The futile quest for ET life continues
“Jupiter’s moon Europa can potentially host extant life.” Those were the opening words of a Nature Astronomy research paper by scientists from four prestigious space-research agencies.
NASA is planning close flybys of Europa in 2024, to find sites where a robot could land and dig for life. Twenty cm (8 in) of overlying ice was supposedly deep enough to shield life’s molecules from destruction by surface radiation.
But the paper says small rocks impacting from space keep churning up the surface, as if digging a garden. This exposes more of the subsurface to the damaging radiation, so the digging has to be at least 50% deeper again.
After many years of fruitless searching, the only place in the universe we know for certain that life exists is Earth. It’s curious how these institutions continue to devote so many resources to a fruitless exercise based on no evidence. The more we learn from biology, chemistry, thermodynamics, etc. the more we realize ‘life from chemicals’ is impossible.
- Costello, E.S., Phillips, C.B., Lucey, P.G., and Ghent, R.R, Impact gardening on Europa and repercussions for possible biosignatures, Nature Astronomy 2021.
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