At the end of the movie 2010: The Year We Make Contact (hey wasn’t that last year? Never mind) a message from the unknown aliens says:
ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE YOURS EXCEPT
EUROPA
ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE
USE THEM TOGETHER
USE THEM IN PEACE
The premise being that after collapsing Jupiter into a new mini star (don’t even get me started on all the incredibly bad science that implies) the watery world of Europa would be a warm home to the life that is possibly there.
That’s the science fiction, but it is looking more an more likely that the Jovian moon does indeed harbor large bodies of water under its thick coat of ice. And since the Earth is the only place we’ve ever found life we assume that liquid water is a basic requirement for other life.
Now this is not particularly new news, and the data that this generated this confirming announcement is from the Galileo mission that ended 8 years ago. But it does make the case that there is at least one place in the Solar System that has this basic requirement for life.
From the Voice of America article:
NASA says the data is especially significant because it suggests the possibility of a vast saltwater ocean below Europa's icy shell that's deep enough to cover the entire globe. The findings are published in the journal Nature.
The NASA team reports that they believe the reason for the formation known as “chaos’” is that they are over a lens of water that is liquid and varies in depth from time to time. Is breaks the ice into the fractures that we see.
This new evidence seems to suggest that there is a lot of salt water under the ice of the inner most Galilean Moon of Jupiter. Which is why you get a story that it is “the best chance for life in the Solar System. Which is true when you talk about water but there is another factor that complicates things and is required for life, energy.
In our close toasty orbit of our local star we all the energy we have is directly attributable to the Sun. All that bound chemical energy that we pass around, comes form the radiance of old Sol. But out in the suburbs of the Solar System, the Sun is not nearly as powerful.
Life as we know it requires that chemical energy, and so the issue is where would life on Europa get that initial boost and how would it continue to get it?
That is where the huge magnetosphere of Jupiter comes into play. It around 10 times that of the Earth and it makes for a pretty wild and wooly place to be in orbit. The interaction between Io and Jupiter causes huge exchanges of really excited sulfur atoms in the form of a plasma toriod.
This means that there is a hell of a lot of high energy particles raining down on Europa, constantly. If you could stand on the surface of the planet you’d be cooked pretty well in short order. In fact the bombardment is so fierce that is cracks water into it’s component oxygen and hydrogen components.
But that is where life might ( probably won’t, but might) catch a break. Even though the surface is a radiation hell, water is a very good baffle against it. A big salt water sea would be able to shelter any micro-beasties that might evolve there.
And that cracking affect also provides a way for energy to get into a hypothetical ecosystem. The collapsing and renewing of the “chaos terrain” areas would allow the oxygen and ozone to get into the seas and would be available to help power any life that might come into existence. Since this is an ongoing process it would keep that cycle going, even if it would be incredibly low energy compared to what we are used to here on Earth.
So even though Europa looks pretty dodgy for a place for life to evolve it seems that more and more of the preconditions for such life are there. Time, water and energy, those were all it took on the Earth to produce life. Can a different ratio of them do the same on Europa?
I tend to think no, but there is only one way to know for sure, we have to send a mission to violate the advice from the end of that visually spectacular but scientifically crappy movie, and attempt a landing there.
By showing that there is or is not life there we will be able to make a better estimate of how often there have been beings like ourselves who reasoned and wondered at their night sky, even though we are probably separated from them in by the vasty deeps of time in a big universe.
The floor is yours.