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."
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.
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. The water plume on the top right is marked as a "hoped-for" feature.
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. It is a paper entitled "Europa’s Lyman-α emissions from HST/STIS observations." The HST referred to is the Hubble Space Telescope. The paper states, "We find evidence to support a persistent hydrogen exosphere at Europa, but no evidence of localized water vapor." A Universe Today article on the paper has the headline, "It Looks Like Europa Doesn't Have Plumes of Water Vapour After All."
Oops, it seems like NASA has wasted 5 billion dollars on the silliest of wild goose chases, by sending a robotic spaceship to one of Jupiter's moons, to sniff water vapor plumes that don't exist. All that is likely to come from the Europa Clipper mission is some nice close-up photos of ice cracks. It will be the kind of basically worthless result that would have occurred if some billionaire had launched drones to Antarctica, to get photos of barren ice cracks. You might compare the Europa Clipper mission to a project that puts super-expensive odor detection equipment in every reported haunted house, with the goal of sniffing ghost smells.
It seems the Europa water-vapor plumes are one of the many chimeras conjured up by overeager scientists trying to create evidence of things they eagerly hope for. Scientists have endless ways to conjure up such illusory fancies, as I explain in my post "Scientists Have a Hundred Ways To Conjure Up Phantasms That Don't Exist." Such mirages tend to arise more often whenever there is something that scientists eagerly long for. In this case you had scientists eagerly hoping for a pathway that might allow for a detection of extraterrestrial life in the solar system. So they put their eager hopes in the driver's seat. To read about some of the sociology at play when such goofs occur, read my post here entitled "The Social Construction of Eager Community Mirages."
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