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Europa's Ocean Chemistry Could Be Earth-Like (discovery.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Alien life in the universe could be close to home, swimming around Europa's ocean. The idea has been floating around scientific minds for more than a decade: beneath the icy surface of the Jovian moon could slosh a deep, wide ocean with the perfect environment for life to develop. In new research published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, NASA scientists studied how the chemical composition of the Europan ocean may have evolved and what chemicals it possibly contains, assuming similar geochemical processes as on Earth are at play. Europa is thought to possess a rocky core fractured with deep cracks that have filled with water. Since the formation of the moon, the core has continued to cool, creating more cracks and exposing more rocks to chemical processes with this water."We're studying an alien ocean using methods developed to understand the movement of energy and nutrients in Earth's own systems," said planetary scientist Steve Vance, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The cycling of oxygen and hydrogen in Europa's ocean will be a major driver for Europa's ocean chemistry and any life there, just it is on Earth."
"All these worlds are yours, except Europa. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE."
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
This was hinted at much longer than a decade ago:
"The idea that Europa and other ice-covered bodies in our solar system might possess an ocean of liquid water under a crust of ice was first proposed by John S. Lewis in his paper Satellites of the Outer Planets: Their Physical and Chemical Nature (which appeared in Icarus, vol.15, 1971)." (source: https://www.math.washington.ed...)
And I recall Carl Sagan talking about life on Europa in his Cosmos television show, back in the 80s.
But astrobiology has come a long way since then. I'm halfway through Nick Lane's "The Vital Question" and he goes into detail about the mechanisms which can form complex cellular structures given nothing but alkaline water, hydrocarbons, rock (to supply catalysts), and an energy source.
Galileo Galilei named Europa(moon) and if you read wikipedia, it actually makes sense. It's named after Europa, who happened to be a lover of Zeus. Zeus is the Greek God the Romans called Jupiter. Galilei figured it might make sense that the object orbiting Jupiter would be his lover.
It's a bad name today due to the nameclash with the continent. However I'm not so sure that it mattered back then. The prince in Troja was named Paris and they certainly didn't care about city nameclashes. There is an aircraft carrier named George Washington. I haven't heard anybody complaining that they confuse the ship with a human being. There are plenty of intended or unintended nameclashes. We just have to live with those because renaming would be even more confusing.