If I take a wild guess (into the next 50 years), we probably will be able to land on Europa. After collecting dirt and water, we found nothing. However, scientists didn't give up on it and debate life could be existed in deep ocean, which is way deeper than what we can go even on Earth. There you go: we have to go far across space and end up swimming really deep. Too many technological barriers. It'd be even more disappointing when we actually find out living organisms, then they look so similar to what we already have on Earth. Again, my "wild guess"
Would be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity, perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever swam too close to one of these blowholes.
That's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times.
It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for fossils to be formed.
I imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a chapter of the planet's history.
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If I take a wild guess (into the next 50 years), we probably will be able to land on Europa. After collecting dirt and water, we found nothing. However, scientists didn't give up on it and debate life could be existed in deep ocean, which is way deeper than what we can go even on Earth. There you go: we have to go far across space and end up swimming really deep. Too many technological barriers. It'd be even more disappointing when we actually find out living organisms, then they look so similar to what we already have on Earth. Again, my "wild guess"
Would be cool if they got there and found layer upon layer of carcasses resembling whales, fish, trilobites ... seasoned with smaller organisms. A record of evolution, deposited over thousands of years of geyser activity, perfectly preserved and documenting every evolutionary bifurcation that ever swam too close to one of these blowholes.
I can dream, can't I?
That's unlikely because ice is fairly dynamic. These geysers are proof that new ice is constantly being formed, and over the timescale needed to see any sort of evolution, the ice layer would have been reformed countless times.
It'd be like finding fossils around Kilauea in Hawaii. You don't because there's new land being formed all the time, and there's not enough time for fossils to be formed.
I imagined that such a geyser has a limited lifespan. Same mechanism as why islands like Hawaii or the super volcano in Yellowstone come in chains. Same thing could be happening on Europa: the icy crust moves and the "hot spot" is fairly fixed. Or a local vent collapses after x years and another weak spot opens. In those scenarios the area surrounding a geyser could preserve a chapter of the planet's history.