Europa’s Promise

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In a universe as mind-bendingly vast and as stupendously ancient as our own, it seems likely that there is life on other planets. Indeed, that is an understatement. Should our galaxy alone not already be aglow with the evidence of thousands of civilisations? And yet, so far, the heavens have yielded no such thing. We appear to be the only mote of advanced life in our cosmic vicinity.

In 1950, legendary physicist Enrico Fermi, while at lunch with the almost equally legendary Edward Teller, is famed for having simply asked, “But where is everybody?” Ever since then the so-called Fermi Paradox has perplexed and baffled all who have grappled with it.

There are dozens of possible answers to this paradox. Some say that life is just unbelievably rare, perhaps even genuinely unique to Earth. Some say that very simple forms of life might be common, but advanced civilisations capable of star travel are fantastically rare. Some say that the galaxy is probably full of extraterrestrial civilisations, but we just haven’t looked hard enough, nor in the right ways. Some say that aliens are already with us, and have been for centuries. Some say that we are being watched and monitored, like animals in a zoo, or some kind of Truman Show style experiment. There are many more potential answers to the Fermi Paradox, and most of them contain variants and subcategories within themselves.

In my opinion—pure conjecture—I suspect that advanced life is both ultra rare, and that we simply don’t have the tools/capabilities to search very efficiently. With any luck the James Webb Space Telescope will help on that particular front. One of its instruments is designed to peer into the atmosphere of exo-planets and detect the signatures of life. It is hypothetically possible that we could obtain evidence of life on other planets via this method any given day.

Yet I suspect, or rather hope, that we might even find life inside our own solar system; and not just microbial life. While we may well detect evidence of extremely simple life having once existed on Mars, and we may well find that within our lifetimes, we may find full-blown living, complex organisms living out their lives, currently orbiting our beloved Sun. I speak specifically of the moons of Jupiter. The Jovian system.

Ever since Galileo first turned his early telescope toward the monstrous Jupiter, we have been aware that there are multiple moons orbiting it. We now know that there are dozens and dozens of them, and we will probably keep finding more and more. The most massive of them, though, are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Each one is a world unto itself, each one more bizarre and fantastic than the last. However, it is Europa, among all the places in the solar system, which might just contain a habitat capable of sustaining life.

Europa is roughly the size of our moon—not an insignificant body in itself—and is made up largely of water-ice, with perhaps an iron-nickel core. It orbits in such a way that tidal flexing means that the entire moon is effectively kneaded by the mighty influence of Jupiter. This means that although Europa’s outer crust is of course solid ice, inside, ah, inside there is an ocean. An ocean!

It is thought that beneath Europa’s icy crust there is a body of water which adds up to way more than all the oceans on Earth. We also know that aquatic life does not need the warming touch of the Sun to exist and proliferate and evolve. Hydro-thermal vents at the bottom of our own oceans are often teeming with life.

It is a tantalising thought, that in the pitch dark seas of Europa, there could be anything and everything from Jovian zooplankton, to schools of Jovian ‘fish’, to giant beasts the size of Whales.

In October 2024 NASA are scheduled to launch a probe called ‘Europa Clipper’, which will perform a number of ‘fly-bys’ of Europa and ‘taste’ the water particles that are thrown into its own orbit by the giant geysers which also exist on its surface. The results from this could very well be our first definitive proof that extraterrestrial life exists.

Beyond that—and this is truly the stuff of my day-dreams—humanity will eventually send landers to Europa. There is a lander planned for 2027, for example. Eventually one will be sent which will be capable of melting or boring itself down into the subsurface ocean, and beam back images of what it finds. It may well be, it just may well be, that those pictures will reveal something utterly amazing. Europa’s ocean holds the promise to expose a wondrous revelation; a marine world filled with alien life. Creatures so fantastic and other-worldly that we can scarcely begin to imagine them. I hope, with every fibre of my being, that I live long enough to see the day when the pictures from that Europa lander are beamed back to Earth.