Europa Europa

My Favorite Science News Story from 2024

The Europa Clipper mission, launched by NASA in October of 2024, will be the first dedicated mission to an ice-covered world with a known subsurface ocean ever, and will arrive at Jupiter’s moon Europa in 2030 after two gravity assists, from Mars and Earth, in 2025 and 2026 respectively.

-BigThink.com

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

-Carl Sagan

In my life I have found two things of priceless worth - learning and loving. Nothing else - not fame, not power, not achievement for its own sake - can possible have the same lasting value. For when your life is over, if you can say 'I have learned' and 'I have loved,' you will also be able to say 'I have been happy’.

-Arthur C. Clarke

Europa - covered in massive striations caused by its ice shell cracking and refreezing… while 3-5 miles of salty, liquid water flows below, on contact with the core and thermal vents and the elements and minerals that could construct and fuel life.

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There are many things that I read about every day but rarely write about. They function as vehicles for pure imagination and as explorations of wonder about reality. However, I have few opinions on them and, not being a scientist, I have no useful information to add. I just enjoy reading and thinking about them. Here are a few:

1. Early human/hominid migration and evolution (for the genetic detective work of our species during the past 100,00 years or so I highly recommend

   Razib Khan
   ’s Substack)

2. Fungus (Paul Stamets)

3. Early microbial life on Earth

4. Theoretical physics and quantum mechanics (PBS Spacetime)

5. Astrophysics & cosmology (Anthrofuturism, Anton Petrov, John Michael Godier)

So many things feed into my love of astrophysics: the sci-fi nerd’s wide-ranging speculation, the contemplation of vast scales and energy levels, the lure of literally countless stars and worlds out there: ice shell moons, rogue planets, gas giants, ice giants, neutron stars, red giants, white dwarfs… I love it all.

The Lure of Space: Answering Objections

That’s one thing I probably should emphasize more than I do: I don’t criticize social justice so much simply because I disagree with it. I disagree with lots of things. Social justice ideology/Critical Theory is uniquely bad, in my opinion, because (1) it runs counter to (all) the solid life philosophies I know (Buddhism, Stoicism, libertarianism, Christianity) and (2) it’s wasting the time and resources of many, many otherwise intelligent people and useful organizations.

The Apollo missions were criticized for demonstrating an insufficient level of regard for earthbound poverty and terrestrial problems but, with respect, earthbound poverty is (in the West) mostly a private or communal affair-not a civilizational one. Simply put, the federal government doesn’t need to allocate many more resources toward alleviating poverty because it never seems to work and instead it just makes a lot of people’s lives easier. I’m okay with that-except that humans often tend to put their energies into gluttony and promiscuity and sedentary pursuits when their lives get easier. This is not a diatribe against the poor-everyone seeks and enjoys easy living. It is a claim that we could spend billions and billions of extra dollars on nutrition and health benefits and mostly see it end up in the hands of Archer-Daniels Midland, and health insurance companies, and diabetes medicine manufacturers (whereas we could see incalculable and exponential improvements in health and education if people simply developed better habits). To be absolutely clear, what I am saying is that if we gave every poor person in the United States enough money to bump them into the middle class (ignoring the massive inflationary effects such a wealth transfer would have) some minority share of those people would invest in small businesses and education and the necessities or life-but most would buy clothes and cars and televisions. The long-term wealth distribution in the United States would barely change. That’s because poverty is largely (not exclusively) an issue of poor habits and addiction and disorganized lives and personality pathologies. Probably the single greatest factor driving poverty is the explosion of single-parent homes, which are almost entirely arrangements that originate in the personal choices of the adults (or minors) involved. It’s a highly disagreeable fact for the Left to confront (and so they mostly do not confront it) but it’s a fact nonetheless. I would make a significant bet that I’ve spent more time living below the poverty line than at least 90% of my readers so my characterization of poverty is not elitism. It’s familiarity. My claim could be incorrect but it’s not incorrect simply because it offends anyone’s sensibilities. It’s only incorrect if it’s incorrect and if you want to point me to the data that indicates that this is the case I will gladly read it and respond to it. Giving trillions of dollars to the American poor will not erase American poverty.

What about global poverty? Global poverty is qualitatively different than American poverty. American poverty is mostly a matter of misspent money and inconvenience and a hundred petty indignities and, sometimes, the inability to afford something really important (like medical care). I’ve never known any person who was not deeply mentally ill or in the throes of addiction who wasn’t able to feed themselves and find shelter (shelter certainly includes automobiles) in the United States. By that standard America has already solved the most serious instances of poverty. Yet there are starving people and hordes of refugees elsewhere. Could we solve their problems with massive wealth transfers? Probably, but that is not the purpose of government, and such a program would be unpopular with democratic voters. If giving billions of dollars to foreigners in order to feed their children was popular with (let’s say) 100 million Americans… then each of those people who favor that act could give $50-and immediately generate $5 billion. If charity is popular no government should be needed. If it’s not, then a democratic government probably shouldn’t embark upon it.

So, the main objections I often hear to “whitey on the moon” seem to be somewhat specious. Could that money be better spent here on Earth? Almost certainly. Would it? Given the technological and scientific advances gained through space exploration and manned missions and extraplanetary probes and satellite launches I strongly doubt it.

I will be honest though: I do not approach space exploration from a utilitarian point of view. My feelings on the question are just feelings and my wishes are much more deeply connected to the mystery of space and a kind of mythical drive to expand the frontiers of human existence. Far from making the proposals illegitimate, though, I think such impulses validate them. Mythical impulses have probably driven every great project of exploration throughout history. They’ve certainly been fundamental to wars and nation-building. To those (probably few) progressives reading this I would submit that their impulse to spread their ideology across the world and undo historical inequities and teach the young ‘tolerance’ (as they define the word) and erase tradition and distinction is a similarly mythical undertaking. It’s certainly not rational. I challenge you to formulate a rational argument for such an endeavor without invoking Western (and therefore racist) ideas like the fundamental civic equality of all people, or human rights, or utilitarianism, or Marxism, or rational materialism, or feminism, or humanism. Be honest, at least with yourself: your dreams are sub-logical, and emotional, just like everyone else’s.

Wandering Our Neighborhood

Measuring distance within our solar system is (sometimes) done using AU’s - astronomical units. 1 AU = the average distance between the Earth and the sun. As you can see from the image above, Jupiter is (on average) more than 10x farther from Earth than is Mars, and initial travel times to Mars would be measured in months, using current technologies.

There are fascinating proposals like Project Breakthrough Starshot (which proposes using small and light probes-less than a pound-which are accelerated to some large percentage of light speed using earth-based lasers, focused on the probes). Using such tools we could reach Proxima Centauri in a matter of years (or decades). There are O’Neill cylinders (like the one featured in the final act of the Christopher Nolan film Interstellar, 2014, below). There’s the possibility of detonating nuclear bombs in…

…space behind a space craft (protected by a generous blast shield) which could accelerate the craft to 10,000 km/s, first explicated in Freeman Dyson and DARPA’s Project Orion. There’s the eminently sensible idea of placing launch ports on the surface of the moon, allowing outgoing craft to avoid contending with the Earth’s gravity and therefore giving them much more propulsion per mass of accelerant. I’m no scientist, but these ideas thrill my imagination in a way that food stamps and public housing do not… and I suspect (like Carl Sagan and other cosmic visionaries of the past) that focusing on the challenges of space might help to address our fractious and tribal and deeply irrational impulses somewhat. It certainly wouldn’t hurt.

I don’t remember ever learning about the incomprehensible scale of the universe in school-or perhaps the figures were communicated and they just bounced off my juvenile brain (which is pretty much what still happens). However, I remember learning about cosmology in elementary school and fully absorbing the widespread assumption that extraterrestrial life might be out there somewhere but almost certainly isn’t in our solar system. Mars is a desert with the wispiest of atmospheres, Venus is a CO2-drenched hellscape with a runaway greenhouse effect that long ago swelled its the surface pressure to a level hundreds of times that of Earth. Saturn’s moon Titan has a considerable atmosphere (the only not-Terran planetary body which seems to, other than Venus) but it’s also hundreds of degrees below freezing. It has a liquid cycle (like Earth’s ocean-rain-glacier-river-etc. sequence) but the liquid in question is methane, which is cold enough to flow like water on Titan’s surface. Titan, to put it another way, doesn’t seem like a promising place for recognizable carbon-based life, despite its thick atmosphere.

So, what then? What planet’s surface could possibly sustain life? Surely not Mercury… or Mars. Surely not Pluto-which will always be a planet in my book. The ice and gas giants (Uranus, Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn, respectively) might not even have surfaces and if they do, they’re crushed under unimaginable weights of gaseous/liquid/crystalline/superheated elements. No life. The obvious answer is that no planet’s surface could generate or sustain anything like what we imagine life to be. But… perhaps the subsurface?

The moons of Jupiter are variegated and myriad. No one is actually quite sure exactly how many there are, but certainly more than 65. The most recent one to be discovered was S/2010 J 2 (discovered in 2010). It is barely a mile across. Jupiter’s titanic mass (which is greater than every other non-solar body in the solar system combined) ends up sweeping up and attracting or deflecting a tremendous amount of debris, which is probably protective of the inner solar system. Leda, another moon, is about 10 miles in diameter. However, there are 4 large moons, known as the Jovian satellites, which have become increasingly interesting to cosmologists: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. Add to these the two largest moons of Saturn (Titan and Enceladus) and then consider this scenario: imagine a rocky world, covered in water-possibly far more water than exists on Earth. Without a gaseous atmosphere or a magnetic field or Earth’s comfy proximity to Sol, our sun, the ice would surely freeze rock-hard. However, the pressure of the planet’s mass squeezing in on itself (which is enough to keep the Earth’s silicate and iron core and inner mantle molten) would create heat, as would radioactive compounds in the core, as would the massive tidal flexing of any nearby orbital body. If you take a lump of silly putty and knead and stretch and squeeze and twist it the lump will grow warm, warmer than the hands manipulating it. That is the principle of tidal flexing. A moon orbiting a giant world could see its interior pulled and stretched with such force that the heat of the friction could heat a greater volume of water to liquid temperatures than all of the water on Earth combined. Tidal flexing seems to be exactly what is happening, creating liquid oceans on Ganymede, Enceladus, Callisto… and Europa. And Europa has such a volume of water. It appears to be salty, and liquid.

Europa

A message from HAL (and aliens, probably) in 2001: A Space Odyssey

Europa has a frozen outer shell, which is solid to depths of approximately 3-5 miles. Below that lie 7 miles of warmer ice, transitioning gradually (probably including vast trapped pockets of liquid water, which have been observed under the Antarctic ice sheet to contain microbial life).

Unlike anything documented in the past, these Antarctic microbial mats represent colonies of microorganisms comprised of layered films, the largest of which were an estimated 40 centimeters high and 60 centimeters wide, covering miles.

Under that gradually warming ice superstructure lies 3-5 miles of liquid water, covering the rocky core entirely, and containing perhaps 2-3x as much liquid water as lies on Earth. We know that this liquid layer exists, due to radar data and the asynchronous movement of the planet’s surface (relative to the moon’s axial rotation) and due to the geysers of liquid water that often spurt into space to heights of more than 100 miles.

Salty water on Europa would be a momentous discovery because it would indicate that the planet’s liquid oceans are in contact with the rocky core. It would imply that the minerals and compounds which (somehow) instigated abiogenesis on Earth are flowing through the Europan depths, interacting with thermal vents and energy gradients and (perhaps) amino acids and organic molecules. Europa has been in its current state for probably billions of years (we think). It only took perhaps 100 million years for Earth’s newly cooled surface (after the Hadean epoch) for self-replicating organisms to suddenly appear. What might lie beneath those miles of ice?

(K.P. Hand et al., Europa Clipper/NASA, 2017)

We may have discovered traces of biological activity in the clouds of Venus or the soil of Mars. Evidence is considerable, but the strict prudence of scientists has held in this regard-still, NASA has already twice declared that extraterrestrial life has been discovered (a little known fact). Personally, I find the evidence of Martian microbes to be very compelling. However, those environments have real logical downsides: they’re not hospitable ecosystems. (Venus’s temperature and water composition becomes positively earthlike-but only miles about the surface. Could microbes have retreated to those heights to float around and survive in the clouds? The NASA DAVINCI mission will investigate). Life conceptually seems to require some barrier to separate its stored information from the environment and preserve its fidelity over time, some kind of liquid solvent to drive chemical processes and energy flows, and an energy input. There are wild speculations about ‘Dyson’s sunflowers’ and self-replicating patterns in the otherworldly masses of stars or neutron stars, but they’re thought experiments more than anything. If we found such life we would probably not even recognize it. If our galaxy or our Earth is ‘alive’ or conscious (why not? They preserve and transmit information; they’re stable through time; they contain complex interactions and energy gradients and structures and transfer patterns… much like the human brain) we may never know. But the prospect of relatively more ‘conventional’ life forms is intensely exciting (to me and to scientists) and if we found extraterrestrial life forms in our solar system we would know that life is surely replete throughout our universe. It might barely make a dent in our endlessly distractible and polluted petri dish of our daily media/cultural dialogue, but it would surely change our collective conception of ourselves and our place in the universe. Perhaps we need such a revelation, as a reminder that life is brief and precious and infinitely strange. We used to be challenged with such reminders regularly, with wars and starvation and family deaths and backyard burials and ghosts and spirits and psychedelic communions, in what Carl Sagan called the ‘demon-haunted world.’ Well, the demons have gone but so has much of the magic, and the celebration of virtue and heroism, and the contemplation of things greater than ourselves. Life on Europa would be, if nothing else, one more reminder that this reality that we inhabit is not and never has been centered around the odd phenomenon of “modern life” (with all its selfishness and fussiness and profound entitlement).

Current Events

You may have to sift through the muck a bit to find news of space exploration, but multiple missions are launched worldwide every year, and dozens are in the planning and proposal phase, such as:

• NASA’s Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have all made flybys of Jupiter and its moons.

• NASA’s Juno mission (which arrived to orbit the planet in 2016) has been orbiting Jupiter and has made close flybys of Europa to investigate its subsurface activity and water geysers. May of our photos have been transmitted from this probe.

Orbital trajectories of the Juno mission’s path around Jupiter

• European Space Agency (ESA)’s JUICE Mission: The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE), launched in April 2023, will focus on Jupiter’s Galilean moons, including Europa. While its primary target is Ganymede, it will also conduct flybys of Europa to gather data on its surface and subsurface.

• NASA’s Europa Clipper: Launched on October 14, 2024, this flagship mission will conduct detailed reconnaissance of Europa’s ice shell and subsurface ocean. It will carry a suite of instruments, including ice-penetrating radar, spectrometers, and cameras, to study the moon’s surface composition, ice thickness, and potential plumes of water vapor erupting from the ocean.

• Concepts for future missions include landers equipped with seismometers to study the ice shell and submersibles (cryobots) to explore the ocean directly. These will take decades to develop and commission.

Wouldn’t you rather read about them than another editorial about Jan. 6th, or another study about the deleterious effects of screen time on teenagers?

Parting Thoughts

That strange feeling which seems to saturate modernity has a few elements, I think. Information flows are unnaturally rapid and modern events are usually stage-managed to some extent, like simulacra. Our lives are very separated and consumption-focused. Our communities and families are weaker and more estranged. Our existences are full of purchases and entertainment and distractions, but this isn’t necessarily how we evolved to live. The tolls that strange ideas and loneliness and relentless subjectivity take on our mental health are underappreciated.

Our mental health is suffering. People seem to struggle to find raisons d'être, healthy models of living, compelling stories.

I enjoy considering the nature of an ice shell moon millions of miles away. I enjoy contemplating its strange dark currents and its magma flows and its heat vents… and, possibly, its alien life. Ultimately these are just stories that I tell myself but we all need stories. There are certainly worse ones on offer. One day I hope to tell these stories to my children. Wonder, curiosity, exploration, our future-what is life aside from these things?

The distinction between natural and supernatural, in fact, broke down, and when it had done so, one realized how great a comfort it had been—how it had eased the burden of intolerable strangeness which this universe imposes on us by dividing it into two halves and encouraging the mind never to think of both in the same context. What price we may have paid for this comfort in the way of false security and accepted confusion of thought is another matter.

-C. S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

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