Space journalist James Oberg comments on yesterday’s news about the discovery of liquid water geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and why it matters:

But why? Do improved science textbooks and even exciting news headlines offer rewards for the effort needed? If there are signs of life — past, present, or even future — on Enceladus, or Europa or Titan or even below the bitterly-cold ice shells of Pluto or the newly discovered Sedna, what does that benefit us?

 

The fundamental and potentially infinite benefit is that we, too, are “life,” with our particular biochemical processes that allow us in a time-tested but slapdash fashion to grow, survive temporarily, replicate and occasionally stare at the stars. To understand this process that briefly keeps each of us alive, we study the examples we have — ourselves and our cousins from the same creche — and speculate. But examples from another creche could show the range of possibilities that was irreversibly narrowed here on Earth as this particular DNA-based “life form” spread and dominated.
How would another microorganism pass on blueprints for progeny, and how does this other process compare to the successes of “our” life, and how does it fail? How does it repair itself against environmental hazards? Do cells on Europa get cancer? Do they even have DNA-tagged “counters” that on Earth enforce cellular death after so many divisions? Do they allow some — but not too much — replication variation that enables environmentally-driven or behaviorally-driven evolution?

 

The answers to these and other questions will tell us about the potentialities and design limits of the life processes that comprise ourselves. And that, most definitely, we want to know, and take advantage of.

 

The “answer book” to all these questions isn’t just lying out there at Enceladus already bound and decoded, for us to go out and pick up and read at our leisure — but pages, or even paragraphs of it, could well be. And this lucky concurrence of watery geysers and of current space capabilities offers a rewarding strategy to do what humans have done, and benefited from, since they became humans: wonder, and then go find out.

Wonder, and then go find out… that’d make a pretty good motto, don’t you think?