Okay, not on Europa really, but under 600 feet of ice. As soon as I heard about that I was thinking about Europa, just like the scientists in the story.
I think we’ll probably find life elsewhere in the Solar System sooner or later.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
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I think the odds aren’t that bad for Europa. If I were to pick a place to look, that would be on the top of my list.
Me too. My guess is life is quite common in the universe, but sentience is extremely rare since a whole lot of things have to happen for it to appear.
I actually suspect sort of the opposite, that once sentience develops it goes extremely quickly to levels of intelligence far beyond our own right now–and we just aren’t interesting enough yet to the others. Yet.
I suspect it’ll be very rare, more like the “Dune universe” or the “Foundation universe” than the “Star Wars universe” of lots of sentient critters. But we won’t know for awhile. My guess is based on two factors: 1 – it took several billion years for sentience to appear on Earth, and 2 – the Earth appears to have lots of very unusual properties such as a large moon that minimizes its wobble, a molten core that generates a magnetic field which protects us from all sorts of cosmic nastiness, etc. But we won’t _know_ for a long while…
If I were hugely rich, I’d endow a professorship in comparative science fiction & different ideas on “life cosmology”…
SAVE EUROPA
Heh.
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