The beautiful thought of life in the cold darkness

Ethan Zukerman is blogging from the TED conference.   THe opening keynote was from Carolyn Porco who showed this amazing picture of Saturn eclipsing the Sun.   Ethan write about the moon Enceladus:

More amazing is Enceladus, a much smaller moon, about the tenth of the size of Titan. She shows Enceladus as if it were hovering over Britain (it’s not a threat, she promises” – the moon is roughly the size of England and Wales. It’s got a white, fractured surface lined by geological and tectonic activity.

The amazing part of Enceladus is the South Pole, where these white canals are lined with green – they’re much warmer than the rest of the planet and are rich in organic material. There are jets of fine icy particles flowing out in space, feeding a plume that goes thousands of miles into space above the surface of the planet. These jets suggest that there’s liquid water under the ground on Enceladus, which leads to a planetary trifecta – excess heat, liquid water and organic material, which could be an environment suitable for living organisms.

Porco ends with an extraordinary image – a total eclipse of the sun from the other side of Saturn. What’s most extraordinary, in my mind, is that the haze around the rings comes from those icy particles coming from Enceladus, particles that might represent liquid water, the potential for life, and the strong chance that there could be lots of worlds in the galaxy capable of supporting life.

You can follow along with TED at the  TED blog and elsewhere.