Swimming in a Far Away Ocean

One lovely but lonely high school day, I was drawing planets. Yeah, kind of weird. But, according to my own unconscious desire of escape which I barely come to understand years later, I was drawing a planet that could possibly be my new home. I imagined a massive planet with a humongous ocean and human made skyscrapers growing from the sea that used hydroelectric and hydraulic energy as a renewable fuel source, as if water and its power was our greatest tool and all our structures encompass that feeling of being one with it. Pretty eco-friendly for a 14 year old.

Suddenly, and thankfully for a break in trigonometry in Math class, my best friend Rodrigo, the loudest person alive if I may say so, sprints into the classroom and into my seat screaming with it all: "THEY FOUND WATER IN EUROPA. THERE IS WATER IN EUROPA. WATER!!!". Of course, my lovely classmates where not so impressed by this and several of them said: "You are pretty late, you dumb twat!" or  "You have to be kidding me! Have you ever even heard  of the the Mediterranean Sea?" Obviously, the fact that in Spanish Europa, the continent and Europa, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter made a little bit of a joke of my dear friend. But I understood what he meant. In his amateur research, he had found that the 6th largest moon of the solar system could possibly have a massive global ocean beneath a relatively thin and geologically active icy shell. This gave my puberty self a glimmer of hope for a place to escape: Europa could sustain life. Since then, I have come to be a true believer that the next clear step for human expansion on the universe is Europa.

Europa's surface's cracks remastered from NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter in the 1990's. The mission lasted 14 years.

Europa was discovered along with Jupiters three other moons Io, Callisto and Ganymede by no other than Galileo Galilei himself in 1610. The discovery of the Galilean moons orbiting Jupiter helped him realize that the planets in our solar system, including Earth, revolved around the sun and not the Earth because those moons orbited Jupiter.

Now, I believe that Europa could be the perfect moon for human colonization if it is proven  to have an ocean of water below the surface since it would give the conditions to sustain life.

But, to be able to understand the conditions that make this moon so interesting for human exploration, we need to identify the conditions of life in our own planet. And life on earth as we know it began on  our ocean. Generally when you find water, you find life.  Europa might posses an ocean that is 10 times as deep as ours, and might contain 2 to 3 times the volume of liquid. To come to think that there might be a  huge ocean beneath the icy surface of  Europe, we have collected data from telescopes, spacecraft that has flown by Europa such as the Voyager (1979), Galileo (1998) that has told us about the surface, the interior structure and its magnetic field.

Apart from water, life needs two other key elements: the building bonds for life (essential chemical elements) and a form of energy to power life.  Europa, although far away from the sun, has this liquid ocean because it orbits Jupiter which humongous nature  causes a tidal tough and pull which flexes Europa up and down because its orbit is an elipse the tide is much higher when it is closer to Jupiter.
This creates heat makes it warmer than just from sun's heat alone that turns into friction and heat that helps maintain that ocean.  But not only that, what makes Europa so special is that it is believed that the ocean its in direct contact with its rocky interior which might what on Earth is called hydrothermal zones, known to be rich in life, powered by energy and nutrients.

There is to much evidence to prove that Europa can what is required to provide life. We just need the exact result of a mission orbiting Jupiter in NASA's Europa Mission to see Europa in different points in its orbits.  If there is life on Europa, it is independent to that one on Earth.  We, as the human race in search for answers of how are we here and what is our next step, we need to find life and understand it.  Maybe if we can find life in some other way, we can find somewhere where we might be able to live that is not so far away. We have been pushing a mission to colonize Mars  but the planet does not posses conditions that would favor us and Kepler 452b although very similar to Earth is a long way. I believe Europa is the next step in our understanding of  universe, and possibly, a place to scape Math Class.



More information:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/europa/overview.cfm
http://www.space.com/15498-europa-sdcmp.html#sthash.j70WtGQU.dpuf
http://www.nasa.gov/press-release/all-systems-go-for-nasas-mission-to-jupiter-moon-europa
http://phys.org/news/2015-09-jupiter-moon-europa.html