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Finally... I've been waiting for this almost my entire adult life. Liquid oceans beneath the surface. A brownish-red smattering of color despite the solid ice

• singularity2001 2y ago
  same. So to shortcut the big question "when"? April 2030
• FollowingTheDao 2y ago
  > We need to send a probe to Europa, like yesterday, and we need to send one that can get below the ice and look around. IMO, "need" is a strong word here and if I thought that this is something we needed to do I would re-examine my priorities. We need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war machine, we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change.
  • lukan 2y ago
    Well, I think we need to do all of it. Explore space together or in competition, instead of war. And climate change is a concern for everyone.
    • arethuza 2y ago
      Worth noting that the ESA Juice mission will be at Jupiter at the same time as Clipper and the teams are already working together: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/Frequently_Asked_Questions https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Juice/...
    • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      We cannot do all of it. The money and the manpower does not exist to do all of it. We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities. You would not spend your time trying to find out if there is a form of life 20 feet below you. Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not have these basics.
      • lukan 2y ago
        "Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? " Often enough. Quite succesful, even though I brought most basic supplies with me. So I know about basic needs. "Right now on earth there are plenty of people who do not have these basics." And there is a possibility, that this always will be the case. And I would not wait to find out and stop with all general progress till then. My compassion is with humanity as its whole, not with every single human. I fear, I have not limitless compassion and I don't see, how we can stop all wars just like that(the main reason for famine today - can you stop the Gaza war for instance?), but I see how little effort can be spend to finance such an interesting mission. Also, space exploration is a tool to bring humanity together.
      • bastawhiz 2y ago
        > The money and the manpower does not exist to do all of it. No, they both exist. Motivation by your legislator is what doesn't exist. There's a reason some departments get almost everything they ask for and others get almost nothing: they know how to grease the political machine. That doesn't mean we should fight over scraps for science and social programs, it means you need to acknowledge that there's a game that needs playing. And yeah, it feels real bad that there are lives at stake playing that game, but that's the fault of capitalism, not science.
      • weweersdfsd 2y ago
        The money does exist, and manpower isn't a problem considering how many people this planet has. The problem is the small monority that has most of the money, and doesn't like to pay their fair share of taxes. "As of late 2022, according to Snopes, 735 billionaires collectively possessed more wealth than the bottom half of U.S. households ($4.5 trillion and $4.1 trillion respectively). The top 1% held a total of $43.45 trillion." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
      • XorNot 2y ago
        The US spends more per capita on healthcare, then similar first world nations spend providing public healthcare to all their citizens.[1] The US has the worst infant mortality, and maternal mortality rates, of any first world nation.[2] Just think of it: with the highest spend of GDP per citizen, and getting so much less you're the butt of every other country's jokes about healthcare systems. "Lack of money" has so little to do with the conditions in the US, it's essentially negligence to think it's the problem. The US doesn't want to fix any of the problems you list: it easily could, with the resources it has today. [1] https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2023/jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-2022 https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2... [2] https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mortality-rates-despite-the-most-health-care-spending https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mor...
    • jajko 2y ago
      Exactly, mankind has potentially amazing capacity to move into star working trekkish utopia within 1 century (not meaning warp fantasy but how society and individuals in it work). But so many stars would have to align, starting with dropping most religions and killing on spot most dictators that it won't happen. But we should aim high, higher than we think our potential is, to actually get somewhere.
      • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
        How about if we aim our compassion higher?
        • IggleSniggle 2y ago
          Aiming higher than the desire for all people to live in harmony with each other, with the freedom to pursue their needs and interests at the top of Maslow's pyramid without fear? Aiming higher than desiring peace for all mankind, where no one wants for anything, and those that are still struggling regardless receive help and compassion from their fellow humans? That seems like a tall order.
        • jajko 2y ago
          How do you force compassion on people? Religions tried for millennia and failed miserably, despite it being consistently among top rules in all of them. If something that cuts so deep can't win on its own 'just because I say so', I'd say lets move towards rationality, progress and smartness, with right eyes there lies tons of compassion too.
  • selcuka 2y ago
    > We need to feed and house people, we need to stop the war machine, we need to slow consumerism to slow climate change. Sure thing. We don't have to do them in a specific order, there are enough resources to tackle them all at the same time. A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't affect others, but at least someone is doing something about one of those projects.
    • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      We need to prioritize. Have you ever tried to survive in the wilderness? Shelter, water, fire, and food. Priorities. > A $5 billion project is small enough that it won't affect others, $5 billion would go a long way to providing shelter, water, fire, and food for the homeless in the United States.
      • bastawhiz 2y ago
        It's 0.1% of the annual US revenue spread out over many years. So probably more like 0.01% per year. Picking on this one project, which is good science, is silly.
        • desdenova 2y ago
          It's also only a little more than what Microsoft paid for Minecraft. Priorities.
          • s1artibartfast 2y ago
            that's comparing shared money versus somebody else's money.
      • fastball 2y ago
        San Francisco spends that much on homelessness in a few years and doesn't make a dent. The problem is not money.
        • 2y ago
  • bastawhiz 2y ago
    Stepping on my soapbox once again to say that putting money towards science doesn't take away money from everything else. There's no shortage of money, or corporations that can be taxes, or people who didn't pay their fair share that can be taxed. Don't get upset with the science, get upset with the politicians who don't give a shit about the programs you care about or enforcing tax law.
    • ttoinou 2y ago
      Money is infinite but resources needed to send a probe outta space are quite limited
      • bastawhiz 2y ago
        You're right, we should get more kids into STEM!
      • sph 2y ago
        Then let's not spend any resources but instead spend time weeping. It's not like stockpiling plutonium, gold, iridium and other rare earths metals used in spaceships is gonna make the world any better. Should we instead force the scientists working on this to abandon space research to "fix the ills of the world" so they do "something useful" instead? I honestly don't know what people who keep complaining about scientific research, especially space exploration, want. It is not those billions spent to send a probe to Europa the cause or the solution to the world's problems. Hint: it is not money the cause nor the solution to the world's problems, nor are drive-by social media activists complaining about it.
        • pclmulqdq 2y ago
          A big part of why this kind of space research is worth doing is weapons development. That is a big part of why huge money goes to space research - because it's more efficient to give that cash to JPL than to Raytheon in terms of developing certain kinds of rocketry and robotics technologies. In comparison, many other branches of science work on much leaner budgets, and sending stuff to space actually does look very wasteful from a "$ per paper" perspective. If you disregard the weapons development value, there is actually very little reason to do these big-money experiments that could instead support the research of hundreds or thousands of more frugal science experiments. At the same time, there are lots of ways to do space research more cheaply, like launching small satellites. Most of the people who don't like this stuff are against the billion-dollar single missions rather than against astrophysics or against the concept of sending things to space. Many of them also are against the FCC project at CERN, for example.
  • sph 2y ago
    I see you channelling Conner O'Malley here: "we need, we need, we need, we need" - and as coherent as one of his rants. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cBiyWlYous https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cBiyWlYous
  • weweersdfsd 2y ago
    If we survive climate change, I would argue that conquering space should be the top priority to ensure long-term human survival. Projects like this ultimately gather knowledge that can help that goal. But sure, we also need to tax the ultra-rich more, so that we can have money for all the things that need to be done. Tax evasion is a problem, not NASA's spending.
    • tirant 2y ago
      What do you mean if we survive? We are already surviving and actually doing quite well. So basically you are proposing to forcedly seize money from 0,01% of the population to fulfill your view of a multi planetary future for human kind. I don’t see that very ethical or appropriate to be honest. I’m all in for space exploration, but should be done in a way that respects individuals and their decisions on how to live their life and not by taxing them to fulfill the wishes of a few. That’s why space exploration needs to be a private endeavor or at least financed publicly but only via optional taxing.
  • Otek 2y ago
    Why did you wrote this comment instead of spending time to fix those problems you’ve mentioned?
    • Epa095 2y ago
      Yeah, don't try to convince others, go fix global climate change by yourself. Are you lazy?
      • s1artibartfast 2y ago
        I think we would be a lot further in addressing climate change and most social problems if people did more of the later and less of the former.
        • Epa095 2y ago
          Without advocating ideas die with the first person getting them. It's obvious that we both need to act, and encourage others to act as well. We have no reason to belive OP don't act, and advocating for acting is a noble act (as it is both uncomfortable and necessary)
          • s1artibartfast 2y ago
            I wasnt speaking about OPs action, but the statement they made. I think advocating without acting is an ignoble action, shallow, lazy, and selfish, and destructive. It is usually people refusing to do any work and pay the cost, but telling others that they should do these things. Most topics have no lack of advocating, and a large lack of people willing to take action. In short, I think most advocates are hypocrites trying to exploit others.
    • FollowingTheDao 2y ago
      Assumption.
  • epidemian 2y ago
    I don't see the causal dependency between these things. Could a probe to Europa be sent while still having housing problems in some countries? And could it be sent after having those housing problems addressed? I think the answer to both of those questions is yes. And conversely, can the housing problems be addressed while sending a probe to Europa? And can they be addressed while not sending a probe? Again, i think the answers are both affirmative. These things don't seem to depend on each other. And different people want to do different things in this world. I don't think that the people who want to help shelter homeless people would be deterred by other people wanting to send a space probe, or vice-versa. I picked housing from the problems you mentioned just because it was the first one. I think this argument would still apply for the others. The reasons we're having those problems have nothing to do with how many probes we send to space.
• riazrizvi 2y ago
  I’m calling it now. Compared to Hollywood fair, our first alien contact IRL is going to be underwhelming.
  • sandworm101 2y ago
    Our first "contact" with alien life has already happened. Once upon a time people thought that Mars was covered in canals, that a civilization lived there. Society did not collapse. People just accepted it and not much changed. Then there was the meteorite with the Mars bacteria. Not much changed then either. Authoritative proof of life on Europa will not have a dissimilar impact. Until there is a critter in a video, a discernable radio message, or a saucer on the white house lawn, the general population will just shrug it off.
    • riedel 2y ago
      White House lawn, wait: could orange skin color be somehow related to the ice color on Europa...
      • tomrod 2y ago
        I look forward to a few months from now where I never have to immediately recognize this reference.
    • safety1st 2y ago
      It has? I'm just quoting Wikipedia here: To date, no conclusive evidence of past or present life has been found on Mars.
      • sandworm101 2y ago
        That's what it says today. Had Wikipedia been around in the 1800s it would have said that canals on Mars indicated an agricultural civilization. The point is that society has already processed the concept of alien life. We know how people will react because we can look to how they reacted in the past when scientists told them about alien life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_canals
• mattlondon 2y ago
  > we need to send one that can get below the ice and look around. I wondered about this - perhaps some sort of lander with a thermo-nuclear energy source that could slowly melt its way down to the liquid water, spooling out some sort of antenna from an internal compartment as it goes. Turns out though that the crust is up to 25KM thick though. Probably not viable! Edit: turns out 25KM spools of fibre are openly available to buy online (so i.e. not exactly unheard of) and only weigh 3-4kg. Maybe not so out of reach after all? Leave a "base station" on the surface at one end of the fibre, and at the other end another "subsurface station" that has a ROV-style tethered- "swimmer" (not a lander) that communicates back to the surface via the fibre, and the base station radios back to some orbiting thing/DSN etc. Fun to imagine these sort of things without any knowledge or experience or credentials! :)
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    Well, it's more viable than you might think. Putting a 300 degree sphere on the surface would eventually get somewhere. But getting anything useful back is pretty hard, since you'd have a probe that's boiling water below 25km of ice and probably far from the lat/lon it landed at.
    • perihelions 2y ago
      You could make it buoyancy-neutral and have it float-melt its way back—heater pointed up.
      • ethbr1 2y ago
        I'd never considered the pressure under an ice cap... it would scale with depth, no? So a water channel within the ice (going "up" from the sea below) would have a decreasing pressure gradient as it ascended?
        • mattlondon 2y ago
          I would imagine the water channel would re-freeze fairly rapidly, so you'd end up with a "bubble" of liquid water around the thing slowly melting itself down.
• safety1st 2y ago
  I find Europa fascinating but unfortunately I think the lack of missions is less about interest and more about feasibility. On earth we rarely drill more than 2-3km down. The Russians did 12km once in Antarctica. With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. Not to mention the immense distance, time lags and hostility of the environment. Drilling on earth is dangerous and difficult and failure prone as it is. How do we learn to do this? How many missions and failures are required?
  • ceejayoz 2y ago
    > With Europa we are looking at 20km+ of multiple layers of exotic Europan ice with composition and properties we know very little about, have zero experience with. I mean, that's why we go. Clipper is going to figure out, in part, whether we actually need to go down 20km or if we can just scoop up stuff kicked by cryovulcanism into low orbit. https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from-europa-nasas-europa-clipper-is-on-the-case/ https://www.nasa.gov/missions/are-water-plumes-spraying-from...
  • jvanderbot 2y ago
    The value from a surface probe that can sample those brown stains is immeasurable. Imagine an HD video of the guysers, or an imaging spectrometer using refraction from the sun through a guyser (or whatever I'm not a scientist) and picking up strange amounts of something that can't be explained by just water and salt. Or even a detailed radar scan of the subsurface - are there pockets of warm water? Limiting probes to only those that can get through 10s of kms of ice is short-sighted.
    • safety1st 2y ago
      Yeah I think a mission to see whether we can scoop up stuff that's been blasted up to the surface or even into orbit (and probably picking up some data on the ice crust along the way) is a lot more promising. Just saying, there are people in these comments observing that "you can buy a 25km fiber cable online" lol... I love the exuberance but people may not be fully grokking the scope of the engineering problem here :) every mission comes at the expense of other possible missions, and drilling 25km down into Europa could easily be a feat that we would fail to accomplish even with 5 or 10 missions. There are challenges we will not surmount in our lifetimes, and this might be one of them. Deep drilling is dramatically harder than your average HN user probably realizes... exuberance alone cannot conquer physics.
• keepamovin 2y ago
  The lore of secret space program insiders say that there are octopus/cephalopod species under that ice in that ocean. And, more so, that they are related to the ones on our planet. Wow. For those who don't know "SSP lore" is the idea that a technological breakaway civilization descended from Mars-via-Antarctica "Space Nazis" who back-engineered anti-gravity tech in the 1950s (the bell craft) with the help of psychics who channelled aliens designs, and then began retrofitting submarines with advanced propulsion systems, before graduating to more advanced "interstellar craft", have long been out among our local cluster of stars, pushing humans beyond the limits of public space programs, and now consist of an international cadre of Earth humans (and born-on-Mars humans), involved in intergalactic trade and exploration....Aaaand it's so secret that if you are recruited and then allowed back to Earth, you are mind wiped and age-regressed/time-travelled back to the moment you signed up after a 20 year stint, the fabled "20-and-back" program.
  • naruhodo 2y ago
    Very cool, but why Nazis?
    • keepamovin 2y ago
      Actual, historical Nazis in fact! - as the lore goes. Apparently, Hitler was very into the esoteric and exploring all avenues for advantage. Through proxies and commanders, this included tapping the Vril society psychics for their channelled alien designs, recovering downed or crashed UAPs, anti-gravity research and possibly more insanely, making deals with a negative group of ETs for even more technology. As the war loomed in their favor they doubled down on their research into anomalous super craft, but as it lurched against them, they, says the lore, transferred all their research down to their Antarctic bases, dug into the ice and also linking up with natural geothermally-cut caverns deep beneath the icesheet. Eventually, Admiral Byrd was dispatched to bring these space Nazis to heal and steal their tech, but was defeated, by said tech. The US then engineered operation Paperclip to get as much of this advanced German tech as possible. And a detente was reached with the Space Nazis in Antarctica, and possibly some deals, while they continued to develop their "high voltage electrogravitic and torsion field technology", all of which resulted in them eventually moving their operations to Mars, while the "Allies" (now well infiltrated by these Space Nazis in supreme positions of power thanks to Paperclip and their own wiles) took over most of the Antarctic underground bases, perhaps even procuring some of this advanced technology for themselves, before the Space Nazis became Mars Germans and broke away with it.
• mywittyname 2y ago
  I think a major hurdle with NASA is that the American ~public~ political leadership does not accept failures (they barely accept success). Thus, NASA seems to only swing at pitches they know will be home runs. If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was. (of course, you'll never hear those same politicians complaining about how wasteful failed military engagements costing 10000x are). It's unfortunate, because NASA is probably the only organization on earth capable of achieving such goals.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    To be fair, this is a pretty rational approach to many low impact questions with no timeline. You can simply wait for cost to go down and chance of success to go up. Most people would agree we dont need to know about Europa today. If you look at other issues where the government spends money like a drunk sailor, there are at least debated claims of urgency and need.
  • DowagerDave 2y ago
    I think the biggest hurdle is the human condition. We're prepared to spend 10x to get a human into some version of outer space as basically cargo, but don't get the same emotional resonance with unmanned exploration even though that's were the valuable science happens.
  • hfe 2y ago
    > If NASA spends $10 billion on a mission that fails, it will be complained about for decades to come about how "wasteful" NASA was. And rightly so. The solution isn't to not try. The solution is to continue investing. See the Apollo missions. Lots of failure there, but it wasn't a waste because it did eventually succeed, both in its mission and also in bringing a bunch of technological advancement. Investing a ton of money into some venture, only to give up on it after the first failure is something we should all be angry about. If its worth doing, its worth trying again when it fails.
    • mlyle 2y ago
• supportengineer 2y ago
  I hope this question gets answered before I pass, which is probably no more than 25 years from now.
• spennant 2y ago
  I feel the same way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094245 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30094245
• 0xblinq 2y ago
  I’m from Europa. I can confirm there’s life here. Not sure for how long though.
• boopdewoop 2y ago
  From what I remember, They really wanted to find a way to do this without introducing organisms from earth. - e.g. drilling into the ice and the probe itself.