| Bill Nye (The Science Guy!) describes the possibility of discovering life on Europa, arguing that we might make such a discovery in as little as 20 or 30 years. Bill is the CEO of the Planetary Society (http://planetary.org/). Don't miss new Big Think videos! Subscribe by clicking here: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Find out more at http://billnye.com/ Bill Nye: What we at the Planetary Society do is do our best to advance space science and exploration. We strongly believe that the search for life is worthy because it would change the world. So, the two logical places to look in the solar system are Mars and this moon of Jupiter called Europa. And if you've never seen Europa I encourage you to go out there and take a look. You need a telescope or binoculars and look at Jupiter. Jupiter is a very bright object. Go to Planetary.org we'll show you where it is. And you can see they look like pinpricks of light, the same pinpricks of light that Galileo himself observed when he took what was nominally a military instrument, a telescope for looking at the other team, your enemy on the other hilltop, and pointed it at the sky. Not only did he point it at the sky, he pointed it at the sky at night. And so he found Jupiter and he found these four moons, which we nowadays call the Galilean moons after him. But meanwhile dozens of other moons have been found, dozens. And the reason we talk about Europa so often and so much in my little space community is because it has twice as much seawater as the Earth. And for years people who looked at Europa did not think it was good or well advised to plan a mission there because of the great expense. You would have to have a lander and then you'd have to have some kind of amazing drill to drill through, pick a number, 20 or 50 km of ice to get to this seawater. And so the surface of Europa is frozen. It's a crust of ice, water ice, but below it is liquid water and it's kept liquid by the gravitational or what we call tidal action of Europa's orbit with this massive Jupiter. Europa's orbital period is 85 hours. And I got to tell you imagine the moon going around the earth every two days, every three days. Instead of a month you'd have a three-day period. It would be really short, a short month. And so this keeps - like squeezing a rubber ball it keeps Europa warm so there’s seawater. So, it's people who have looked at what it takes to be a living thing, which nowadays these people nowadays call themselves, we like to call ourselves, itself astrobiology. Astrobiologists have thought deeply about what it takes to be a living thing. You've got to have a membrane or a wall, something that separates you from what's not you and you'd probably have to have a liquid, a solvent. And the best solvent anybody can come up with is water. so with the gravitational action and the frozen icy crust, Europa shoots geysers of water out into space all the time. So now it would be possible, instead of landing th |
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