I'm more optimistic about life on Europa than even Hoagland. Those of you familiar with Daniel Dennett's view (Darwin's Dangerous Idea of how evolution works it's magic by generating many more solutions to the life puzzle than any given environment can permit to survive should find my opinion tolerable. I expect there to be advanced forms of multicellular life cruising the ocean of not only Europa but those of Ganymede and Callisto as well. Bioluminescence and biohypergolics would be handy to have in such environments and these in turn would make eyes handy to have. Symbionts likely will form colonies that build totally enclosed calcite , silicate, or some combination modules in which creatures equipped with lungs can evolve and help balance the toxic effects of too much oxygen. More likely life will invent a system beyond the limits of my imagination to prevent oxygen toxification. With the limited exposure to the rest of the universe that such critters will have, even with sentience, their religion and philosphy and suspicion of outsiders will be a source of astonishment to us.

Earth has evolved extremophiles that are resistant to radiation. So we know the machinery of evolution can produce them. Jovian radiation may be an important selection filter and may have steered evolution along paths to generate critters about which we may have to be very cautious when we open their cages. We will open their cages unless they do it before we get around to it.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
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ah, no. If Io were here it wouldn't erupt like that. Jupiter's gravity (and the pull from sister moons) cause the planet to heat up. Around here it would be as still as our own.

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OH, and I think all of this stems from the hope that there is liquid water there.


Sometimes people's hopes outweigh their reason. I hope there is water there. It would makes us less unique and give hope to the human race that we are not alone.

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Not only europa is very interresting, enceladus also has good possibilyties of habitting extraterrestrial life

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Yes, but first there has to actually be life there in order to evolve. And we don't know what the odds of life actually forming there are. So it has nothing to do with evolution per se.

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Then we move Io closer to earth so it does heat up.

Probably, since our moon is slowly orbiting outward, Io would eventually far enough away to have the volcanism stop.

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LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

well, our gravitational force is nothing next to Jupiter's. But like I said before, it's the other VERY LARGE moons that help create the tidal forces tearing it apart.

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I include prebiological evolution which starts in the stars that manufactured the elements from which life self organizes. A lot depends on where you start the process and how you define it. It seems likely that however life started on Earth, it could have started on Europa in like manner and that the filtering done by the Europan environment would lead to life similar at the DNA level but widely variant at the multicellular level.
Mildew is the poster child for life. Wherever conditions are right, it happens.

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For those inclined to oppose human meddling with the structure of the universe or the composition and configuration of objects and groups of objects within the universe, consider:
Whether there is a limit to the magnitude of a modulation of chaos below which order remains invariant? Or, is order but a fiction invented by perspectives applied over finite, however large, time intervals?

We don't know that, we have only one sure example of celestial bodies life, and an inhabitant of that world its reading this post. And yet another is typing it, wow! I don't mind speculation, in fact I love it, as long as we remember it IS speculation. Until we send a probe out to Europa, and dig around in that slush, we are not going to know anything.
A thing I don't like is rewriting or broadening the definition of word until it fits what you are trying to say. Picture this, a cat walks by, and your friend says "Hey look, a dog!" and you say "No, that is a cat." then your friend says "Well it is a dog, if we include in the definition of dog that some meow, and wag their tail when angry, and leave only one line of paw prints, then it's a dog!"

Yes, now it is a dog, at the expense of ruining the definition of dog.

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In July 2005 Cassini completed a spectacularly close flyby of Enceladus, passing just 173km above its surface.

From this flyby came confirmation that the moon has an atmosphere, and strong evidence that the gases which make up the atmosphere are coming from cracks in the surface, nick-named "tiger stripes", near the south pole.

This false-colour image shows the extent of the active region (Image: Nasa/JPL/SSI)
It appears that the gases are being forced through the surface, as they emerge in jets which shoot upwards for hundreds of kilometres before dispersing, eventually forming Saturn's E-ring.

Most of the gas is water vapour, suggesting strongly that liquid water lies under the moon's icy surface.

From his base at the University of Arizona, Tucson, Bob Brown leads the scientific team for Cassini's visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (Vims) which analysed the chemical composition of Enceladus's atmosphere and mapped the distribution of various gases.

"We very clearly saw water; there's water everywhere on Enceladus, it's 99.9% water ice in general at the surface, and we've known that for years, so it wasn't a big surprise," he told the BBC News website.

"But when we started looking at our spectra we saw absorption bands from a compound that had to have carbon and hydrogen bonded together.

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If life is a biological process that will always occur in liquid water, then if there is liquid water on Europa, then there is life.

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Fields of Space

LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. One giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

Host of Seraphim

Well, that is a very large and untestable assumption, since the only life we know is here on Earth. I would suggest that life would not develop in liquid water without all of the other requirements - temperature, chemical building blocks etc - as well as an absence of inhibitive factors. In a simplistic example, how much life would develop in liquid water that contained 25% chlorine bleach?

Then, of course, there is the matter of time. There may well be liquid water under the ice of Europa but it may constantly be freezing and melting and otherwise changing state. Life on Earth has had the advantage of billions of years to get where it is today and even more billions of years to actually get started in the first place.

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

Or at least a song!

Not true. There is evidence that life got going on Earth pretty soon after the surface conditions had cooled enough, maybe 5-600 millions years. And having started, it pretty much sat around not doing much for billions of years. Things only started getting interesting about 580 million years ago, leading to the Cambrian explosion and diverse multi-cellular life forms.

Please do not forget everyone, that a subsurface ocean on Europa is not even a given fact.

There could well be, but whilst evidence is compelling that there is, it is not proven, less the proof behind life there.

There is only one way we will know for sure, a dedicated Orbiter / Landers mission to carryout super high resolution glboal imaging, the landers to probe the landing site with seismometers, tiltmeters, PanCams, then dependant on the resuts, maybe send a cryobot.

When I cryobot is finally sent, I think we are in for one hell of a dissappointment.

I hope not, but the cold light of reality is a hard taskmaster.

Andrew Brown.

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"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before". Linda Morabito on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.

that's not necessarily true either. We have found lakes beneath 4km of ice in Antarctica with no more than ground penetrating radar. Water has a bright reflection and a 100% dead giveaway. No need to land although I suspect the next mission out there will.

UM. liquid water is already the right temperature.

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Um... and what temperature is that?... and at what pressure? Assuming, of course, that RalOfTyr's premise is correct, which I doubt. I was merely pointing out that a presence of liquid water is not the only requirement for life to develop. If it was, I would think twice about downing a bottle of Evian if I was you.

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This is not an idea to be tossed aside lightly - it should be thrown with great force

no, but you also suggested that liquid water would not necessarily be in the right temperature range, where on earth wherever it exists some creature has found a way to live - under any pressure.

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"I will do my best to understand and explain the universe from big to small without invoking miracles, unrepeatable events, or divine intervention. In place of those things I will use observations, mathematics, and science."


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Those that lack education have a hard time understanding its value. - Cross