Zeus's Little Secret, Or Galileo and Clarke's Europan Vacation
little spices… a cat’s tail, sugar, spice, and everything nice… and some organic compounds and a little carbon. These are things that virtually all planets and moons in the solar system possess, having received them from comet and asteroid impacts over billions of years. (Well, I’m not sure about the cat tails.)
But still that’s not enough. If you check the shopping list, so far we’ve got liquid water and all the little compounds we need. One thing is still missing though. Heat. We need a little heat to make it all come together. On Earth heat is generated by the hot metal core of the planet, and also received from the nearby Sun. Europa, however, is too small to have a hot metal core, and at a distance of 500 million miles it doesn’t get much light from the Sun. So where are we going to get the heat?
Nearby Europa there is, in the words of Gustav Holst, a jolly fellow named Jupiter. That’s right, Europa’s daddy is jolly… and huge. 10,000-times-the-volume-of-the-earth huge. This size means intense gravity, which in turn means enormous pull on nearby Europa (670,000 miles away). And as I said earlier, friction’s just another word for warmth.
The pull of Jupiter is so strong that it actually causes the surface of Europa to flex. There’s also evidence that the entire surface of the moon rotates every 10,000 years. This is very unique in our solar system. Most moons, like our own, always show the same side and never rotate in relation to their parent. Europa’s situation is important because it is strong evidence that heat generated by its tug-o-war with Zeus has melted much of the ice and created a vast ocean trapped beneath a thin crust. Given the combination of liquid water, heat, and organic compounds, scientists believe that there may just be life in that ocean.
CONCLUSION
While Mars is still our best chance of finding other life in the solar system, the Jovian moon Europa is firmly the next best chance. If there really is a liquid ocean beneath the icy surface, something we should know for sure within the next 20 years, there is an excellent chance that life is there, too. It seems that Clarke was right all along.
What kind of life? It’s doubtful that you’ll find any bass swimming
around looking for dinner dangling from your hook. But life similar to that
which thrives on Earth’s deep sea floors could be a real possibility. We’re
only beginning to understand the bizarre world that lies
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