Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseThis moon of Jupiter has an ENORMOUS ocean. Does anything live in it?
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Hey or hey, when you think about finding life on other planets? What do you imagine? I want to hear what an artistic cartoonist thinks about when he thinks about life on other planets.
Well, you know, I think of little green men or blue, tall attractive people like an avatar, or you know, crazy blobs or weird plants.
So you're mostly thinking about life like on these planets, like on the surface.
Yeah, like living things on the surface of other planets.
What if there could be like strange underground life, not life on other planets? But life in other planets.
You mean, like underneath the surface.
Yeah, like underground life on other planets.
Oh man, it sounds like a pretty cool, hib grungy kind of extraterrestrial life, you know, be part of the underground scene.
Yeah, exactly interesting.
So like we could look at a planet and think, oh, it's barren, there's nothing there, But really, there could be amazing cities underneath the surface.
Yeah. Well just think about our oceans, right, If you look at the ocean from space, you don't see that much action, right, But of course there's a huge amount of stuff going on under the surface.
Oh, it could be more than what you see. Hi, I'm Jorgean and I'm Daniel, and welcome to our podcast. Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe, a production of iHeartRadio.
In which a cartoonist and a physicist try to break it all down for you and explain to you all that weird stuff you always wanted to understand but didn't feel comfortable asking your friends about.
Yeah, it was the weird things on the surface and the maybe possibly cooler stuff underneath the surface of things, the.
Cooler, weirder, probably slimier stuff too.
So today on the podcast, we'll be talking about Europe, the moon of Jupiter. What is it? Where is it? Could there be life in it or on it, or under it or inside of it behind it?
Could there be an alien slime ship just hiding behind your rope of ahwas dodging out of you as we look at it.
At all times? Yeah, it might be possibly one of the only other places in our solar system where they're could be life.
There could be really goopy, slimy life out there. Hey, why do you think that aliens are often associated with slime in movies? Well?
Hmmm, what they can't be dry? I guess it wouldn't be gross or alien.
Why can't you have like an armadillo life? You know, armadillos are not slimy, all right? Why can't aliens be more like armadillos? They always seem to be like, you know, salamanders, or goopy and gross, like there's some sort of like aliens have to be disgusting.
Hmm, they have to feel alien, I guess. So well, let's talk about it. Say Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. So Jupiter, another planet in our solar system, has many moons and one of them is called Europa.
That's right, and you know it's very interesting to us, of course, ask the question is their life out there in the universe? And so we naturally think about looking for life in places where we would live, you know, on the surface of a nice, warm, rocky planet. But we should think more broadly. We should think about whether there's life in other kinds of places, places where you and I wouldn't want to live, places a little too slimy, but places that still there could be something wriggling around in.
Right, that might have the conditions or the ingredients for life, but maybe not necessarily look like the planet Earth.
Yeah, exactly, and certainly not a place you'd want a vacation to. And so in this episode we want to dive deep into the moon of Jupiter Europa and see about and talk about whether it's possible for there to be life underground in that moon.
You mean you don't want to have a European vacation.
If European, I'm a going no, But I think it'd be really fascinating. Say we do discover life in Europa. You know, that would be amazing because it would tell us a lot about the likelihood of life forming in general, right, right, when you have these conditions, how often does life start? And we just haven't found the conditions for life in many other places, and so it's fascinating to get to just you know, peace again on an alien body of water and see if they are microbes or fish or crazy angry octopi or something. Yeah.
Well, Europe is interesting because it's kind of a mystery, right, because it's a moon of Jupiter, but it's covered in ice, and scientists think that maybe underneath all that ice is a big giant ocean.
Yeah, Europe is crazy. We'll get into that, but it's a really weird object. It's got lots of mysteries in it. Yeah, But before we do, we thought, what do people think about whether there's life on this moon. People know about these alien oceans, people believe there might be life under there.
Yeah, So, as usual, Daniel went out into the UC Irvine campus and ask people on the street what do they think is under the ice in Europa?
Yeah, here's what people had to say a variety of responses, as you'll hear. So think for a moment, what's your bet what do you think would be found in an alien ocean under kilometers of ice and then listen to these responses gas.
Yeah, maybe like unknown things that like we're not immune too, or like so we haven't discovered yet.
Maybe you think there might be life there.
Maybe it could be, Yeah, because I believe like like parallel universes and like there has to be life and in other universes. So maybe, like I don't know, some kind of like fishes or something, I don't know.
Maybe some weird creatures or.
Something like that.
So you think they might be life on the moon.
Arounger, Yeah, definitely.
I believe there's life all around us. Yeah.
I don't expect to my life, No, why not?
It just seems very improbable.
Like you know, I feel like life can you know, happen because you know obviously Earth, but I feel like the odds of something like that to happen would be very very small.
Okay, it's possible that there could be some like intelligent life since there's water, but it is pretty far away from the sun, might be too cold for anything to sustain up.
Yeah, so you think water on another planet is the chances of his life there?
Yeah, definitely, probably some debris, some space debres. Seriously, I mean, do you think there might be life there. As far as life, I mean, grass is an organism. Is this life so in essentiated for all? Into the person's perspectively, they might find some life cool?
Okay, pretty interesting. I find it interesting that most people kind of knew what you were talking about, Like you said, what's under the beneath the ice in Europa? And people didn't Flinis, They're not like, what what's underneath Europe? What do you mean like Iceland or Finland or Sweden?
Yeah that's true. Yeah, No, you're right. And some people were shocked to discover that there could be oceans of water on other planets, right, But most people when you when I told them that there was a water ocean, or when they believe that for the moment, a lot of people were confident that we could find life there. I think people have this sense that water means life, and that life is not a rare thing, and that when you have the conditions, you should expect it to pop up to flower wherever wherever it can.
We associated with life, Like how can you have water without any life or bacteria or little bugs in it? Yeah, it'd be weird to think of that much water totally pure.
And clean exactly. And you know that much water and that much time, Right, a blob of water with organic chemicals in it sitting around for billions of years, it feels like the right stuff's got to bounce into each other just the right way eventually. Right, there's just so much time and so many combinations.
Yeah, so so much water for sitting there for such a long time. Is it kind of the most probable place where life might be elsewhere in our Solar system besides Earth?
That's a great question, you know, if you have to make a bet. Remember we once talked about underground body of water on Mars as well. They've found a body of water kilometers underground on Mars and haven't sampled it. They've just detected it there using like ground penetrating radar, and so that might also have microbes. We don't know. But something really fascinating about Europa is that it's further from Earth. So, for example, if you discover life on Mars, you know, you might make the argument that life started on Earth and got to Mars as rocks got blown off the surface. And you guys should listen to that whole podcast episode we did about it. But Europa is far away. So if life started on Europa, it would probably be unique. It would be separate, it would be distinct, right, it would mean life starting on its own again, not just spreading from Earth or to Earth.
It couldn't have come from us. It must have originated totally separately from life here.
Yeah. And you know, unless our ancient ancestors somehow were spacefaring and landed on Jupiter and you know, seated it with life and then lost that technology and all traces of it were destroyed except for that weird hypothesis, which somebody out that probably believes, Yes, exactly, it would have to start a.
Weird possibility saw in a bad science fiction movie.
You mean the science fiction novel I'm currently writing. What are you talking about that? It's just this idea that one caveman space spaceman. Come on, I icy caveman Aliens. That's right, I'm crazy spaceman iceman. Isn't that the SATURD Night Live episode? Anyway? Yeah, let's dig into it. Let's talk about why Europa attracted people's attention in the first place.
Yeah, let's let's dig to the core of the issue.
Yeah, but we have to start on the surface, because the weirdest thing about Europa is that it's pretty smooth.
Hmmmm, like it's cool.
It is very cold in fact, on the surface. It's not a kind of place you want to go. The temperature on the surface is like minus two hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit on a sunny day. Oh man. But actually, what I meant is that there aren't a lot of craters on the surface because you know, the Solar System is a messy place. There's asteroids and rocks bouncing around everywhere, and basically everything in the Solar System is constantly being bombarded by small rocks, which is while you look in the Moon you see all these craters, right.
So it doesn't have any pimples on its face kind of.
Yeah, exactly. And so the weird thing about Europa is that it has hardly any craters on it, right, It's so smooth, and it doesn't have an atmosphere like Earth. Earth doesn't have a lot of craters because our atmosphere acts like a pillow, you know, it's like a waterbed or something. It slows down the rocks and disperses their energy before they hit the surface. Europa, it has a very slight atmosphere, but not enough to act as a break for any of these rocks. So you would expect, since it's billions of years old, that it would be pummeled with rocks and have lots of holes on its surface, but it doesn't. It's very smooth.
What does that mean.
It means that the surface is pretty young, right, that it hasn't been around very long, or it's being constantly refreshed, right or erased. You know, it's like a chalkboard that somebody comes in and cleans every morning and then you fill it up with equations and then they clean it again, right, or.
Maybe somebody grooms it, somebody.
Out there with a huge rake, Yeah, exactly. The fascinating thing is they tried to estimate the age of the surface of your and you know, it's basically consistent with zero.
You know.
The measurement they get is like fifty million years plus or minus fifty.
Million years just based on the craters, just.
Based on the size and the number of the craters. Yeah, something is going on on the surface of Europa that's refreshing the surface. It's like erasing it.
It's like it's forever young, like it uses bulltox lunar bulltox. Well, let's give people some context. So Europa is it one of the moons of Jupiter, one of the planets in our solar system, And I was reading it's about almost the size of our moon.
And we have a pretty big moon, right, So being close to the size of our moon means you're being pretty big.
So it is a pretty sizable ball of rock or ice out there, and it orbits Jupiter every three and a half days. Mm hmmm, exactly, which probably means that it's sort of sees sunlight has kind of a day night period. We had probably around three and a half days then.
But remember it's much further from the Sun than our planet, and so it gets like one twentieth of the amount of sunlight. The Sun in the sky of Europa is a tiny, tiny dot, whereas Jupiter is mammoth, right, it appears hugely in the sky.
Is that why it's so icy and cold because it's so far away.
Yeah, that's one of the reasons why it's so icing cold. Also, it doesn't have much of an atmosphere, which could you know, collect and keep that warmth on the surface. Yeah, exactly. And also Jupiter is blasting it with radiation. So the surface of Europa is not a very friendly place.
Wait, Jupiter is shooting at it, what do you mean.
Yeah, well Jupiter, you know, like the Sun, Jupiter produces a lot of radiation. You know, it's crazy stuff happening in the core of Jupiter because of all the gravitational pressure produces huge amounts of radiation. And you know, just in general out in space is radiation right from the Sun but also from Jupiter, and there's nothing there's no atmosphere to protect you. So if you were on the surface of your you would get a fatal dose of radiation very quickly.
Oh so it doesn't have an atmosphere.
It has a very very thin atmosphere, essentially, nothing useful to protect you from radiation. So it's not a very hospitable place. It's cold, it's frozen, it's nothing. They're breathe. You're getting cancer every five minutes. You know, there's really nothing in the brochure that would attract you, except of course for the scientific mysteries, right, the things that make you think, what, how could that be? What's going on? Yeah?
Yeah, so the weird thing or the incredible things about Europa. Are what's going on inside of it?
Right? Yeah? So the outside is this water crust, right, it's frozen water crust. It's ice, and you know the ice spikes on the surface are like fifteen meters high. And there was a bunch of spacecraft that flew by Europa and took a bunch of pictures and measurements because they were trying to understand like what is going on with this surface? How is the surface getting reformed? Why is it so smooth, and why is it so good looking? What its exactly? And so what they did was they try to probe the inside of it. They were like, well, what is this made out of? Right? Is there like weird tectonic activity? Because you know on Earth, Earth is very active, right, the plates are always moving and shifting, and so you're getting new surfaces being formed as you know, volcanoes erupt and stuff. So they're wondering maybe it was tectonic activity. So they flu did all these flybys to try to measure what's going on inside, and this is really cool. They just measure the gravitational pull on the satellite from various angles and various directions and they can get a map basically of the density of what's going on inside. Without landing or going inside, they can get a map of the density of the stuff inside the.
Moon from a distance, you can tell these things.
Yeah, yeah, just from gravitational measurement. And NASA does this also on Earth, like NASA can see you know, when your house is sinking by an inch or by a meter or by two meters due to like ground water being sucked up because it's making these very detailed gravitational measurements the effect of the gravity on satellites. So what they found when they did this is that there's this very thick crust, water crust, a water ice crust on the outside, and underneath it is something with the density of water. And they were like, what, how could there be something with a density of water because you have this frozen stuff right which is less dense. And then under that they saw this huge band of something that has the density of liquid water.
Oh so it could be a giant ocean, a giant underground ocean.
Yeah, exactly. And so the best guess is that there's a huge underground ocean of water. And you know, they think it's water because that has the right density and because the outside of Europa is frozen water.
Right.
It's not like something exotic like liquid methane or something. But it's not small. It's not like, you know, two or three cups of water. If you took all the liquid in the oceans of a Europa, it would be two or three times the amount of water on the surface of the Earth.
Wow, in a much smaller ball of rock.
Right, yeah, exactly, exactly. It's much much smaller than the moon. Right, and so it's a thick layer of water. Wow.
Okay, well let's dig into that mystery. But first, let's take a quick break.
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All right, so, Europa is a moon of Jupiter and it's interesting because it's made out of ice, but underneath that ice there's a huge ocean of water.
We think, yeah, exactly, And it gets weirder as you go in. I think, right, so you've got this ice crust on the outside, and then you got this liquid center, right, it's like a candy or something. And then on the inside of that you have this rocky ball with some metal in it. Also, so you have these three basic components and everything is spinning, but it's not really connected. Right, The inside bit, the rocky bit on the inside, is not connected to the shell, the water, the ice shell on the very outside, because there's this liquid, right, so they can slip, and what they think is that the outside is rotating at a different speed from the inside, right, So like the outside is like eventually it laps the inside.
Oh so it's like a shell floating on top of or around a metal core.
I know if you included this in my bad Spaceman Iceman Caveman science fiction novel that I'm supposed to be writing, you would think, oh, this is crazy. This could never happen in real life. I mean, let's get realistic. I love that you look out there in the universe and you find such weird stuff, right, stuff you could never imagine or dream up. Wow.
So it'd be kind of like going to Antarctica and you know there's a huge sheet of ice, but underneath that is sort of there's water, right, Like you could swim underneath these sheets of ice.
Yeah, exactly, it's warmer underneath the sheets of ice, right. And the thing that's providing that warmth that is Jupiter. And it's not the radiation, but Jupiter's gravitational field is constantly squeezing Europa, right, something we call tidal forces, which sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple to understand. You know, the gravity the strength of gravity that falls as the distance, right, So the further way you get from Jupiter, the weaker gravity is. Well, imagine you're a big body, you're like a moon like Europa. Then Jupiter is pulling harder on the bit of you that's closer to Jupiter, and it's not pulling is hard on the bit that's further away. What that means, it's basically trying to pull the moon apart. Right. It's tugging harder on one part than on the other, So it's trying to pull the moon apart. This is what we call a tidal.
Force that generates heat and warmth.
Yeah, it's like you know, it's like Jupiter's taking his hand and squeezing it constantly, right, and that's pumping energy into it. It's like it's like an engine, right, Jupiter's gravitational field.
It's like taking an orange and like massaging it kind of liquid.
It's like hot stone massage for a whole moon. Right.
And there's a huge ocean and it's the ice cross It's huge. It's like one hundred kilometers thick.
Yeah. They don't know exactly how thick it is. That's difficult. They're going to figure that out when they send the next satellite there, but they estimate around one hundred kilometers thick. Yeah, and the ice crust is being cracked constantly.
Right.
If you're going to massage something which is like a sphere of ice, then you're gonna end up cracking its shell. And so we see all these stripes on these lines on the surface of Europa, not craters, right, it's smooth. It's pretty smooth from the crater point of view. But there are these cracks which they think come from these tidal forces. Squeezing the ice.
Oh on ice. Okay, so there are wrinkles on this boatogs perfect.
Space, just like you see an Orange County. No plastic surgery ever really looks good.
Well, I also read this cool thing that Europa has water volcanoes.
I know, it just gets crazier and crazier. Right, So what happens when you have high pressure water trapped under ice and then you squeeze that ice, Well, you're gonna get cracks and then the water is gonna spew out. And so we have these pictures from Hubble. We pointed Hubble at Europa and they have these pictures of what looks like plumes of water. Right, they're basically water volcanoes. The ice cracks and the water shoots up. And these are not small, you know, they go up like two hundred kilometers into space. That's like, you know, multiple times the height of Mount Everest. Wow, a volcano on Earth shooting lava, you know, six times the height of Mount Everest, that would be an event.
Yeah, it's like a ginormous geyser, but.
Yes, scale exactly, and you know it makes Earth feel like a calm place. You know, we have like volcanoes and earthquakes and stuff. But the more you look out into the Solar System, the more you discover like, wow, other planets and moons are much more extreme than the stuff on Earth. Earth is like a pretty calm and cozy place to live. Yeah, and just one qualifier on the water plumes. You know, there is a picture from Hubble that chose something that looks like a plume. Scientists are still a little skeptical, right, They're not one hundred percent sure that there really are water plumes. But it's also connected to this idea of the surface, right, it could be that the reason the surface is getting reformed, the reason it looks smooth, is that like all these cracks are appearing, and maybe the ice is turning over or you know, getting rotated somehow, or you know, they don't fully understand it. It's hard to come up with a model that explains how the surface gets reformed. But it might have something to do with, you know, all this activity under the ice breaking it, sucking some of it down and sending up new pieces to get hit by asteroids.
Kind of like the ice sheets and Antarctica. I keep moving and shifting.
And yeah, and reform exactly.
So if you were to build a house there, it might not be there in fifty million years.
That's right. One more reason not to build a house on Europa.
Okay, so that's Europa. It's pretty cool. So if you flew there and landed, it would sort of feel like you're on the Moon kind of. And then if you drilled the hole one hundred kilometers deep, you would find a huge ocean and you could potentially swim in it, right, because it's sort of around the same density as the water that we have here.
Yeah, exactly. And you know, the Moon is mostly rock, whereas this planet when you land on, it'll be mostly water ice. And they have pictures from Europa and it looks like not a very friendly place. Land is like spikes of these water ice that reach up like fifteen meters. You know, it's like these needle thin i am super sharp icicles on the surface. So it's not a friendly place. It's not like, hey, come look, land on me. Right in comparison, the Moon is a much friendly place. But you're right, there's this ocean of water under the ice.
It wouldn't be a smooth landing if you try to get there.
That's right. It's sort of like that friend you have, you know, who's like sort of grumpy on the outside, but then when they get home, they're nice and friendly.
You know.
Europe is like that. It's really unfriendly and unwelcoming on the outside, but it has this chewy candy center, right, this ocean of water at the right temperature for life.
And it has smooth skin. That's the other.
Friend exactly. So we don't know too much about what's in that water. That's really the biggest question, Like that's the organic molecules in there. Is it too salty for life?
You know, Oh, it could be salt water.
Yeah, it could be salty, right, or who.
Knows what else it could be. You could have others, you know, it could have high concentrations of other things. Right, it could be like water, but it could be really dangerous for us to drink.
Yeah, exactly. So could certainly be toxic for us. But you know, life on Earth has evolved in lots of places that are toxic for us. It's really pretty incredible what you get when you have a lot of time and a lot of volume. So life on Earth, for example, can survive even in places with no sun. Right, Folks out there might be asking, Wait a second, how can you have life under the ocean if there's a crust on top and it's totally dark, Right, it's not a warm, balmy ocean in the Caribbean. It's totally black, right, it's jet black.
But that happens here on Earth.
That happens here on Earth also exactly. Yeah, you have places under the water where there's heat escaping from the Earth's crust, from the Earth's core and heats up the water and bubbles it up and stuff. And the same thing we think is happening on Europa. Remember, Jupiter is massaging it and creating all this activity inside of it, and some of that's creating heat, which is warming up the water, and that's enough energy for life.
Yeah, So that's the big question. That's what's so interesting about Europa is that there could be life in it. In these giant oceans too.
It there certainly could be.
Yeah, So what's the probability do you think that there is life in there?
That's a great question, and you know, unfortunately we don't really have a great scientific answer to that, you know, because we've never gotten data from other places, right, we haven't ever sampled alien water you know, if we had done it one hundred times and we'd only seen life once, then we'd know, oh, a, life is pretty rare. But the only time we've ever looked at water is here on Earth, and so we have no information, right, And that's exactly why we want to do this. We want to get sample number two to understand and you know, if sample number two has life in it, also, if two totally separate examples both have life, Wow, then the possibilities for life are huge. Because you look out into the sky and there's lots of stars with lots of planets, a lot of them have liquid water. And if the probability for there to be life and any sample of liquid water is larger than any tiny amount, that means just a huge amount of life out there. So it'd be mind blowing. But unfortunately we don't really have an answer.
Well, it's exciting to think about because Europa does have kind of all the ingredients for life right that we know about water, energy, chemistry, compounds from rocks and things like that.
Right exactly, And that ocean is conveniently shielded from Jupiter's harmful radiation by the one hundred kilometers or so.
Of ice, Like, we have our atmosphere to protect us. Those Europians would have the ice sheet to protect them.
Yeah, and you know, I imagine there's intelligent life on Europa, right, What would they think of their planet? Like do they think of the ice the way we think of the atmosphere, right, Like we think of the edge of the Earth as the surface right where the rock ends, but really the atmosphere is part of the Earth. Maybe they would think of the edge of Europa as like the top of the water. The rest of it is what they would call atmosphere, you know.
Right, or their worldview would be kind of like our worldview two thousand years ago, where we think that maybe there's a ceiling to the sky.
Yeah, like they literally do have a ceiling, right Yeah. Wow. Imagine being intelligent life in Europa and creating like a whole cosmology and mythology about how the universe works, and then drilling out and discovering that there's an enormous universe out there. Wow, that would be mind blowing.
That would be amazing. So it is possible that there is life in Europa.
It's totally possible. And you know, I think if you ask scientists they're not signed. Their non scientific opinion would be it's a good chance, and that's why we're also excited. That's why we're spending billions of dollars to send missions out there to figure it out.
All right, that's pretty cool. All right, let's let's jump into what these plans are to get there and to study it. But first, let's take another quick break.
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I'm so excited about life on Europa.
Why love meeting Europeans. Europeans they're so sophisticated and.
The Quissants and Europa are fantastic. We No, I just think it's incredible. It's so weird and interesting, and honestly, I believe this life there.
You just want to see Aquaman in real life.
I want to see life on another place other than Earth, and I'm just desperate to discover it and I can't wait I mean, it's out there waiting for us, and we just don't know the answer. We will know soon. I'm just so impatient.
But what do you think that instinct comes from? Like, what is it that makes you want to confirm that there's life elsewhere? Or to meet other life out there?
Like you?
Aren't you surrounded by other people already and.
I hate most of them, right, So why would I want to meet anybody else? No, even though I'm an introvert, I do want to meet life on other planets. But mostly I think to answer pretty basic questions, you know, like what is the context of our existence? Are we alone in the universe or not? It changes everything. If we're not alone, you know, it means something about how special we are, how unusual we are. It just it changes the whole context of the human experience. You know, religion out the window, right. If there's life in other places, well.
I mean, if if we find life elsewhere, obviously we go from one data point of life to two data points, which is, you know, one hundred percent increase. But would that really tell you that much about the rest of the universe? You still have that question? I mean, you would have the probability or double the probability, but it's you still wouldn't know what the actual probability is.
No, but you have a much much better estimate, and you know it must be a lot larger than zero. Right, Because you could say that life on Earth is not an independent test because we are here to ask the question. We wouldn't be asking the question if we were there wasn't life on Earth. So it could be that we're the only life in the universe and we're asking the question because we're alive. So what we need is an independent data point. So if we go and get a sample from another place that hasn't been infected by Earth, it'll tell us independently how likely life is to exist. And yeah, it's only one data point, but if in one data point you get a positive response, that means the answer must be a lot more than zero. Right, or you were crazy, crazy, crazy lucky. But much more likely would be that the answer is fifty percent. You know, half the time you get life.
Yeah, well let's get let's get into it.
Now.
What are humans's plans to go to Europa and check out what's underneath all that ice? To poke through the ice?
Well, I'm building something in my backyard right now, because they're desperate to know, and I can't wait.
See you later.
That's right, Daniel's final European vacation. Of No, we have several plans. The most imminent one is called the Clipper, and this is something being developed by JPL and others. And I spoke to an expert there who gave me so much useful information. It was really fantastic. She's so excited. And this is something that we planned that they plan to launch in like twenty twenty three, So it's you know, a few years away before it even gets out into space, and then it would take a few years to get there.
By then you might be already be there, Daniel.
You know, by then our civilization might just be smoking rubble anyway, and it'd be nobody to send answers back to right the way things are going exactly. But the interesting thing about this is that it's not going to land a landing on you. Europa is a whole other problem, which we'll talk about later. This one's just going to do a bunch of fly bys. Also, you can't really orbit Europa.
You can't, You cannot, Why not.
Because the radiation is crazy so if you go into orbit around Europa, all our electronics that will be fried, and the solar cells and all that stuff will be fried in weeks.
It's like a one way trip.
Yeah. So instead of orbiting Europa, it's going to do a bunch of flybys, right. It's like, you know, it's going to run through It's like running through the sprinklers instead of getting downed. It's going to do like, you know, several dozen flybys to get these measurements.
It's going to maybe like orbit Jupiter, or it's going to orbit the whole Sour system, but each time it's going to go near Europa to take some pictures.
Yeah, exactly. I think it's going to orbit Jupiter and it's going to try to do as many flybys by Europe as possible. And you know, my hope is that there's a huge water volcano eruption right when it's flying by, and then it could fly through.
That spray hmm and get some water.
Yeah.
And I asked Cynthia from JPL, I said, what do you think is going to happen? And she said, well, I don't think we're gonna fly through it and get hit by a fish, which is disappointing because that was actually my mental image is like.
Of course it's going to be like some weird octopus probably obviously not a fish exactly.
The satellite's gone offline. What happened, right, some enormous two hundred kilometer sized shark like jumps up and bites it. No, but it would be amazing to sample it. And this instrument, sorry, this this thing, the Europea Clipper has lots of useful instruments on board. One thing is an ice penetrating radar that can use to like measure the ice and figure out how deep it is and sort of image the inside of the planet.
Right, and there's another mission out there to being prepared to actually get even closer.
Yeah, that's right, but that's years away. And so I'm really hoping that the Europea Clipper gives us some useful information because also on board from the Clipper is something called a mass spectrometer, And this is a really fancy piece of chemical equipment that tells you basically what's in some stuff. You know, how heavy are all the molecules in something. So if you could like fly through a water plume, or even if you don't get that lucky, you know, there's going to be like little bits of Europe and just sort of floating out in the space nearby it. Because this constant impacts from small meteors spewing stuff into space. You could still sample that water ice and try to figure out what's in it, right, and so that might be really interesting hints of life.
Right. So we're still many many years away from actually sending something that will land there and actually drill through the ice, right, Like, that's not coming anytime soon because it's.
Dangerous time soon.
Yeah, spiky, and there's boattox everywhere and radiation.
But I was wondering if you could determine if you could discover life just from what you measure using the europe A clipper, Like if you get a sample of this water, say, you know, we get really lucky and the surface opens up and spews a volcano, and the clipper flies by and snatches some of that water, right, then you could study it with this mass spec And so I asked my wife, who is a microbiologist and she's an expert in these kind of things, I said, could you conclusively say that there's life in a drop of water from an alien ocean just from understanding the mass spec information, just from knowing basically what molecules are in there.
But is the clipper going to have like a little cup out there trying to catch water.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely it's going to have it can sample and they'll be able to do this measurement, this mass spec and tell us like what molecules are in there and what are their relative fractions? Wow?
And could you tell if there was life?
Unfortunately, I don't think you could. All you can tell is like, here's a bunch of molecules, right, And but you can there's not going to be a microscope on board, and you can't like see this thing, these little bugs. If there's like microbes in there, you can't like see them metabolizing or living or anything like that, unfortunately. And one of the reasons is that there's just so much complex stuff going on in life.
You know.
I asked her the same question about like pond water. If you took a bunch of pond water from Earth and put it through the same instrument, could you argue conclusively there's life and there's just too much stuff going on. We don't even really understand all the things that are happening even here on Earth. It's such a big, messy blob. So I think you need to have a microscope, and you'd need a sample of the water before it got spewed out into space. So you're right, we should go further and deeper, and we should dig into those oceans.
You would need to see the actual giant space shark.
Exactly exactly. But you know, how are you going to land on a moon super far away and drill like, you know, kilometers and kilometers into ice like the do something we've accomplished on Earth.
Humans can do it, Clan, You mean engineers can do it? Engineers, Yeah, don't put the physicists in charge as the engineers. You won't spend as much money and they'll get it done.
Well. They have plans for another one. They have plans for a lander. It's going to go you know, years later, and but this one's only going to be on the for a few weeks because it's going to get fried by radiation and it's only going to drill down about ten centimeters, not enough to go through the ice.
Wow, all right, well, I think that's the mystery of Europa. It's pretty cool to think that there is a moon out there in our solar system with a giant ocean that's just sitting there waiting for us to go there and dip our toes in it.
I know it's a mystery, it's close by, it's tantalizing, it's calling to us. And the amazing thing to me is we will know the answer. It might take us five years or ten years or forty years, but eventually humans or their robots will go to Europe and we'll drill into that ocean and we will know if there's something swimming around slimy, you know, listening to underground dance tracks and having a great time, or if it's just another sterile blob out there in space.
There could be something living there right now, that's right need They.
Could be preparing something to be sent to Earth. Well, what if our landers crossed in space they're like, hey, where you going?
It would be such a strategy. They crashed into each other and you would never know.
Where are you going?
Man?
I signaled left? What are you talking about?
My laughter?
Your last crash.
At least they would answer the question though, if there's life out there. They're not great drivers, but at least they're alive all right.
I hope that was a great European Europen vacation. European vacation for you guys out there.
All right. Tune in next time for more mysteries of the universe.
Thanks for listening.
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