英语听力:自然百科 行星旅行指南:木星 Jupiter—17
时间:2014-08-28 07:12:50
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(单词翻译)
As these robot submarines accomplish great missions, the possibility of one day melting our way into Europa’s deep ocean is moving from fiction toward fact.
Let’s just imagine, there we’re on a little spacecraft with the
capability1 to melt to the ice, we push down, ‘mmm’,
plowing2 through the ice. We hit the water, that may be an interesting sound right there at the
interface3 between the water and the ice. When we look around, what we might see is a community of organisms that are growing on energy that’s coming through the ice, and oxidants, maybe even oxygen, produced by sunlight on the surface of the ice, being mixed through the ice, reacting with the water at that interface. Energy is being released. Organisms are consuming that energy. OK, that’s cool. We are going to go deeper down to the bottom of the ocean. There we see maybe hot hydrothermal
vents4, deep sea vents like we see on Earth or tidal energy, which is being caused by Jupiter’s gravitational pull, is pumping hot fluids through the crust. That’s a way we’re hoping to find.
On Earth we’ve found communities of life doing just fine, cut off from life above and
huddling5 for warmth and
sustenance6 around
volcanic7 vents in the deep sea. This is what makes Europa so appealing. There should be warm salty water interacting directly with a hot rocky seafloor.
Life is like a little battery. It runs off a chemical reaction. If that rocky
mantle8 is hot, then like black
smokers9 on the ocean floors of the Earth, there could be the chemistry that powers life just pouring into that ocean from hot locations on that ocean floor. If Europa is an environment where we think there should be life, then it’s important to know, is there? Does life get going easily, given the right conditions? Or to that matter, if there is no life in Europa’s ocean and the conditions are favorable to life, why not? And how rare, then, is a life as we know it on Earth?
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