Oops, That "Europa Water Plumes" Phantasm Sent NASA on a 5-Billion-Dollar "Wild Goose Chase"

 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. 

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. 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."

Postscript: In an interview talking about the recent release of UFO-related information, astronomer Avi Loeb cites another case of a multi-billion dollar "wild goose chase" in which eager hopes were in the driver's seat:

"The physics community was advocating for a new symmetry of nature: Supersymmetry. Ten billion dollars were invested in CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, in part to search for this symmetry. We did not find it. So, it’s not always true that the mainstream knows what it’s talking about."

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. 

Postscript: A new scientific paper announced in January 2026 estimates the thickness of Europa's ice at 29 kilometers (18 miles). It is a thickness even more than the estimates above. The greater the thickness of that ice, the smaller the chance that Europa Clipper will find anything notable. The thicker the ice, the smaller the chance that a geyser could shoot up water through the ice, in a way allowing Europa Clipper to sniff something interesting. 

The Quixotic “Wing and a Prayer” Impracticality of NASA's Europa Clipper Mission

A press report a few days ago reported, “NASA has cleared the Europa Clipper mission to proceed through the final-design phase and then into spacecraft construction and testing, agency officials announced yesterday.” Too bad. The Europa Clipper mission will basically be a $4 billion dollar waste of money that won't produce any very important scientific results.

Europa is a moon of the planet Jupiter. The Europa Clipper mission will be solely focused on getting more information about this distant moon. But the Europa Clipper won't have the job of discovering what Europa looks like. We already know that, from previous space missions.

Europa (Credit: NASA)

The Europa Clipper spacecraft will take photos of Europa more close-up than previous photos. But there won't be any very interesting close-ups, due to the fact that the surface of Europa is almost featureless, consisting of frozen ice. So the Europa Clipper won't find any interesting geological features like the Valles Marineris on Mars. The most interesting features on the surface are merely cracks in the ice. Close-up photos of those won't provide photos that people will be pasting on their walls.

The reason why scientists are interested in Europa is that they think that there could be life in an ocean underneath the icy surface of Europa. Will the Europa Clipper be able to confirm that life exists on Europa? It seems not, for the mission does not include a lander.

But NASA scientists have a kind of “wing and a prayer” idea about how the Europa Clipper spacecraft might detect life. They hope that it might be able to fly through a water geyser erupting on Europa, and sniff signs of life in water vapor. At 2:11 in the NASA video here, we are told 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.

The first reason is the enormous improbability of abiogenesis, life appearing from non-life in an under-the-ice ocean of Europa. To calculate this chance, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion,” a vast organization windfall comparable to falling trees luckily forming into a big log-cabin hotel. Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

Scientists have been knocking their heads on the origin-of-life problem for decades, and have made very little progress. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a single type of functional protein molecule to appear, and many different types of protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality (like the luck of you tossing a bucket full of pennies on the floor, and having them all turn up heads).  The complete failure of all attempts to search for radio signals from extraterrestrials would seem to provide further evidence against claims that the origin of life is relatively easy. 

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).

It would not at all be a situation like the following:

Mr. Spock: Captain, I detect a water plume from a geyser on Europa.

Captain Kirk: Quick, hurry over there while it lasts! Go to Warp Factor 8!

If a rare water geyser eruption occurred, the Europa Clipper spacecraft probably would not be anywhere close to Europa's surface. This is because the Europa Clipper mission plan does not have the spacecraft orbiting Europa. Instead, the plan is to just have the spacecraft repeatedly fly by Europa, flying by it about 45 times, so that the spacecraft does not pick up too much deadly radiation near Europa. With only such intermittent appearances close to Europa, the spacecraft would need an incredibly lucky coincidence to occur for the spacecraft to fly through some short-lived water plume ejected by a geyser.

We can compare this scheme to the “wing and a prayer” scheme of a traveler who plans to travel without any food to a city, the plan being that the traveler will walk with his mouth open and hope that someone discards food by throwing it into the air, with the food luckily landing in the traveler's mouth.

At the 2:52 mark in the NASA video, we get some talk that reveals the main motivation behind Europa exploration. It's all about trying to prove (contrary to all the known facts) that “the origin of life must be pretty easy,” to use the words in the video. For people with certain ideological tendencies, proving that the origin of life was easy is like a crusade. But zealous crusaders often don't make logical plans, as we saw during the Middle Ages when there were foolish missions such as the Children's Crusade, in which an army of children marched off to try to capture the Holy Lands from Muslim armies. The Europa Clipper mission's odds of biological detection success seem like the odds of success faced by the Children's Crusade.

Do the “Easy Life” Guys Want 8 Billion Bucks for Metaphysical Reassurance?

On the Ars Technica website, there is a very detailed and lucid explanation of NASA plans to search for life on Europa, a moon of the planet Jupiter. The mission described is fascinating, but it may be a case of people who want to spend 8 billion dollars to reassure themselves that their dubious philosophical assumptions are correct. The mission seems to be all about proving an “easy life” hypothesis, one which seems to be very unlikely to be true from a purely scientific standpoint.

Europa is believed to be covered with a thick layer of ice, but it is believed that deep below that ice is a watery ocean. The plan is to land a robot probe on the icy surface of Europa. The probe will then drill down into the ice, looking for signs of life. Advanced plans for searching for life on Europa have always looked like the plan shown in the NASA visual below. Under such plans a probe would release something that drills down through the ice, and makes contact with the ocean below.

The best way to search for life on Europa (credit: NASA)

When I read the Ars Technica article, I was expecting to hear about a mission such as this, one that would somehow make contact with Europa's ocean underneath its ice. But the article did not describe such a mission. It merely described a mission that would drill down a little into the ice, and look for signs of life inside the ice.

There are two reasons why such a mission seems like a gigantic boondoggle that will almost certainly fail. The first and lesser reason is that even if life had evolved in an ocean underneath Europa's thick icy layer, it is unlikely that signs of such life would pass up all the way through such a layer of ice. That ice is believed to be between 15 and 25 kilometers thick (10 to 15 miles thick). It seems unlikely that any type of organism could survive a journey through such a thick layer of ice.

The second and better reason why such a mission seems very unlikely to succeed is that the chance of life appearing in an ocean of Europa seems extremely low. To calculate this chance, we must consider all of the insanely improbable things that seemed to be required for life to originate from non-life. It seems that to have even the most primitive life originate, you need to have an “information explosion.” Even the most primitive microorganism known to us seems to need a minimum of more than 200,000 base pairs in its DNA (as discussed here).

Scientists have been knocking their heads on the origin-of-life problem for decades, and have made little progress. The origin of even the simplest life seems to require fantastically improbable events. Protein molecules have to be just-right to be functional. It has been calculated that something like 10⁷⁰ random trials would be needed for a functional protein molecule to appear, and many such protein molecules are needed for life to get started. And so much more is also needed: cells, self-replicating molecules, a genetic code that is an elaborate system of symbolic representations, and also some fantastically improbable luck in regard to homochirality.

Facts such as these are troubling to those who believe in a random, purposeless universe. To such people, it would be embarrassing to have to concede that our planet seems to have been blessed by an astonishingly improbable set of lucky events that got life started. So such people often advance a kind of counter-thesis: what we may call the idea of “easy life.” The “easy life” hypothesis maintains that we didn't get lucky, because given the right ingredients and chemicals, life will inevitably appear. Such thinking is perhaps rather like the daughter's thinking in this conversation:

Mother: Why are you leaving us and heading 2000 miles to Hollywood? The chance of you becoming a star is one in a million.

Daughter: No, it is inevitable that I will become the world's greatest starlet.

When you are faced with a mathematical reality that something that you want to happen is very unlikely to happen, it is very effective psychologically to “cross out” this troubling improbability by maintaining that the thing is not unlikely at all, but instead has a probability of 100%.

In the case of the proposed Europa mission, we have a mission that we might describe as “Desperately Seeking Easy Life.” Some people pitching such a mission want very much for their “easy life” hypothesis to be proven, and they are asking for 8 billion dollars of taxpayer funds so that they can achieve this metaphysical reassurance, and say to themselves, “I'm so relieved – Earth wasn't so lucky!” It's basically the kind of “give me lots of money so I can be reassured about my assumptions” thing that would go on if a fundamentalist group were to ask for millions of taxpayer dollars to fund projects digging underground looking for Noah's ark.

Looking at the probability of life arising by pure chance in Europa's ocean, a purely chemical and biological assessment must rate the probability as being extremely low. Now it is true that there may have been some additional factor involved in the origin of life on Earth. Perhaps life got started here through the action of some divine being or the action of extraterrestrial visitors. But while such a higher power may have acted to spur the start of life on many planets in our galaxy, the chance of such a higher power working to create life in some buried ocean underneath 20 kilometers of ice seems much smaller. So even if we throw in the possibility of some additional power helping life appear in our galaxy, it still seems unlikely that life would exist in Europa's ice-buried ocean, given all of the fantastically improbable things that have to happen for life to appear from non-life.

The proposed Europa mission seems like a fantastically expensive “shot in the dark” that is very unlikely to succeed. Even if some hint of life were to appear, it might well be some ambiguous signal like the one produced by the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. A mission putting cameras down into Europa's ocean might conceivably yield fascinating footage of swimming creatures. But a mission drilling only a little into the ice (like the currently proposed mission) would merely yield some numerical data that might be of interest only to scientists. Such data probably would still be subject to debate, and would be unlikely to give a final decisive answer as to whether life exists on Europa.

We don't need the Europa mission because there are other ongoing scientific research programs that can be used to test the “easy life” hypothesis. One such program is the search for radio signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, with a price tag a tiny fraction of the proposed Europa mission. If the “easy life” hypothesis is true, we would expect such searches to be successful before long. (Their failure so far despite thousands of hours of searching time may be a strong indication that the “easy life” hypothesis is not correct.)

Another such program is the search for atmospheric signs of life from planets revolving around distant stars. If the origin of life is easy, and life is all over the galaxy, we can expect that soon our space instruments will start showing up by-products of life (such as abundant oxygen) in the atmospheres of extrasolar planets.

So an advocate of the “easy life” hypothesis cannot claim that the Europa mission is essential to test such a hypothesis, as the hypothesis will be tested by other programs searching outside of our solar system. 

Postscript:  The selling point constantly made for SETI outside of our solar system is: there are so many planets where life might have appeared, so eventually we'll find something. But that argument cannot be used whenever you are talking about searching for life on one particular moon or planet. Think of it this way. Investing in some telescopic search of many stars (or a radio search of many stars) is like buying two big stacks of lottery tickets. But sending a robot mission to look for life on one moon or planet is like buying a single lottery ticket, and just as unlikely to pay off.  8 billion dollars is way too high to pay for a lottery ticket.