Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What's Under The Ice On Europa?

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

This moon of Jupiter has an ENORMOUS ocean. Does anything live in it? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Your entire identity has been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness. I'm Danny Shapiro. And these are just a few of the powerful stories I'll be mining on our upcoming 12th season of Family Secrets. We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests

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Hey, Jorge, when you think about finding life on other planets, what do you imagine? I want to hear what an artistic cartoonist thinks about when he thinks about life on other planets. Well, you know, I think of little green men or blue, call attractive people like an avatar or, you know, crazy blobs or weird plants. So you're mostly thinking about life like on these planets, like on the surface. Yeah, like living things on the surface of other planets. What if there could be like strange underground life? Not life on other planets, but life in other planets.

You mean like underneath the surface? Yeah, like underground life on other planets. Oh man, it sounds like a pretty cool, hip, grungy kind of extraterrestrial life, you know? be part of the underground scene. Yeah, exactly. Interesting. So, like, we could look at a planet and think, oh, it's barren, there's nothing there, but really there could be amazing cities underneath the surface.

Yeah, well, just think about our oceans, right? If you look at the ocean from space, you don't see that much action, right? But, of course, there's a huge amount of stuff going on under the surface. Oh, it could be more than what you see. Hi, I'm Jorge. And I'm Daniel. And welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of IHeart Radio. In which a cartoonist and a physicist try to break it all down for you and explain to you all that weird stuff you always wanted to understand but didn't feel comfortable asking your friends about.

Yeah, the weird things on the surface and the maybe possibly cooler stuff. underneath the surface of things. The cooler, weirder, probably slimy or stuff, too. So today on the podcast we'll be talking about... Europa, the moon of Jupiter. What is it? Where is it? Could there be life in it or on it or under it or inside of it? Behind it.

Could there be an alien slime ship just hiding behind Europa? Owee dodging out of view as we look at it? At all time. Yeah, it might be possibly one of the only other places in our solar system where there could be life. There could be really goopy, slimy life out there. Hey, why do you think that aliens are often associated with slime in movies? Hmm. Well, they can't be dry, I guess.

It wouldn't be gross or alien. Why can't you have like an armadillo life? You know, armadillos are not slimy, right? Why can't aliens be more like armadillos? They always seem to be like, you know, sad. alamanders are goopy and gross. Like there's some sort of like aliens have to be disgusting. They have to feel alien, I guess.

I guess so. Well, let's talk about it. So Europa is one of the moons of Jupiter. So Jupiter, another planet in our solar system, has many moons. And one of them is called Europa. That's right. And, you know, it's very interesting to us, of course, to ask the question, is there life out there in the universe? And so we naturally think about looking for life.

in places where we would live, you know, on the surface of a nice, warm, rocky planet. But we should think more broadly. We should think about whether there's life in other kinds of places, places where you and I wouldn't want to live, places a little too slimy, but places that still there could be something wriggling around in. Right. That might have the conditions or the ingredients for life, but maybe not necessarily look like the planet Earth. Yeah, exactly. And certainly not a place you'd want a vacation to.

And so in this episode, we want to dive deep into the moon of Jupiter, Europa, and talk about whether it's possible for there to be life underground in that moon. You mean you don't want to have a European vacation? If you're a pan, I'm a-go-in. No, but I think it would be really fascinating. Say we do discover life in Europa, you know, that would be amazing because it would tell us a lot about the likelihood of life forming, in general, right?

When you have these conditions, how often does life start? And we just haven't found the conditions for life in many other places. And so it's fascinating to get to just, you know, peek in on an alien body of water and see if there are microbes or fish or crazy, angry octopi or something. Yeah. Well, Europe is interesting because it's kind of a mystery, right? Because it's a moon of Jupiter, but it's covered in ice. And scientists think that maybe underneath all that ice

is a big giant ocean. Yeah, Europe is crazy. We'll get into that, but it's a really weird object. It's got lots of mysteries in it. But before we do, we thought, what do people think about whether there's life on this moon? People know about these alien oceans. People believe there might be life under there.

Yeah. So as usual, Daniel went out into the UC Irvine campus and asked people on the street, what do they think is under the ice in Europa. Yeah, here's what people had to say, a variety of responses, as you'll hear. So think for a moment, what's your bet? What do you think would be found in an alien ocean under kilometers of ice?

And then listen to these responses. Gas. Oh, yeah, maybe, like, unknown things that, like, we're not immune to or, like, that we haven't discovered yet. Maybe, yeah. Do you think there might be life there? Maybe, it could be, yeah, because, like, I believe, like, parallel universes and, like, there has to be life in other universes. So maybe, like, I don't know, some kind of like fishes or something, I don't know.

Maybe some weird creatures or something like that. So you do there might be life on the moon around you? Yeah, definitely. I believe there's life all around us. You did? Yeah. Awesome. I don't expect to live it by life.

No, why not? It seems very improbable. Like, you know, I feel like life can, you know, happen because, you know, obviously Earth, but I feel like the odds of something like that to happen. in would just be very, very small. It's possible that there could be some intelligent life since there is water, but it is pretty far away from the sun.

It might be too cold for anything to sustain off. Yeah, so you think water on another planet is the chances there's life there? Yeah, definitely. Probably some debris, some space debris, seriously. I mean... Do you think there might be life there? As far as life, I mean,

grass is an organism, is this life. So in a sense, yeah, for all intents and purposes, prospectively, yeah, they might find some life. Okay, pretty interesting. I find it interesting that most people kind of knew what you were talking about. Like you said, what's underneath the ice in Europa and people didn't flinch it. They're not like, what? What's underneath Europe? What do you mean? Like Iceland or Finland or Sweden? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. No, you're right. And some people were shocked to discover that there could be oceans of water on other planets, right? but most people when I told them that there was a water ocean or when they believed that for the moment

a lot of people were confident that we could find life there I think people have this sense that water means life and that life is not a rare thing and that when you have the conditions you should expect it to pop up to flower wherever it can we associate it with life like how can you have water

without any life or bacteria or little bugs in it it would be weird to think of that much water totally pure and clean exactly and you know that much water and that much time right a blob of water with organic chemicals in it sitting around for billions of years it feels like the right stuff's got to bounce into each other just the right way eventually right there's just so much time and so many combinations yeah so much water for sitting there for such a long time is it kind of the most probable place where life might be elsewhere in our solar system besides earth that's a great

question. You know, you have to make a bet. Remember, we once talked about an underground body of water on Mars as well. They found a body of water kilometers underground on Mars. I mean, they haven't sampled it. They've detected it's there using like ground penetrating radar. And so that might also have microbes. We don't know. But something really fascinating about Europa is that it's further from Earth. So, for example, if you discover life on Mars, you know, you might make the argument that life started on Earth and got to Mars as rocks got blown. off the surface. And you guys should listen to that whole podcast episode we did about it. But Europa is far away. So if life started on Europa, it would probably be unique. It would be separate. It would be distinct, right? It would mean life starting on its own again, not just spreading from Earth or to Earth.

It couldn't have come from us. It must have originated totally separately from life here. Yeah. Unless our ancient ancestors somehow were spacefaring and landed on Jupiter. and, you know, seeded it with life and then lost that technology and all traces of it were destroyed, except for that weird hypothesis,

somebody other probably believes, yes, exactly, would have to start on that. The weird possibility you saw in a bad science fiction movie the other day. You mean the science fiction novel I'm currently writing?

What are you talking about that? It's a genius idea. That one. Cave men, space man. I see cavemen aliens. That's right. I'm a crazy spaceman, ice man. But isn't that the Saturday Live episode?

Anyway, yeah, let's dig into it. Let's talk about why Europa attracted people's attention in the first place. Yeah, let's dig to the core of the issue. Yeah, but we have to start on the surface. Because the weirdest thing about Europa is that it's pretty smooth. Like it's cool? It is very cold, in fact, on the surface. It's not a kind of place you want to go.

The temperature on the surface is like minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit on a sun. sunny day. Oh, man. But actually what I meant is that there aren't a lot of craters on the surface because, you know, the solar system is a messy place, there's asteroids and rocks bouncing around everywhere. And basically, everything in the solar system is constantly being bombarded by small rocks, which is while you look in the moon, you see all these craters, right? So it doesn't have any pimples on its face, kind of. Yeah, exactly. And so the weird thing about Europa is that it has hardly any craters on it, right? It's so smooth. And it doesn't have an atmosphere like Earth. Earth doesn't

have a lot of craters because our atmosphere acts like a pillow. It's like a waterbed or something. It slows down the rocks and disperses their energy before they hit the surface. But Europa, it has a very slight atmosphere, but not enough to act as a brick for any of these rocks. So you would expect, since it's billions of years old, that it would

be pummeled with rocks and have lots of holes on its surface. But it doesn't. It's very smooth. What does that mean? It means that the surface is pretty young, right? That it hasn't been around very long. Or it's being constantly refreshed, right, or erased. You know, it's like a chalkboard that somebody comes in and cleans every morning and then you fill it up with equations and then they clean it again, right? Or maybe somebody grooms it. Somebody shaves every morning. There's somebody out

there with a huge rake. Yeah, exactly. The fascinating thing is they tried to estimate the age of the surface of Europa. And, you know, it's basically consistent with zero. You know, the measurement they get is like 50 million years plus or minus 50 million years just based on the craters just based on the size and the number of the craters yeah something is going on on the surface of europa that's refreshing the surface it's like erasing it it's like it's forever young like it uses botox lunar botox well let's give people some context so europa is one of the moons of jupiter one of the planets in our solar system. And I was reading it's about almost the size of our moon.

And we have a pretty big moon, right? So being close to the size of our moon means you're being pretty big. So it is a pretty sizable ball of rock or ice out there. And it orbits Jupiter every three and a half days. Mm-hmm. Exactly. Which probably means that it sort of sees sunlight. It has kind of a day-night period, probably around three and a half days then.

But remember, it's much further from the sun than our planet. And so it gets like one-twentieth of the amount of sunlight. The sun in the sky of Europa is a tiny, tiny dot, whereas Jupiter is mammoth, right? It appears hugely in the sky. Is that why it's so icy and cold because it's so far away? Yeah, that's one of the reasons why it's so icy and cold. Also, it doesn't have much of an atmosphere, which could, you know, collect and keep that warmth on the surface. Yeah, exactly.

And also Jupiter is blasting it with radiation. So the surface of Europa is not a very friendly place. Wait, Jupiter is shooting at it? What do you mean? Yeah. Well, Jupiter, you know, like the sun, Jupiter produces a lot of radiation. You know, it's crazy stuff happening in the core of Jupiter because of all the gravitational pressure produces huge amounts of radiation.

And, you know, just in general out in space, there's radiation, right? From the sun, but also from Jupiter. And there's nothing, there's no atmosphere to protect you. So if you were on the surface of Europa, you would get a fatal dose of radiation very quickly. Oh, so it doesn't have an atmosphere. It has a very, very thin atmosphere. Essentially nothing useful to protect you from radiation.

So it's not a very hospitable place. It's cold. It's frozen. There's nothing to breathe. You know, getting cancer every five minutes. There's really nothing in the brochure that would attract you, except, of course, for the scientific mysteries, right? The things that make you think, what?

How could that be? What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. So the weird thing or the incredible things about Europa are what's going on inside of it, right? Yeah. So the outside is this water crust, right? It's frozen water crust.

It's ice. And, you know, the ice spikes on the surface are like 15 meters high. And there was a bunch of spacecraft that flew by Europa and took a bunch of pictures and measurements because they were trying to understand like what is going on with this surface. How is the surface getting reformed? Why is it so smooth? why is it so good looking what's it exactly

and so what they did was they try to probe the inside of it they were like well what is this made out of right is there like weird tectonic activity because you know on earth earth is very active right the plates are always moving and shifting and so you're getting new surfaces being formed as as you know volcanoes

erupt and stuff so they're wondering maybe it was tectonic activity so they they flew did all these flyby to try to measure what's going on inside and this is really cool they just measure the gravitational pull on the satellite from various angles and various directions, and they can get a map basically of the density of what's going on inside. Without landing or going inside, they can get a map of the density of the stuff inside the moon.

From a distance, you can tell these things. Yeah, just from gravitational measurement. And NASA does this also on Earth. Like NASA can see, you know, when your house is sinking by an inch or by a meter or by two meters due to like groundwater being sucked up because it's making these. very detailed gravitational measurements, the effect of gravity on satellites. So what they found when they did this

is that there's this very thick crust, water crust, water ice crust on the outside, and underneath it is something with the density of water. And they were like, what? How could there be something with a density of water? Because you have this frozen stuff, right, which is less dense. And then under that, they saw this huge band

of something that has the density of liquid water. Oh, so it could be a giant ocean, a giant underground ocean. Yeah, exactly. And so the best guess is that there's a huge underground ocean of water. And, you know, they think it's water because it has the right density and because the outside of Europa is frozen water, right? It's not like something exotic like liquid methane or something. But it's not small.

It's not like, you know, two or three cups of water. If you took all the liquid in the oceans of Europa, it would be. two or three times the amount of water on the surface of the earth. Wow. In a much smaller ball of rock, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's much smaller than the moon, right?

And so it's a thick layer of water. Wow. Okay, well, let's dig into that mystery. But first, let's take a quick break. December 29th, 1975. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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Welcome to Season 2 of The Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so Europa is a moon of Jupiter, and it's interesting because it's made out of ice, but underneath that ice, there's a huge ocean of water, we think. Yeah, exactly. And it gets weirder as you go in, I think, right? So you've got this ice crust on the outside, and then you got this liquid center, right? It's like a candy or something. And then on the inside of that, you have this rocky ball with some metal in it also.

And so you have these three basic components. And everything is spinning, but it's not really connected. The inside bit, the rocky bit on the inside is not connected to the shell, the water, the ice shell on the very outside. Because there's this liquid, right? So they can slip. And what they think is that the outside is rotating at a different speed from the inside, right? So, like, the outside is, like, eventually it laps the inside. Oh.

So it's like a shell floating on top of, or around a metal core. I know. If you included this in my bad spaceman, ice man, caveman, science fiction novel that I'm supposed to be writing, you would think, oh, this is crazy. This could never happen in real life. I mean, let's get realistic. I love that you look out there in the universe and you find such weird stuff, right? Stuff you could never imagine or dream up.

Wow. So it'd be kind of like going to Antarctica and, you know, there's a huge sheet of ice, but underneath that is sort of there's water, right? Like you could swim underneath these sheets of ice. Yeah, exactly. It's warmer underneath the sheets of ice, right? And the thing that's providing that warmth is Jupiter. And it's not the radiation, but Jupiter's gravitational field is constantly squeezing Europa, right?

It's something we call tidal forces, which sounds complicated, but it's actually pretty simple to understand. you know that gravity, the strength of gravity falls as the distance, right? So the further away you get from Jupiter, the weaker gravity is. Well, imagine you're a big body, you're like a moon like Europa. Then Jupiter is pulling harder

on the bit of you that's closer to Jupiter, and it's not pulling as hard on the bit that's further away. What that means is it's basically trying to pull the moon apart, right? It's tugging harder on one part than on the other, so it's trying to pull the moon apart. This is what we call a tidal force.

And that generates heat and warmth? Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like Jupiter's taking his hand and squeezing it constantly, right? And that's pumping energy into it. It's like an engine, right? Jupiter's gravitational field. It's like taking an orange and like massaging it kind of. It turns out of inside liquid. It's like hot stone massage for a whole moon, right?

And there's a huge ocean, and the ice cross, it's huge. It's like 100 kilometers thick. Yeah, they don't know exactly how thick it is. That's difficult. They're going to figure that out when they send the next satellite there. But they estimate around 100 kilometers thick. Yeah. And the ice crust is being cracked constantly, right?

If you're going to massage something which is like a sphere of ice, then you're going to end up cracking its shell. And so we see all these stripes on these lines on the surface of Europa, not craters, right? It's smooth. It's pretty smooth from the crater point of view. But there are these cracks, which they think come from these tidal forces squeezing the ice. Oh, on the ice. Okay. So there are wrinkles on this both.

talk's perfect face just like we see in Orange County no plastic surgery ever really looks good well I also read this cool thing that Europa has water volcanoes

I know it just gets crazier and crazier right so what happens when you have high pressure water trapped under ice and then you squeeze that ice where you're going to get cracks and then the water is going to spew out and so we have these pictures from Hubble we pointed Hubble at

at Europa and they have these pictures of what looks like plumes of water, right? They're basically water volcanoes. The ice cracks and the water shoots up, and these are not small. You know, they go up like 200 kilometers into space. That's like, you know, multiple times the height of Mount Everest. Wow.

Imagine a volcano on Earth shooting lava, you know, six times the height of Mount Everest. That would be an event. Yeah. It's like a ginormous geyser, but a cosmic scale. Exactly. And, you know, it makes Earth feel like a, calm place, you know. We have like volcanoes

and earthquakes and stuff, but the more you look out into the solar system, the more you discover like, wow, other planets and moons are much more extreme than the stuff on Earth. Earth is like a pretty calm and cozy place to live. Yeah. And just one qualifier on the water plumes, you know,

there is a picture from Hubble that shows something that looks like a plume. Scientists are still a little skeptical, right? They're not 100% sure that there really are water plumes. But it's also connected to this idea of the surface, right? It could be that the reason the surface is getting reformed,

the reason it looks smooth is that like all these cracks are appearing and maybe the ice is turning over or, you know, getting rotated somehow or, you know, they don't fully understand it. It's hard to come up with a model that explains how the surface gets reformed, but it might have something to do with, you know, all this activity under the ice, breaking it, sucking some of it down and sending up new pieces to get hit by asteroids.

Kind of like the ice sheets in Antarctica, I keep moving and shifting and reforming. Exactly. So if you were to build a house there, it might not be there in 50 million years. That's right. One more reason not to build a house on Europa. Okay, so that's Europa. It's pretty cool.

So if you flew there and landed, it would sort of feel like you're on the moon, kind of. And then if you drilled a hole the 100 kilometers deep, you would find a huge ocean. and you could potentially swim in it, right? Because it would be sort of around the same density as the water that we have here. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, the moon is mostly rock, whereas this planet, when you land on it, it would be mostly water ice. And they have pictures from Europe, and it looks like not a very friendly place to land.

There's like spikes of these water ice that reach up like 15 meters. You know, it's like these needle-thin, super sharp icicles on the surface. So it's not a friendly place. like, hey, come, look, land on me, right? In comparison, the moon is a much friend to their place. But you're right, there is this ocean of water under the ice. It wouldn't be a smooth landing if you tried to get there. That's right.

It's sort of like that friend you have, you know, who's like sort of grumpy on the outside, but then when they get home, they're nice and friendly, you know. Europa is like that. It's really unfriendly and unwelcoming on the outside, but it has this chewy candy center, right? This ocean of water at the right temperature for life. And it has smooth skin. That's the other thing about your friend.

Exactly. So we don't know too much about what's in that water. That's really the biggest question. That's the mystery. Are there organic molecules in there? Is it too salty for life? Right. Oh, it could be salt water.

Yeah, it could be salty, right? Or who knows what else? It could have other things, you know? It could have high concentrations of other things, right? It could be like water, but it could be really dangerous for us to drink. Yeah, exactly. It could certainly be toxic for us. But, you know, life on Earth has evolved in lots of

places that are toxic for us. It's really pretty incredible what you get when you have a lot of time and a lot of volume. So life on Earth, for example, can survive even in places with no sun, right? Folks out there might be asking, wait a second, how can you have life under the ocean if there's a crust on top and it's totally dark, right? This is not a warm, balmy ocean in the Caribbean. It's totally black, right? It's jet black. But that happens here on Earth. That happens here on Earth also, Exactly. You have places under the water where there's heat escaping from the Earth's crust, from the Earth's core, and heats up the water and bubbles it up and stuff. And the same thing we think is happening on Europa.

Remember, Jupiter is massaging it and creating all this activity inside of it. And some of that's creating heat, which is warming up the water. And that's enough energy for life. Yeah. So that's the big question. That's what's so interesting about Europa is that there could be life in it in these, giant oceans to it there certainly could be yeah so what's the probability do you think that there is life in there that's a great question and you know unfortunately we don't really have a great scientific

answer to that you know um because we've never gotten data from other places right we haven't ever sampled alien water you know if we had done it a hundred times and we'd only seen life once then we'd know oh well life is pretty rare but the only time we've ever looked at water is here on Earth. And so we have no information, right? And that's exactly why we want to do this. We want to get sample number two to understand. And you know, if sample number two has life in it also, if two totally separate examples both have life, wow, then the possibilities for life are huge. Because you look out into the sky and there's lots of stars with lots of planets, a lot of them have liquid water. And if the probability for there to be life in any sample of liquid water

is larger than any tiny amount, it means there's a huge amount of life out there. So it would be mind-blowing, but unfortunately, we don't really have an answer. Well, it's exciting to think about because Europa does have kind of all the ingredients for life, right, that we know about, water, energy, chemistry compounds from rocks and things like that, right? Exactly, and that ocean is conveniently shielded from Jupiter's harmful radiation by the 100 kilometers or so of ice above it. Like we have our atmosphere to protect us.

Those Europans would have the ice sheet to protect them. Yeah. And, you know, if we, imagine there's intelligent life on Europa, right? What would they think of their planet? Like, do they think of the ice, the way we think of the atmosphere? Right. Like, we think of the edge of the Earth as the surface, right, where the rock ends. But really, the atmosphere is part of the Earth.

Maybe they would think of the edge of Europa as like the top of the water and the rest of it is what they would call atmosphere, you know? Right. or their worldview would be kind of like our worldview 2,000 years ago where we think that maybe there's a ceiling to the sky Yeah, like a hard dome. They literally do have a ceiling, right?

Yeah. Wow, imagine being intelligent life in Europa and creating like a whole cosmology and mythology about how the universe works and then drilling out and discovering that there's an enormous universe out there. Wow, that would be mind-blowing. That would be amazing.

So it is possible that there is life in Europe. It's totally possible. And, you know, I think if you ask scientists, their non-scientific opinion would be, it's a good chance. And that's why we're also excited. That's why we're spending billions of dollars to send missions out there to figure it out. All right. That's pretty cool. All right, let's jump into what these plans are to get there and to study it. But first, let's take another quick break. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys.

Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances, just a chaotic, chaotic. scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. Terrorism. Law and Order Criminal Justice System is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I had this, like, overwhelming sensation that I had to call her right then. And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation. And I just wanted to call on and let her know there's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a nonprofit fighting suicide in the veteran community.

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. So join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission. I was married to a combat army veteran and he actually took his own life to suicide. One Tribe saved my life twice. There's a lot of love that flows through this place and it's sincere. Now it's a personal mission. Don't have to go to any more funerals, you know. I got blown up on a React mission.

I ended up having amputation below the knee of my right leg and a traumatic brain injury because I landed on my head. Welcome to Season 2 of the Good Stuff. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime.

A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm so excited about life in Europa. Why? You just love meeting Europeans, Europeans. They're so sophisticated and pretty often. The croissants in Europa are fantastic. No, I just think it's incredible It's so weird and interesting And honestly, I believe this life there

You just want to see Aquaman in real life I want to see life on another place Other than Earth And I'm just desperate to discover it And I can't wait I mean, it's out there waiting for us And we just don't know the answer We will know soon

I'm just so impatient But what do you think that instinct comes from Like what is it that makes you want to Confirm that there's life elsewhere or to meet other life out there. Like, aren't you surrounded by other people already? And I hate most of them, you're right? So why would I want to meet anybody else?

No, even though I'm an introvert, I do want to meet life on other planets, but mostly I think to answer pretty basic questions, you know, like what is the context of our existence? Are we alone in the universe or not? It changes everything if we're not alone. You know, it means something about how special we are, how unusual we are, it just, it changes the whole context of the human experience, you know, religion out the window, right, if there's life in other places.

Well, I mean, if we find life elsewhere, obviously we go from one data point of life to two data points, which is, you know, a hundred percent increase. But would that really tell you that much about the rest of the universe? You still have that question. I mean, you would have the probability or double the probability, but you still wouldn't know what the actual probability is. No, but you have a much, much better estimate, and you know it must be a lot larger than zero, right?

Because you could say that life on Earth is not an independent test because we are here to ask the question. We wouldn't be asking the question if there wasn't life on Earth. So it could be that we're the only life in the universe and we're asking the question because we're alive. So what we need is an independent data point. So if we go and get a sample from another place that hasn't been infected by Earth,

It'll tell us independently how likely life is to exist. And yet, it's only one data point. But if in one data point you get a positive response, that means the answer must be a lot more than zero. Or you were crazy, crazy, crazy lucky. But much more likely would be that the answer is 50%. You know, half the time you get life. Yeah.

Well, let's get into it. What are humans' plans to go to Europe? and check out what's underneath all that ice. To poke through the ice. Well, I'm building something in my backyard right now because I'm just desperate to know and I can't wait. See you later. That's right.

Daniel's final European vacation. No, we have several plans. The most imminent one is called The Clipper. And this is something being developed by JPL and others. And I spoke to an expert there who gave me so much useful information. It was really fantastic. She's so excited. and this is something that we plan

that they plan to launch in like 2023 so it's you know a few years away before it even gets out into space and then it would take a few years to get there by then you might already be there Daniel yeah by then our civilization might just be smoking rubble anyway and nobody to send the answers back to right the way things are going exactly

but the interesting thing about this is that it's not going to land a landing on Europe is a whole whole other problem, which we'll talk about later. This one's just going to do a bunch of flybys. Also, you can't really orbit Europa. You can't. You cannot. Why not? Because the radiation is crazy. So if you go into orbit around Europa, all our electronics will be fried and the solar cells

and all that stuff would be fried in weeks. It's like a one-way trip. Yeah. So instead of orbiting Europa, it's going to do a bunch of fly-bys, right? It's like, you know, it's going to run through. It's like running through the sprinklers instead of getting doused. It's going to do like, you know, several dozen flybys. to get these measurements. It's going to maybe like orbit Jupiter or it's going to orbit the whole solar system,

but each time it's going to go near Europa to take some pictures. Yeah, exactly. I think it's going to orbit Jupiter and it's going to try to do as many flybys by Europa as possible. And, you know, my hope is that there's a huge water volcano eruption right when it's flying by and that it could fly through that spray. And get some water. Yeah. and I asked Cynthia from JPL,

I said, what do you think is going to happen? And she said, well, I don't think we're going to fly through it and get hit by a fish, which is disappointing because that was actually my mental image. Of course not. It's going to be like some weird octopus, probably. Obviously not a fish. Exactly.

It's going to be acrimand. Guys, the satellites gone offline. What happened, right? Some enormous 200-kilometer-sized shark jumps up and bites it. No, but it would be amazing to sample it. And this instrument, sorry, this thing, the Europa Clipper has lots of useful instruments on board. One thing is an ice penetrating radar that can use to like measure the ice and figure out how deep it is and sort of image the inside of the planet.

Right. And there's another mission out there to being prepared to actually get even closer. Yeah, that's right. But that's years away. And so I'm really hoping that the Europa Clipper gives us some useful information because also on board from the Clipper is something called mass spectrometer. And this is a really fancy piece of chemical equipment that tells you basically what's in some stuff. You know, how heavy are all the molecules in something? So if you could like fly through a water plume or even if you don't get that lucky, you know, there's going to be

like little bits of Europa just sort of floating out in the space nearby it because it's constant impacts from small meteors spewing stuff into space. You could still sample that water ice and try to figure out what's in it. And so that might be really interesting hints of life. Right. So we're still many, many years away from actually sending something that will land there and actually drill through the ice, right? Like that's not coming any time soon.

That's not coming anytime soon. Yeah. It's spiking and there's Botox everywhere and radiation. But I was wondering if you could determine, if you could discover life just from what you measure using the Europa Clipper, like if you get a sample of this water,

say, you know, we get really lucky and the surface opens up and spews a volcano and the clipper flies by and snatches some of that water then you could study it with this mass spec and so I asked my wife who's a microbiologist and she's an expert in these kind of things that said could you

conclusively say that we that there's life in a drop of water from an alien ocean just from understanding the mass spec information just from knowing basically what molecules are in there but is the is the clipper going to have like a little cup out there trying to catch water? Yeah yeah absolutely

it's going to have it can sample and there'll be to do this measurement, this mass spec, and tell us, like, what molecules are in there and what are the relative fractions? Wow. And could you tell if there was life? Unfortunately, I don't think you could. All you can tell is, like, here's a bunch of molecules, right? Right.

But there's not going to be a microscope on board, and you can't, like, see this thing, these little bugs. If there's, like, microbes in there, you can't, like, see them metabolizing or living or anything like that, unfortunately. And one of the reasons is that there's just so much complex stuff going on in life, you know, I asked you the same question about like, you know, pond water. If you took a bunch of pond water from Earth and put it through the same instrument, could you argue conclusively there's life?

And there's just too much stuff going on. We don't even really understand all the things that are happening. Even here on Earth, it's such a big messy blob. So I think you'd need to have a microscope and you'd need a sample of the water before it got spewed out into space. So you're right. We should go further and deeper and we should dig into those oceans. You would need to see the actual giant space shark out there. Exactly.

Exactly. But, you know, how are you going to land on a moon super far away and drill, like, you know, kilometers and kilometers into ice? They can do it. That's not even something we've accomplished on Earth. Humans can do it. Come on. You mean engineers can do it.

Engineers, yeah. Don't put the physicists in charge. Ask the engineers. You won't spend as much money, and they'll get it done. Well, they have plans for another one. They have plans for a lander. It's going to go, you know, years later. but this one's only going to be on the surface for a few weeks

because it's going to get fried by radiation and it's only going to drill down about 10 centimeters not enough to go through the ice. Wow. All right, well, I think that's the mystery of Europa. It's pretty cool to think that there is a moon out there in our solar system with a giant ocean that's just sitting there waiting for us to go there

and dip our toes in it. I know, it's a mystery, it's close by, It's tantalizing, it's calling to us. And the amazing thing to me is we will know the answer. It might take us five years or ten years or 40 years, but eventually humans or their robots will go to Europa. We'll drill into that ocean. And we will know if there's something swimming around, slimy,

you know, listening to underground dance tracks and having a great time, or if it's just another sterile blob out there in space. There could be something living there right now. That's right. They could be preparing something. to be sent to Earth. What if our landers crossed in space?

They're like, hey, where are you going? It would be such a tragedy if they crashed into each other and we would never know. Where are you going, man? I signaled left. What are you talking about? My left or your left? Crash.

Civilization, never. We never find out. At least they would answer the question, though, if there's life out there. They're not great drivers, but at least they're alive. All right. I hope that was a great European vacation, European vacation for you guys out there.

All right, tune in next time for more Mysteries of the Universe. Thanks for listening. If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge. or email us at Feedback at Daniel and Jorge.com.

Thanks for listening and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeart Radio. For more podcasts from IHeart Radio,

visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Hi, it's HoneyGerman, with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment

with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending

with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great vivras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Grasias Come Again on the I-Heart Radio app, podcast or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy

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It's not that people don't know that exercise is healthy. It's just that people don't know why it's healthy. and we're struggling to try to help people help themselves and each other. Listen to WebMD Health Discovered on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.