Quote:
Originally Posted by ceptimus
If a planet needs to sustain a climate where liquid water exists continuously for many hundreds of millions, or even billions of years in order for intelligent life to evolve, then current theories suggest that such planets may be vanishingly rare.
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And yet the preponderance of the evidence tells us that there are three such bodies in our solar system alone: Earth, Europa and Enceladus. There is some circumstantial evidence that the latter two have hydrothermal vents like our
Last universal common ancestor - Wikipedia probably lived around.
That kind of environment (frozen water at the top, boiling water at the bottom) under a kilometers thick ice shell may be a lot more stable and hospitable to life than the average planet with a thin atmosphere. I wouldn't be all that surprised if we melted through the ice on Europa and something bit the camera.