Europan Vacation – Under the Scope

“Oh, you should see the Colosseum, Spaniard,” Proximo told Maximus in the original Gladiator movie.  When Maximus finally did see it, his awestruck friend Juba commented “I didn’t know men could build such things.”  If you live in the land of soft and stormy impermanence (better known as PoV Country), you might be sharing Juba’s wonder at seeing great Roman ruins and other colossal things humans have built—like the Eiffel Tower or Stonehenge or the Acropolis or Versailles or Prague Castle or Notre-Dame Cathedral—constructions that could never persist atop our soils to become our history.  Of course, Juba and Maximus were taken to Rome against their will to fight as gladiators.  But if you’re lucky enough to voluntarily visit Europe, you’ll see these things without having to fight to the death in the great arena, though Customs at major European airports may be as bloody a battle–and one you’ll need to fight without a gladius!

Over the next few years, I’ll be taking a different trip—one less crowded, without waiting lines, and far less expensive.  I’m not going to Europe.  Rather, I’m going to Europa.

“And, mais, where’s that at?” my neighbor asked.  It’s in outer space, I told him.  “And you need me to feed your cats?  You better leave me a lot of cans!”  As I explained to him, Europa is a moon of Jupiter—two billion miles away.  It’s the fourth largest of the planet’s 95.  It was discovered by Galileo in 1614, just before construction began on Versailles in France and just after the original Acadians began carving a settlement into the rocky shores of their New World.

“And why you going so far?” he asked, which left me wondering if his concern was for me or for the cats.  In late 2023, NASA called for anyone who wanted their name carried aboard the Europa Clipper spacecraft.  I submitted my name just before midnight on New Year’s Eve to beat the deadline.  In response, I received a certificate that guarantees my name laser-etched in nanometer-height lettering onto a silicon wafer that will be attached inside the spacecraft’s titanium-aluminum shell just aside the magnetometer and behind the ultraviolet spectrograph.

Actually, I am already enjoying my Europan vacation.  The 2.6 million of us who submitted our names blasted away from the launchpad in mid-October of last year.  By the time you read this, my name will be 13 million miles away and feeling the pull of Mars’ gravity.  But don’t worry, Neighbor!  I’ll be right back in a few months because, to gain enough speed and conserve enough fuel to make it to Europa by the year 2030, we need not only a gravity assist from Mars but also a later, second gravity assist from back at Earth.  That’s like leaving Houma on LA 24 and going to Thibodaux so that you can turn around and gain speed to hop on U.S. 90 to get to Morgan City.  That certainly won’t gain speed or conserve any fuel.  I know.  I’ve tried it.

A Europan vacation offers no opportunities to experience art or architecture or music or gift shops or exotic foods.  Nothing medieval, renaissance, or baroque.  The only ruins we’ll pass will be a belt of pock-marked asteroids and maybe a dim comet or two.  “So, why you going there at all?” Neighbor asked (or maybe it was one of the cats–it’s hard to tell sometimes when the conversation involves cat food).  “To find extraterrestrial life—or the conditions for it.”

Europa has a 10-mile thick outer shell composed of ice, but the surface beneath is heated by geothermal energy.  Between the two is a relatively warm-water ocean.  With the shell protecting the moon from radiation and evaporation as well as maintaining a warm temperature beneath, the environment might be perfect for supporting life.  “And why you wanna get messed up in all that?  You never saw Alien?” Neighbor asked.

I had seen War of the Worlds, however.  Suddenly, my brain conjured an image of two aliens conversing like me and Neighbor.  If it opened the spacecraft and found the etching of my nanometer name, what would one eight-armed, octopus-looking being say to the other?  “Hey, Krylox.  Think this dude has an Amazon account that I could hack and order more gloves?  I ordered once, but I need three more pairs.”

“Not Star Wars or Star Trek aliens,” I told Neighbor, “but simple forms of life, like bacteria or amoebas.”  Just this past December, in fact, scientists found primitive microbes that had been untouched for 14 million years in a subsurface lake hidden beneath the Antarctic ice shelf.  Those same conditions exist on Europa, but microbes there could be billions of years old.

Neighbor looked toward the wet ditch that separates our property.  “Pretty sure we got some of them bacteria and amoebas right there.”  Indeed we do, but those have been selected by the forces present on earth.  What would microbes look like on Europa?  What would DNA look like—or would it be something other than DNA?  

My conversation with Neighbor took so long that during it my name inched another 100,000 miles closer to Mars.  “Where you gonna go after that with all those frequent flyer miles?” he asked.  I couldn’t convince him that only my name would be travelling, and so a stock of canned cat food would not be necessary.  We never got around to the existential discussion of whether a person could actually exist separately from a name where no one would read it.  Little does it matter:  An intelligent Europan that could read my name would likely mispronounce it, just like they always do west of the Atchafalaya.

“I gotta go feed the cats now,” I told Neighbor in an effort to break the impasse.  He bid me farewell, borrowing Juba’s line from the final scene of Gladiator:  “I will see you again.  But not yet.  Not yet.”