Abstract
Although this book is devoted to subsurface oceans of our Solar System and the potential for life to arise in such environments, a detour to the arid plains of Mars is recommended, as unique experiments related to extraterrestrial life were performed there. The search for life on the Red Planet is a fascinating tale, and we do it no justice by covering it here in a few paragraphs since entire books have been written on this subject alone. Regardless, such a story provides a sense of perspective, as well as insights that will prove helpful as we speculate about the possibility of life within the subsurface oceans of our Solar System.
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- 1.
Darwinian evolution is the process by which organisms change over time as a result of changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. The changes which increase the chances of survival in a given environment will be more likely to pass on to the next generation. Unfortunately, Darwinian evolution is often misunderstood by the general public, which sometimes confuses it for the defunct Lamarckism theory that supports the idea that an organism passes on the attributes that it has acquired throughout its life to its offspring. For example, it was thought that a neck of a giraffe would grow from generation to generation because the giraffe uses this part of his body most throughout his lifetime. This has since then been proven to be false.
- 2.
Surface regions can also receive additional forms of energy, such as the electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun (sunlight); however this is only relevant for planetary bodies that lie within the ‘Goldilocks zone,’ an area in the Solar System where the surface temperatures could theoretically allow liquid water to exist.
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Henin, B. (2018). Life on Earth and in Space. In: Exploring the Ocean Worlds of Our Solar System. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93476-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93476-1_3
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