Life Under the Conditions of Jupiter

Life under the Conditions of Jupiter

Only way to make a living under the conditions of Jupiter is to reproduce before you are fried and hope that convection will carry some of your offspring to the higher and cooler layers of the atmosphere. Such organisms could be very little or very much. These floaters may propel themselves through the planetary atmosphere with gusts of gas, like a ramjet or a rocket. We imagine them arranged in great lazy herds for as far as the eye can see, with patterns on their skin, an adaptive camouflage implying that they have problems, too. Because there is at least one other ecological niche in such an environment: hunting. Hunters are fast and maneuverable. They eat the floaters both for their organic molecules and for their store of pure hydrogen. Hollow sinkers could have evolved into the first floaters, and self-propelled floaters into the first hunters, There cannot be very many hunters, because if the consume all the floaters, the hunters themselves will perish.

Physics and chemistry permit such lifeforms. Art endows them with a certain charm. Nature, however, is not obliged to follow our speculations. But if there are billions of inhabited worlds in the Milky Way Galaxy, perhaps there will be a few populated by the sinkers, floaters and hunters which our imaginations, tempered by the laws of physics and chemistry, have generated.

You have to know the past to understand the present. Biology is more like history, than it is like physics. Jupiter

You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail. There is as yet no predictive theory of biology, just as there is not yet a predictive theory of history. The reasons are the same: both subjects are still too complicated for us. But we can know ourselves better by understanding other cases. The study of a single instance of extraterrestrial life, no matter how humble, will deprovincialize biology. For the first time, the biologists will know what other kinds of life are possible. When we say the search for life elsewhere is important, we are not guaranteeing that it will be easy to find – only that it is very much worth seeking.

In biology there is a principal of powerful if imperfect applicability called recapitulation: in our individual embryonic development we retrace the evolutionary history of the species. There is a kind of recapitulation that occurs in our individual intellectual developments as well. We unconsciously retrace the thoughts of our remote ancestors. Just imagine a time before science, a time before libraries. Imagine a time hundreds of thousands of years ago. We were then just about as smart, just as curious, just as involved in things social and sexual. But the experiments had not yet been done, the inventions had not yet been made. It was the childhood of genus Homo. Imagine the time when fire was first discovered, What were human lives like then? What did our ancestors believe the stars were?