New Paper Implies Europa Clipper Is a "Snowball's Chance in Hell" Mission

 On October 15, 2024 I published a post entitled "NASA Just Launched a $5,000,000,000 'Snowball's Chance in Hell' Mission," which you can read here. I started out the post like this:

"Hurricane Milton delayed the launch of NASA's Europa Clipper mission, which occurred  on Monday. It's too bad nature can't whip up some time warp that would allow going back in time to cancel the ill-conceived mission, which will almost certainly be a waste of 5 billion dollars that won't produce any very important scientific results."

A new scientific study (discussed in the article below) suggests that my negative assessment of the Europa Clipper mission was correct. 

The Europa Clipper mission is heading for Europa, a moon of Jupiter. In the post I explained why there is no need for a basic investigation of this moon. Europa has already been photographed by previous space missions, and we already know what it looks like. The surface of Europa has no very interesting features, because it is solid ice. Below is a photo of Europa. 

Europa (Credit: NASA)

The diagram below shows a cutaway view of Europa, which has a liquid salty ocean underneath a layer of solid ice that is at least 6 miles (10 kilometers) thick. 

In my post I described the wacky "throw ink at the wall and hope it spells correctly" gamble that is at the center of the Europa Clipper mission:

"But NASA scientists have a loony kind of 'bet all your retirement savings on a 9-digit lottery number' idea about how the Europa Clipper spacecraft might detect life. The scientists hope that it might be able to fly through a water geyser erupting on Europa, and sniff signs of life in water vapor. A NASA video told us that Europa 'might be erupting plumes of water,' and that 'if that's true, then we could fly through those plumes with the spacecraft.'  There are two reasons why there is virtually no hope that such a thing would ever succeed in detecting life."

I discussed the first reason, which is the gigantic improbability that life could accidentally arise from non-life. I then discussed the second reason, which is the gigantic improbability of Europa Clipper detecting life on Europa even if it exists in Europa's ocean under its ice. I wrote this:

"There is another reason the 'sniff life from a water geyser's vapor'  would have virtually no chance of succeeding. The evidence that water plumes even occur on Europa is only borderline, with some research casting doubt on the evidence. If water plumes occur on Europa, they seem to occur only very rarely and for a short time. The paper here suggests plume 'ballistic timescales of only 1000'  seconds, making the chance of a spacecraft flying through a plume incredibly unlikely (less than the chance of me dying from stray gunfire).  Europa's suspected ocean (the only place where life could exist) is 10 to 25 kilometers below a layer of ice, making it all but impossible that geysers could shoot out microbes through such an ice layer." 

Recently there was published a new paper suggesting I was right on the topic. In a recent press release we read this:

"A new study led by Paul Byrne, an associate professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, raises doubts about whether Europa’s ocean could support life at its base. By analyzing the moon’s size, the composition of its rocky interior, and the gravitational pull it experiences from Jupiter, the research team found little evidence that Europa has the kind of active geology thought to be essential for life. Their results suggest the moon lacks tectonic movement, hydrothermal vents, and other forms of underwater activity that could supply energy to living systems.

'If we could explore that ocean with a remote-control submarine, we predict we wouldn’t see any new fractures, active volcanoes, or plumes of hot water on the seafloor,' Byrne said. 'Geologically, there’s not a lot happening down there. Everything would be quiet.” On a frozen world like Europa, he added, a still and inactive seafloor could mean the ocean is lifeless.' ...But we don’t see any volcanoes shooting out of the ice today like we see on Io, and our calculations suggest that the tides aren’t strong enough to drive any sort of significant geologic activity at the seafloor.”

According to Byrne, the lack of energy at Europa’s seafloor makes the presence of modern life unlikely. 'The energy just doesn’t seem to be there to support life, at least today,' he said."

In the paper here, Byrne states, "These results strongly indicate that models of Europan habitability reliant on present-day volcanism at its sea floor are implausible." His 2026 paper here reaches a similar conclusion. 

One of the NASA pages describing the Europa Clipper mission makes clear that NASA's decision to launch the mission was based on the assumption that something called "tidal heating" might have provided enough energy for life to form and for water plumes to be shooting out of Europa's ice. That NASA page states this:

"The third component is an energy source. As Europa orbits around Jupiter, Jupiter’s strong gravity tugs and pulls on it. It actually stretches out the surface. And it produces a heat source called tidal heating. So it’s possible that hydrothermal systems could exist at the bottom of Europa’s ocean, and it’s possible that those could be locations for abundant life."

It is just such a "tidal heating" possibility that Byrne dismisses in the quote above, by saying that "our calculations suggest that the tides aren’t strong enough to drive any sort of significant geologic activity at the seafloor."

NASA's Europa Clipper mission was always based on a crazy "snowball's chance in hell" idea: the idea that while orbiting Europa, the spacecraft might be so lucky as to pass near a hoped-for plume of water gushing out of Europa's thick layer of ice. The hope was that if so improbable a stroke of luck occurred, that sensor instruments on the spacecraft might "sniff" some sign of life in the water being ejected from the ocean miles below the ice. This was always an idea as silly as someone on a camping trip to a cold spot waiting outside his tent in the cold for hours, hoping for a bolt of lightning that might start his campfire. 

Europa was long observed by multiple spacecraft missions to Jupiter, including several flyby missions, and two missions orbiting Jupiter for years (the Galileo mission that orbited Jupiter for eight years, and the Juno mission that orbited Jupiter for more than nine years).  No type of plumes have ever been observed coming from Jupiter's moon Europa. although there are some studies trying to suggest such a thing, studies that are probably just cases of "Jesus in my toast" pareidolia. Referring to such plumes from Europa, the 2025 paper here (published by an ardently pro-NASA group called the Planetary Society) confesses that "visible imaging data taken during spacecraft flybys do not reveal clear indications of ongoing activity." It also refers to "the lack of a confirmed plume detection to date." 

The new paper by Byrne and his co-authors suggests that such water plumes do not ever rise up from the at-least-six-miles-thick ice of Europa. NASA has wasted 5 billion dollars on a mission with a design almost as silly as a mission to Africa trying to search for diamonds dropped by unicorns, unicorns that have never even been observed. It seems I was right in late 2024 in saying that the Europa Clipper mission has a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding. 

The Europa Clipper affair makes a case study in the sociology and psychology of the public's fawning acceptance of nonsensical statements by science authorities.  The design of the Europa Clipper was always very bad nonsense, predicated on the occurrence of some all-but-miraculous stroke of luck that no one could reasonably believe would have a decent chance of occurring. But  5 billion dollars of funds for the mission were approved, because people are too timid to tell scientists they are speaking nonsense when they speak nonsense, as many scientists often do. There are very many other cases in which the public should be saying to scientists and science teachers "that would not have a snowball's chance in hell of happening"  or "that would not have had a snowball's chance in hell of happening." But such BS denouncing rarely occurs, because we have been conditioned all our lives to mind-kneel to science authorities, and accept their proclamations no matter how nonsensical they sound.