What planet is most suitable for life?

1. Mars. Mars takes the top spot for several reasons. We know it was once habitable billions of years ago, when it had lakes and rivers of liquid water on its surface.

technologyreview.com - The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system, ranked

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But life isn’t that simple. We now know that life on Earth is able to thrive in even the harshest, most brutal environments, in super cold and super dry conditions, depths of unimaginable pressures, and without the need to use sunlight as a source of energy. At the same time, our cursory understanding of these obscure worlds has expanded tremendously. Our rocky neighbors of Venus and Mars may have once been temperate and Earth-like, and some of the life might have lingered on after these planets’ climates took a turn for the worse. Several of the icy moons that hang around Jupiter and Saturn might have underground oceans that could sustain life. A couple may even have atmospheres. And still other places that seem to be too exotic for life continue to surprise us. Unlike the myriad of new exoplanets we’re identifying every year, when it comes to worlds in the solar system, we have the ability to send probes to these places and study them directly. “We can measure things that would be impossible to measure with telescopes,” says David Catling, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington. They could study things up close, maybe fly into the atmosphere or land on the surface, and perhaps one day even bring back samples that could reveal whether these planets and moons are home to materials or fossils that are evidence of life—or perhaps life itself. Here are the 10 best places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life, subjectively ranked by yours truly for how likely we are to find life—and how easy it would be to find it if it’s there.

NASA

10. Triton

Triton is the largest moon of Neptune, and one of the most exotic worlds in the solar system. It’s one of only five moons in the solar system known to be geologically active, as evidenced by its active geysers that spew sublimated nitrogen gas. Its surface is mostly frozen nitrogen, and its crust is made of water ice, and it has an icy mantle. Yes, this is a cold, cold world. But in spite of that, it seems to get some heat generated by tidal forces (gravitational friction between Triton and Neptune), and that could help warm up the waters and give rise to life through any organics that might exist on the moon. But actually finding life on Triton seems like a very distant possibility. The only mission to ever visit the world was Voyager 2 in 1989. The window for such a mission opens up only every 13 years. The best opportunity to visit Triton would be the proposed Trident mission (which seems unlikely to get launched after NASA just greenlighted two new missions to Venus later this decade). And lastly, the horrendous cold tempers hopes that life could stay unfrozen for long enough to make a home for itself. NASA / JPL-CALTECH / UCLA / MPS / DLR / IDA / JUSTIN COWART

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9. Ceres

The largest asteroid and smallest dwarf planet in the solar system could be home to liquid water, sitting deep underground. Ceres, a dwarf planet that sits between Mars and Jupiter, was studied by NASA’s Dawn probe from orbit from 2015 to 2018. Scientists are still unpacking and analyzing that data, but tantalizing studies in the past few years suggest there’s an ocean sitting 25 miles below the surface, and could stretch for hundreds of miles. It would almost certainly be extremely salty—which would keep the water from freezing even well below 0°C. Dawn even found evidence of organic compounds on Ceres that could act as raw materials for life. But Ceres ranks second-to-last on our list because its habitability has too many questions attached. The evidence of subsurface water and the organic materials is still very new. Even if those things are there, it would need some source of heat and energy that could actually help encourage that water and organic material to react in such a way that it leads to life. And even if that occurred, finding that life means we have to drill at least two-dozen miles into the ground to access that water and study it. Lastly, Ceres is tiny—more than 13 times smaller than Earth. It’s not yet clear how that fraction of gravity could affect life on the dwarf planet, but if Earth is our compass for what’s habitable, Ceres’s small size is probably not an asset. There’s no shortage of new proposals for future missions to study the dwarf planet, including ones that would even attempt a sample return mission. But nothing is going up soon.

NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

8. Io

Boasting over 400 active volcanoes, Io is the most geologically active world in the solar system. All of that activity is thought to be caused by tidal heating created as Io’s interior is gravitationally pulled between Jupiter and the other Jovian moons. The volcanism results in a huge coating of sulfur and sulfur dioxide frost (yes, that’s a thing!) across the globe, along with a super thin sulfur dioxide atmosphere. There might even be a subsurface ocean on Io, but it would be made of magma, not water.

technologyreview.com - The best places to find extraterrestrial life in our solar system, ranked

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