Thanks to Eric for putting the rude and true “idiot” in his place. I was about to say almost exactly the same thing until I scrolled down and saw your answer. It is saddening to see mere “smartalecky” red-neck rubbish being offered the same podium as educated discussion. This is the worrying weakness of unedited Internet media. BTW, just so the argument stays within the family, I too are from Alberta. I hope your and my comments will show that not all Albertans are so unpleasant.

ill keep it simple as i could rant on for quite a while about the errors in your statement. you mentioned gravity pulling down on a column of fluid and keeping it down, yes gravity is working on this comparatively small amount of the equation. Gravity is ALSO pulling down on the millions of tons of ice over that lake effectively squeezing it, but it has no where to relieve this pressure… poke a hole in the ice and viola! those people you just told to wipe their bums with their well earned degrees, are right.

anyways, think of a juice box… squeeze it.. nothing happens… push the straw in the top while squeezing it… im sure you get the picture.

“The space between the perceiver and the thing perceived… can be closed with a shout of recognition. One form of a shout is a shot. Nothing so completely verifies our perception of a thing as our killing of it.”

-Findley.

Human curiosity is a double edged sword..people would still applaud a fantastic discovery, even if its dead, or the whole system destroyed. Like some rare creature never seen before..kill it and study it and hang it on the wall. Cool, case closed, lets publish a paper and win a prize!

With so many problems facing the world, all these scientific minds should be focusing on other critical areas. Is it worth possibly destroying an ecosytem to determine whether some microbes might be able to live under the ice of some moon? To compare the environments is crazy anyway, we have no idea how, if anything, might have evolved elsewhere…regardless, its not worth destroying something to get some papers, numbers and speculations…how is that going to solve or help anything….anything going on in the world right now? Its nothing but a glossy spread in magazines that will be read, tossed and out and forgotten. “Honey, they found some weird bacteria living miles under the ice sheet”…”wow, cool”…”but its polluted now”…”oh, that’s too bad, did you Tivo Real Housewives?”…

Find ways to control an acid ocean, create breeding grounds for the fish that eat med jellies (that have been messing up my beach vacations), enginer hardier plants for the Sahel, go to the rainforest to look for species there, develop crabon sinks in dense cities, control the trypanosome in Africa,..anything..besides pouring poison down a miles deep hole so you can get a sample of a possible microbe.