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Reasons To Believe Home PageWith the White House and the media still abuzz about the possibility of life on Mars, NASA seized the moment to announce another "possible lifew site" in our solar system, Jupiter’s moon Europa.1 In the case of Europa, the so-called evidence for life requires a truly enormous stretch of the imagination, and it exposes the degree to which the notion "where there’s water there’s life" has become entrenched.
Slightly smaller than our moon and orbiting Jupiter at a distance of about 400,000 miles, Europa was photographed in August by the Galileo probe. A few years ago, Voyager’s images showed us that Europa’s surface is full of cracks, but Galileo passed close enough (just 96,000 miles out) to provide some detail. 2 Because the closer the closer view of the cracks resembles what we see at the edges of Earth’s arctic ice cap, some members of the Galileo team hypothesized that pieces of Europa’s chilly crust may have "cracked apart, moved slightly, and then frozen together again." 3 If that happened, there must be some kind of plastic or liquid medium below the surface, a medium such as water, for instance. Reporters (nudged by a few "wishful thinking" scientists, perhaps), jumped from that tenuous series of speculations to the announcement that Europa is a possible life site.
In case you are called upon to explain what’s so improbable about this idea to an individual who doesn’t yet question the water = life myth, let me outline just a few of its difficulties. First, we face the lack of a heat source to thaw the mantle layers and the frozen crust (which may or may not be mostly frozen water). Tidal friction resulting from Europa’s proximity to Jupiter has been suggested. Though this friction would be great indeed, my rough calculations indicate it falls far short of what would be necessary to melt such an enormous body of ice. I must mention, in addition, that several moons orbiting closer to Jupiter, thus subject to more intense tidal pull, show no signs of surface cracking.
Second, Europa’s gravity is too weak to hold onto liquid water at (or near) the surface. If the melting-cracking-refreezing scenario were true, Europa’s water would be long gone into space, more precisely into what’s called the "interplanetary medium," the thin veil of gas and a few dust particules occupying the space between planets. All this speculation may become moot when Galileo passes Europa within 400 miles sometime early in 1997.
The popularity of the assumption that liquid water and a few other chemicals in solution are the only requirements for life4 suggests two things to me: 1) the weakness of modern science education; and 2) the strength of spiritual darkness. We depend upon God’s resources to combat both.
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