“Through how many dimensions and how many media will life have to pass? Down how many roads among the stars must man propel himself in search of the final secret?” asked scientist and philosopher Loren Eiseley with almost poetic, lyrical insight in The Immense Journey.
“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In Space Odyssey 2001, HAL 9000, the Heuristically Programmed Algorithmic Computer, consigned the crew commander to his death by refusing to open the pod bay doors. Leaping forward to today, with life hopefully transcending Arthur C. Clarke’s fiction, NASA has announced a visionary step: that intelligent computer systems will be installed on space probes to direct the search for life on distant planets and moons, starting with the 2022/23 ESA ExoMars mission, before moving beyond to moons such as Jupiter’s Europa, and of Saturn’s Enceladus and Titan.
This YouTube episode of The Galaxy Report takes us on journey to Jupiter’s storied, ocean moon, Europa. Arthur C. Clarke, author of Space Odyssey 2001, famously warned “attempt no landing” to explore Europa, the most intriguing of Jupiter’s 79 moons, perhaps anticipating an “almost racing certainty” that there’s alien life there.Which leads to the question: Could there be fossils on Europa’s surface that may be millions of years old?
There’s been increasing speculation that many of the Milky Way’s more than 4,100 known exoplanets might resemble the ocean worlds of Jupiter’s storied moon Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus. “So if we’re thinking about these places as being possibly habitable, maybe bigger versions of them in other planetary systems are habitable too,” says NASA’s Lynnae Quick about planets with oceans that may be orbiting many of our galaxy’s one trillion stars.
New research based on huge simulations involving hundreds of processors on the Australian National Computing Infrastructure using parameters run through a unique geodynamics code simulating the development of the interior of planets, showed that many early planets would have tended to develop a magnetic field and plate tectonics than planets formed later in the Milky Way, which is favorable to the development of life.
