there to check, scientists assumed it would be like that all the way down: A solid ball of ice, maybe with some rock at its core.
SLOWLY LEARNING ABOUT ENCELADUS, PROBE BY PROBE
Let us start this uplifting and educational section with an inspirational quotation about perseverance:
“When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up.”
–Monty Python and the Holy Grail; not to be mistaken for the The Holy Grail of Eris (the web serial novel written by Kujira Tokiwa, or its manga version by Hinase Momoyama)
OK. Inspired? Ready to persevere? Good. I’ll do this probe by probe, because that will give you a clearer idea of how solar system science progresses both relatively rapidly (the instrument technology and image resolution are far better on each probe), and relatively slowly (there can be a pause of decades between probes).
PIONEER 11
The first probe to visit sexy Saturn (and its encircling rings and many moons), was dear old Pioneer 11, launched in 1973, when high quality digital photography was still a distant dream. It sent back some grainy photos of Saturn, but it didn’t get any shots of Enceladus.
VOYAGER 1
The second probe was Voyager 1: launched three years after Pioneer 11, in 1977, it finally got close enough to take a photo of Enceladus on November 12, 1980 – but it was from 624,000 kilometers away, and showed no surface features.
VOYAGER 2
But the third probe to make it to Saturn, Voyager 2 (also launched in 1977) got close enough to Enceladus (87,000 kilometres) to notice something weird: although some of its surface was covered in overlapping craters, of all ages, from billions of years of impacts (just as Earth’s Moon is), much of the surface was smooth. The ice looked fresh. That didn’t make sense: Enceladus, like our Moon, didn’t have an atmosphere, because it was too small, with too little gravity, to hold onto one – so wind and rain couldn’t have smoothed the surface. And, again, the models they had at the time said that a moon that small would be frozen solid right to the core.
Remember, size really matters when cooling down – a thimble of warm water cools down far faster than a swimming pool of the same temperature would. Earth has cooled down a lot since all the planets and moons emerged from the original disc of gas and dust that formed them. Enceladus, being so small (and so far out from the sun), would have cooled down far faster. And so he shouldn’t still have a molten core, or volcanic activity, or any of that exciting stuff that could melt the surface, fill in old craters, and generally freshen everything up.
A HELPFUL CHILD INQUIRES: Wouldn’t radioactivity heat up and melt the core, as the uranium in the rocks breaks down? Like happens on Earth?
ME, SMILING A FORCED SMILE AT THE CHILD: Yes the core of Enceladus, like that of the Earth, would also be heated by the slow and steady decay of uranium isotopes, and other radioactive elements; but by now, several billions of years after the formation of the planets and moons, with most of the most radioactive material already having decayed into stable (or semi-stable) isotopes, the tiny solid core of a world like Enceladus shouldn’t be generating enough heat to melt oceans.
Which meant this hint of a molten core was mysterious. So we sent another probe. Eventually.
CASSINI-HUYGENS
The fourth Saturn probe, Cassini-Huygens, was launched in 1997 (twenty years after both Voyagers had launched). Incidentally, imagine how frustrating that twenty-year wait must have been for scientists studying Saturn… Anyway, Cassini-Huygens finally arrived in the Saturn system in 2004. (Yeah, a seven-year flight… the solar system is BIG, and Saturn is FAR FROM ITS STAR.) And Cassini got much, much closer, with far better cameras… and discovered that not only did Enceladus somehow still have a molten core after several billion years, but he was squirting huge plumes of water into space from what turned out to be many, many cryovolcanoes – cold volcanoes made of ice that, instead of spewing molten rock, spewed molten, er, water.
That water, of course, evaporated as soon as it left the high pressure of the volcano for the no-pressure-at-all of space – and then immediately froze into tiny crystals of ice dust. Thus the sparkly plumes.
How huge were these plumes? Well, it turned out that the entire E-ring is made from the sparking frozen crystals of ice spewed out of Enceladus’s ice volcanoes.
Well, that was cool, but let’s do another circuit, swing by again from the south, and check out the south pole…
So Enceladus wasn’t just randomly orbiting in the middle of the E ring: it had made the E-ring, and was continuously replenishing it. (This had been guessed by Haff, Eviatar, and Siscoe back in 1983, and Pang, Voge, Rhoads, and Ajello in 1984: nice one!)
WHY, YES, I HAPPEN TO HAVE A COSMIC DUST ANALYZER RIGHT HERE
Astronomers have always been fascinated by Saturn’s bright rings of mystery dust, and so when they were designing the Cassini probe for this mission, they had outfitted it with a Cosmic Dust Analyser – a golden bucket full of sensors, designed to catch grains of dust and analyse the hell out of them as they exploded inside the bucket. (Why would grains of dust explode inside the bucket? Because Cassini was a probe sent by rocket from earth, and thus ended up orbiting Saturn at a pretty rapid clip: Cassini was moving at over 20 kilometres per second relative to the rings as she passed through them – which meant those grains of dust were hitting the bucket over thirty times faster than an F-16 jet fighter at full thrust.)
So Cassini flew through the E-ring again and again (and even flew briefly through the plumes themselves as they emerged from the volcanoes) and picked up a lot of particles of dust – and a lot of data on those particles. And yep, the dust particles that make up the E-ring turned out to be mostly frozen ice crystals from the ice volcanos of Enceladus – many of them salty, and therefore almost certainly from the liquid water ocean, miles underneath his frozen surface.
It’s taken years to analyse this data. (That’s because they keep coming up with new and more sophisticated software, and applying it to the original raw data to extract more information from it – a lovely example of genuine, ongoing progress in science.) But a paper landed in Nature yesterday last week last month back in June in June of last year (yes, I have been working on this post for 7 months now, God damn it to hell and back. Life, and other posts, and the masterclass with David Sloan Wilson, and attending the N2 Conference at Berkeley, and looking after my son solo while my wife Solana travelled, and Christmas holidays with family, and getting sick several times, most recently with some weird virus that still has me singing baritone and coughing convulsively weeks later, all took precedence over finishing this.)
And the ice particles from deep inside Enceladus turned out to contain… (dramatic drum roll)… huge amounts of what you get when you boil an alchemist’s piss.
REMIND ME WHY THIS IS SO EXCITING
Sure. Bear in mind, you only need six core elements for organic life as we know it: Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, sulphur… and phosphorus. Yes, calcium is nice if you want to build, say, bones, but you don’t HAVE to build bones (bacteria don’t have bones, and they have been doing just fine for billions of years); yes, potassium is useful; yes, you can do a lot with sodium; etc etc… but those six are core. Nothing on Earth can live without those six.
But why, in particular, can life not exist without phosphorus? Well, partly because it forms the chemical zipper in every DNA molecule. But perhaps even more importantly, phosphorus is the P in ATP – adenosine triphosphate, chemical formula C10H16N5O13P3 – the molecule that stores, carries and releases energy for every plant and animal on earth, with no exceptions. (They briefly thought there was a bacterium in one lake in California that could use arsenic rather than phosphorus to do the same job, at the expense of a lot of damage to other parts of the organism… turned out not to be the case. It’s phosphorus everywhere.)
THE ELEMENTS OF LIFE: FIVE DOWN, ONE TO GO…
So let’s run through that short list: Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulphur tend to be both abundant, and, for various reasons, through various channels, chemically available in water. Carbon, for instance, as carbon dioxide, LOVES to dissolve in water; for evidence of how much carbon dioxide you can dissolve under mild pressure in a small amount of water, just crack open a Coke, Carlsburg, or Volvic.
Sure, nitrogen can be a bit tricky; N2 – two nitrogen atoms joined in a very strong triple bond – doesn’t want to dissolve in water; but NH3, or ammonia – a nitrogen atom and three hydrogens – dissolves very easily, and we have known since 2008 that Enceladus has ammonia in its liquid water oceans. (Ammonia in water also has another interesting property: it acts as antifreeze, allowing the water to stay liquid at much lower temperatures than it would otherwise. Another reason these oceans don’t freeze.)
So, for the past decade or so, phosphorus was considered the bottle-neck element for life on Enceladus (and, by extension, for life on icy moons generally), as all the other vital elements were known to be, or confidently assumed to be, dissolved in the water there. In 2018, the definitive paper on the subject, Is Extraterrestrial Life Suppressed on Subsurface Ocean Worlds due to the Paucity of Bioessential Elements?, by Lingam and Loeb (yes, that’s Abraham “Avi” Loeb, the Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, Director of Harvard’s Institute for Theory and Computation, and former chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy), stated firmly that there would be far less than is found on Earth.
But why? The problem is, most of the phosphorus on Earth is locked into rocks, with strong bonds that do not want to dissolve in water. It is only the existence of life on earth that has created the chemical conditions whereby phosphorus is more freely available. Life has set up a phosphorus cycle, with fungi and bacteria removing phosphorus from those pesky insoluble rocks, thus making it available to life.
If soluble forms of phosphorus tend to be MADE by life, then, in the absence of life, it was assumed there would be very little phosphorus available on Enceladus. Far less than on Earth.
But the new paper, having re-analysed the old Cassini data, shows that phosphorus is at least a hundred times more abundant in the liquid water ocean of Enceladus than in Earth’s own oceans.
One really obvious explanation for that might be: there is already life of some kind in the oceans of Enceladus, and that life has already set up a phosphorus cycle, keeping it available in water. Maybe there was indeed very little phosphorus in the water, a couple of billion years ago on a lifeless Enceladus. (And Lingam and Loeb would have been totally correct if they had published their paper in the year 2,000,000,000 BC.) But if life at some point began, in the warm, nutrient-rich waters around the hydrothermal vents which dot the Enceladus ocean floor, it could have slowly transformed the chemistry of Enceladus, just as life in our oceans transformed the chemistry of Earth.
However, that kind of wild leap is frowned upon severely in contemporary science – You Are Going Beyond the Data – so they have instead come up with a purely chemical explanation that doesn’t mention life at all.
They now think phosphorus on Enceladus is found in the form of orthophosphates, which dissolve easily in water. Where do the orthophosphates come from? Er, not totally sure. (On earth, orthophosphates can come from decaying plants, bacteria, etc – ie, life – but they can also come from weathered rock, and other purely chemical processes, so this keeps their options open.)
Anyway, it’s an incredibly clearcut result that demolishes the 2018 paper. They wrap up with a paragraph that, compared to most astrophysics papers, reads like a speech from Braveheart:
The stark contrast between earlier modelling and our results might be due to modelling assumptions that were based on scaling fluxes of the P cycle on the modern Earth to Enceladus15, not considering the fundamental differences between Earth and ocean-bearing moons. The most important differences are the much higher concentration of carbonate species in alkaline ocean water and the probable presence of unrecycled, equilibrated rocks at the seafloor of Enceladus34,38 versus continuous production of more reactive seafloor basalts on Earth. Regardless of these theoretical considerations, with the finding of phosphates the ocean of Enceladus is now known to satisfy what is generally considered to be the strictest requirement of habitability.
“The stark contrast between earlier modelling and our results…”
“…the ocean of Enceladus is now known to satisfy what is generally considered to be the strictest requirement of habitability…”
Take that, you bastards!
So life on Enceladus is possible. (And, but whisper this, may indeed be present.) That’s already a big deal!
But this breakthrough, though delightful, raises bigger questions.
Why does Enceladus – tiny, and 1.5 billion kilometres from the sun, remember – have energetic ice-volcanoes that squirt so much water into space they’ve made a ring around Saturn? Water we now know is full of life-supporting phosphorus? And why are so many icy moons turning out to have molten cores, and thus liquid water oceans – oceans which are being fed nutrients through hydro-thermal vents fed by those molten cores? In other words, why are suitable conditions for life turning up all over the solar system – waaaaay outside the traditional, Earth-adjacent, “Goldilocks zone”, where the mainstream for decades assumed liquid water was confined? (Even Pluto is now believed to have a liquid water ocean beneath its frozen surface.)
Well, that’s a great question, or bunch of questions. And as usual, there isn’t really a coherent answer, inside mainstream cosmology. Cosmology can’t really answer “why?” questions, because of its underlying unquestioned assumption that our universe is a one-shot, with random properties, and so everything that happens in it is essentially arbitrary and meaningless. But if you forced it to reply, cosmology’s explanation would be something like “a series of random and unlikely things that we did not predict seem to happen, again and again, that mysteriously lead to the conditions for life repeatedly occurring where we did not expect them to occur.”
Obviously, in the next two posts (or three, or four; this thing has grown absurdly long), I’m going to explore that series of “random" and "unlikely" things, and argue that it isn't random at all: the most parsimonious explanation is that it’s the result of an evolutionary process, at the level of universes, that optimises for conditions supportive to life, because life in turn makes for reproductively fit universes (through mechanisms I’ve explained elsewhere). The highly unlikely becomes extremely likely, in an evolved universe. And a theory that can give plausible explanations for otherwise highly unlikely things, plus a mechanism by which they could have come about, is a good theory…
But before I go, let me, more in sorrow than in anger, rub the mainstream’s nose in its own poop one more time. (For its own good – how else will it learn?) They didn’t just think there would be a bit less phosphorus than is available in Earth’s oceans, they thought there should be MASSIVELY less. The study by Lingam and Loeb was remarkably sure (for a scientific paper) that the availability of phosphorus would be the bottleneck for life; indeed, that there would be less than is found on earth “by a few orders of magnitude”. (And that was only in 2018! We already had the data proving this thesis to be totally wrong, we simply hadn’t yet unpacked it!) Instead there is MORE, by two orders of magnitude. So the mainstream was wrong, again, by at least five orders of magnitude. Just make a mental note of that, because how badly (and confidently) wrong Harvard astronomers get this shit is rapidly memory-holed once the new data comes in.
Oh, and this five-orders-of-magnitude error isn’t because Avi Loeb is a closed-minded guy! (I’m not going to pick on Lingam because he is way younger and less experienced.) Loeb is so open-minded his brain sometimes falls out! I really like the guy, while thinking he is wrong about almost everything; he’s the kind of completely bananas scientist we need more of, just to shake things up a bit. Gene Wilder could definitely play him in a movie, although he might have to tone him down a bit to keep it believable.
The thing is, Loeb is a serious scientist; he’s done great things. Back in 2003, he was one of the first people to speculate about direct collapse supermassive black holes, in a paper written with Volker Bromm. He founded the excellent Black Hole Initiative in 2016! I love the Black Hole Initiative! The first big, global, interdisciplinary centre to focus obsessively on the study of black holes.
No, Loeb has slowly gone nuts in the way only Harvard professors, isolated in the high, thin air at the very top of the academic dominance hierarchy, can go nuts. (When you don’t think you really have peers any more, then there’s no one to give you feedback. See also: Timothy Leary.) He thought the weird tumbling rock ʻOumuamua, that passed through our solar system recently, was probably an alien probe (it almost certainly wasn’t), and he thinks that metal nodules found on the seafloor after a meteor impact might have been made by the disintegration of an alien spacecraft. (They almost certainly weren’t.) He’s probably wrong on all these big calls, but he’s exploring a much broader possibility space than his critics, and I like that. Hell, he criticises mainstream science about the universe almost as hard as I do, albeit from a different angle:
“My message is that something is wrong with the scientific community today in terms of its health.
Too many scientists are now mostly motivated by ego, by getting honors and awards, by showing their colleagues how smart they are. They treat science as a monologue about themselves rather than a dialogue with nature. They build echo chambers using students and postdocs who repeat their mantras so that their voice will be louder and their image will be promoted. But that’s not the purpose of science. Science is not about us; it’s not about empowering ourselves or making our image great. It’s about trying to understand the world...”
–Abraham “Avi” Loeb, in Scientific American
I even love the fact that he delivered that quote, completely straight-faced, in the same interview where he also said:
“I’ve been doing interviews with, for example, Good Morning Britain at 1:50 A.M. and Coast to Coast AM at 3 A.M.—plus appearances on U.S. network and cable television. I’ve got about 100 podcast interviews to do in the next few weeks. And I already recorded long conversations with [podcasters] Lex Fridman and Joe Rogan for their shows.”
–the same Abraham “Avi” Loeb, also in Scientific American
So, you know, he is exactly the kind of guy who would be up for discovering life on other worlds. Almost too up for it! And yet, even he gets it spectacularly wrong. Why? Well, with this error, he was just betrayed by cosmology’s unexamined dogmas, like everyone else in the mainstream. Without taking an evolutionary approach, you are going to constantly misinterpret things like icy-moons-with-liquid-water-oceans, by assuming all the values of everything else will be independent of that fact.
But the simple fact that such icy moons are full of liquid water, when all the surrounding circumstances say that should be highly unlikely (and it would be highly unlikely, in a random/arbitrary universe), means you are probably now in a territory where evolutionary fine-tuning has occurred. In an evolved universe, if the BIG thing that supports life has unexpectedly turned up (liquid water, a billion and a half kilometers away from the sun), then the little things, like dissolved and available phosphorus, are very likely to turn up, too.
That is, an icy moon with a liquid water ocean is likely to be a fine-tuned, evolved system, not a random rock. (Similarly, an asteroid of similar mass to Enceladus, and at a similar distance from our sun, with NO liquid water on it IS likely to be a random rock, and no startlingly unlikely chemistry is to be expected.)
“Unlikely” fine-tuned chemistry that is conducive to life is, in fact, likely on icy moons with liquid water oceans – just as “unlikely” fine-tuned chemistry that is conducive to life is, in fact, likely inside the cells of the human body.
DOGMA VERSUS CATMA
Put another way:
Unexamined dogma: This is a one-shot universe, in which matter with random qualities blindly obeys arbitrary laws.
Enlightened catma: This is an evolved universe, in which (over the course of many, many earlier generations of universe) matter itself has evolved so as to be conducive to life. Chemistry evolved; evolution itself evolved. Icy moons evolved.
An icy moon, in this universe, is therefore like a lung, or a kidney – no, wait, they’re too big for this analogy – OK, perhaps more accurately, an alveolus (tiny air sac), or a white blood cell, in a mammal. It’s a tiny, sophisticated, evolved sub-system that (once the individual universe/mammal has been born), develops efficiently, and maintains itself stably over its lifetime, with energy supplied from elsewhere in the organism.
It’s not a random dead object with arbitrary properties. It’s better thought of as a system, or a process, or an organ. (One of many such.) And it’s doing a job, efficiently. (Or at least, with the fuzzy, improvisational, semi-efficiency of any evolved natural system. It satisfices.)
But Lingam and Loeb are stuck with their unexamined dogma.
This is from the Lingam and Loeb abstract
The availability of bioessential elements for "life as we know it", such as phosphorus (P) or possibly molybdenum (Mo), is expected to restrict the biological productivity of extraterrestrial biospheres. Here, we consider worlds with subsurface oceans and model the dissolved concentrations of bioessential elements. In particular, we focus on the sources and sinks of P (available as phosphates) and find that the average steady-state oceanic concentration of P is likely to be lower than the corresponding value on Earth by a few orders of magnitude, provided that the oceans are alkaline and possess hydrothermal activity.
Well, the ocean on Enceladus is indeed alkaline, and possesses A LOT of hydrothermal activity (to the point that volcanoes are blasting water into space!) – and it nonetheless contains two order of magnitude more phosphorus than the oceans of Earth, not “a few orders of magnitude” less.
As I have said a bunch of times before, all of cosmology’s errors lean in the same direction.
BUT WAIT, NO, HERE COMES THE CAVALRY!
OK; my conscience is nagging at me here: I’ve got to mention, for the sake of fairness, a terrific paper that leans in the other direction: in 2022, Jihua Hao/郝记华, Christopher R. Glein, the wonderful geologist Robert Hazen and others wrote a paper directly contradicting Lingam and Loeb, and predicting lots of available phosphorus in the liquid water ocean of Enceladus:
“Here, we perform geochemical modeling, constrained by Cassini data, to predict how much phosphorus could be present in the Enceladus ocean. These models suggest that Enceladus’s ocean should be relatively rich in dissolved phosphorus. This means that there can now be greater confidence that the ocean of Enceladus is habitable.”
–from Abundant phosphorus expected for possible life in Enceladus’s ocean
How come they got it right? Because Robert Hazen, and some of the younger scientists he mentors and works with – such as Jihua Hao, and the splendid Michael L. Wong (a wonderful astrobiologist who also hosts Strange New Worlds: A Science & Star Trek Podcast)– are among the noble few who do seem to understand there is something wrong, not just with the details of the current paradigm, but with the unexamined dogmas underlying the paradigm. That we are missing something vital, and fundamental, which keeps throwing us off in the same direction.
Knowing there is a problem deep beneath the paradigm, they are able to come up with original papers, attacking the problem from original angles. Read, for example, Michael Wong’s excellent recent paper (written with Carol E. Cleland, Daniel Arend Jr., Stuart Bartlett, H. James Cleaves II, Heather Demarest, Anirudh Prabhu, Jonathan I. Lunine, and, yes, Robert Hazen), On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems, which starts off:
“The universe is replete with complex evolving systems, but the existing macroscopic physical laws do not seem to adequately describe these systems.”
–from On the roles of function and selection in evolving systems
Bold! (Yes, the paper blurs together evolution-meaning-development, and evolution-meaning-Darwinian-evolution, which makes it hard for them to see the problem clearly, but it’s still a great paper.) Check it out…
Oh, and meanwhile, while I was writing this post, researchers using new software tools have found hydrogen cyanide (a very important precursor for life) in the plumes ejected from Enceladus.
And also salts and organics on Ganymede (Jupiter’s biggest moon, and indeed the biggest moon in the solar system – it’s bigger than Mercury, or Pluto).
See? If the BIG stuff allowing for life is there, the small stuff is likely to follow. They aren’t going to turn out to be randomly distributed. They are going to turn out to be clustered.
AN EVOLVED CHEMICAL LOGIC
Why? Because there is an evolved chemical logic to liquid water that means – once it is present in large quantities for a decent period of time – it transforms its wider chemical environment into one conducive to life. This is possible because the elements aren’t just a bunch of random things with arbitrary properties, any more than all the varied and different parts of a Rolls Royce jet engine, separated and laid out on a hanger floor, are random things with arbitrary properties. Chemistry is instead an evolved, integrated system. And it has been – somewhat messily, and wastefully, but nonetheless successfully – designed by evolution to perform several important, specific, interlocking tasks, one of which is to facilitate the development of life (because life ultimately makes for more reproductively successful universes). And so, once enough water is present, the evolved logic of an evolved chemistry plays out – whether that is on the surface of a small, rocky planet like Earth, or deep under the icy surface of a tiny moon, like Enceladus.
AAAAAAAAaaaaannnnd… I’m going to abruptly stop this absurdly long post here, because I’ve just looked down, and gotten vertigo. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of words to go, and a lot of ideas that need a bit of space and time for the reader to take on board, and it doesn’t make sense putting them all into one post. Nobody with a normal human bladder would get to the end of it. (I’m amazed and delighted you got this far! Thank you for trusting me with so much of your time. Go dump a few grams of phosphorus, and stretch.)
Anyway, I hope this line sounds a little more exciting (and packed with meaning, and possibility) now than it did back at the start of this post: There is phosphorus on Enceladus!
Hail Eris!
Masterly! I am looking forward to the follow-up posts.
Dogma & Catma 🐶🐱🎯 such a fascinating read! Now to figure out how to write a scienceku or senryu with your information.