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Comment by monlockandkey | Hacker News Reader

Europa is definitely the most exciting part of the solar system that sparks imagination. Literally 100s of miles of pitch black ocean with thermal vents, ripe for life. Getting kiddy thinking about the leviathan sized aliens roaming the deep ocean of Europa. Does anyone else feel this way?

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Well technically they would just be Europeans.

Technically, they’d be Europans. ;p

Are you sure, I think they would be called Europaeans.

To solve your dillema as a Greek. Both the continent and the planet have the same name. Europeans it is.

While on the subject of etymology, spelling the Greek word “dilemma” (δι+ληπ+μα) incorrectly does not help with providing a definitive answer as a Greek. I'm not starting a flame war, I just make an observation (and as it happens, I'm a fellow Greek).

Yes, the word “European” (inhabitant of Europe) is rooted on the Greek word Europē, Zeus' mythical mistress (one of many), after whom both the continent and the satellite were named, but is the “-ean” a proper transcription from Greek?

Perhaps “Europaean” could be the better answer to the question we discuss; after all, in English the continent's name is a modernized “Europe” while the satellite stays closer to the intermediate Latin as “Europa”, and since this discussion is in English, I feel that the difference in suffix justifies a different label for the inhabitants of the satellite.

I think it was a joke, not a argument from authority as a greek :)

That said, I think ChatGPT is right here:

  ...the term "Europans" seems the most appropriate choice for the inhabitants of the Jovian moon Europa. It aligns with the linguistic patterns used for other celestial bodies, maintains clarity by avoiding confusion with "Europeans," and respects the Greek origin of the name "Europa" without introducing non-standard formations.

  Mercury: Mercurians
  Venus: Venusians
  Earth: Earthlings
  Mars: Martians
  Jupiter: Jovians
  Saturn: Saturnians
  Uranus: Uranians
  Neptune: Neptunians
  Pluto: Plutonians
  Moon: Lunarians
  Io: Ionians
  Europa: Europans
  Ganymede: Ganymedians
  Callisto: Callistans
  Titan: Titanians
  Rhea: Rheans
  Iapetus: Iapetians
  Triton: Tritonians
  Eris: Erisians
  Ceres: Cerians

That doesn't seem like a very Greek spelling of dilēmma.

There are currently two Jupiter moon exploration missions either en route or about to launch. Oddly, the European one (JUICE, launched earlier this year) will focus on Ganymede, while the NASA one (Europa Clipper, launches next year) will focus on Europa.

Or Europaens?

Europa Report (movie): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avzqYgtpdMQ I enjoyed it ^^

I was thinking that just now and will rewatch this evening! Any other recommendations of the same vibe?

Great film with the suspense and tension of Aliens.

Great movie, smart script and they did a great job without huge budget

From an Arthur C. Clarke novel:

> ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS - EXCEPT EUROPA.

> ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

So yes. Clarke thought it was special also.

Well, kinda, eventually. The book of 2001 points Discovery 1 at Iapetus, a moon of Saturn. Evidently, the special effects crew for the movie couldn't do a convincing job of faking Saturn because of the rings so they did Jupiter instead.

Then when Clarke did the book for 2010 he retcon'd it to match the movie.

I'm pretty sure that Clarke stated somewhere in the preface that each story in the Space Odyssey series doesn't necessary happens in the same universe and thus that's why there's a difference between places in books

Nevertheless, Jupiter as the biggest planet within our star system being forced to collapse into a small sun feel extremely right

It's also one of my favorite sequences in the 2010 movie of Space Odessey series (which IMO, works a lot better as an actual movie pacing wise). Just something about the tension gets captured really well there, without their being any sort of actual threat (since it's a robotic probe).

Funny that the Clipper probe is still only flying by, attempting no landing.

Don't forget about Enceladus. Also a massive ocean with the added benefit of shooting enormous geysers into space. Would be wonderful if our solar system had at least 3 worlds with ocean life.

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/enceladus

imagine if we could harness the power of the sun and basically direct extra heat towards target moons and planets via a mirror system or something and basically make any body in our solar system human habitable warm.

I'd imagine this could also be weaponized against dangerous asteroids, as the heat laser or whatever could cause a change in direction.

or terrible news a la great filter arguments

Except those are utter nonsense. The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there, so we can't deduce anything about their existence from the fact we haven't detected them. The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

> The distances involved, the speed of light and inverse square laws mean we wouldn't expect to have detected aliens yet if they are there

That’s not true at all - simple assumptions would make it likely we would have encountered intelligent life if it evolved in the past in this galaxy.

We don't have the technology to detect signals similar to our own from the distance of even the nearest stars [1], and there is no reason to assume that more technologically advanced civilisations will generate vastly larger signals. Therefore the absence of detection to date tells us nothing, except to place an extremely generous upper bound on the power of signals they generate.

[1] https://www.seti.org/press-release/can-et-detect-us - where a SETI researcher concludes an alien civilisation around a nearby star would require technology much more advanced than ours to detect us. (And what technology we do have has been pointed at a vanishingly small fraction of the planets in the galaxy.)

We wouldn’t need to detect signals - life arising only a few hundred million years earlier than us would easily have been able to send physical artifacts/vehicles/harvesting to every system in the entire galaxy if they had interstellar travel.

If life were common enough that it has evolved multiple times in the same solar system (excluding panspermia) then this becomes almost a certainty that it should have occurred

What a big assumption to make though. Billions of years of life on earth and an object was first put in space what 80 years ago? This technological age of ours could very well just be a blip. Its far more likely based on our own planet that intelligent life does none of these things. We might not have civilization at all if we didn’t happen to farm, we could both be preparing for our morning hunt and foraging just as easily as we are preparing for work today, if events happened only slightly differently. N=1 here. Our trajectory is no generalized model.

Yes, it is possible that there is a large filter between developing life and getting to where we are. I can't deny that that is a possible explanation for the observed Fermi paradox.

But finding independent life on other planets would eliminate a whole class of great filters, making it more likely the filter is either as you said or that it is ahead of us. It is bad news imo if it is more likely than before that the filter is ahead of us. And that is unambiguously the case if we were to find life on another planet. Not proof positive it is ahead of us, but it shifts the probabilities.

And yes, it took billions of years for life to evolve, but if we find life in our solar system, that is potentially billions of opportunities for life independently evolving.

All you need is one single civilization to develop von Neumann probes and then they’re everywhere in the universe (or at least Galaxy). If life really is so ubiquitous as to be found in 3 different planets or moons in our solar system then we’re totally screwed.

How many different life forms have there been on earth? Billions? How many of these have made von neumann probes? Zero. All these assumptions about how intelligent life should look are always so anthropocentric and rooted in assumptions we make based on supposition or even sci fi stories. Meanwhile, your dog is an example of intelligent life, and it engages in none of these pursuits.

Why do people insist that intelligent life had to take the turns we took over the last couple thousands of years? Intelligent life is far more likely to look like how humans have lived for the last couple hundred thousand years than the last few thousand. I’d argue a flock of birds qualifies as intelligent life.

It makes sense temporally.

If you have a species that is intelligent and has the capacity to evolve to more and more sophisticated tool building, then that will build on itself. If life is so common that it has arisen independently on other planets in our solar system, it would be likely that these intelligent species would have arisen hundreds of millions of years before us.

And even if most don't advance to interstellar travel, it really only takes a few expansionary ones if they were sufficiently long ago that we would have seen evidence. Again, if life is so common it is on other bodies independently in our solar system, this should have happened probably.

> The "Fermi" "paradox" is like someone locked in a bathroom going "OMG I can't see anybody! Everybody on earth must have died!!".

I’m going to try this today just to see how my wife reacts.

It's also utter nonsense because we have already detected UAP NHIs and are gradually beginning to understand them as the stigma fades away.

Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton? Seems like thermal vents would provide a lot less energy than the Sun, but I’m really out of my depth.

> Could you have leviathan sized animals with no phytoplankton?

Yes. See e.g.:

https://www.biointeractive.org/classroom-resources/how-giant...

These aren't "leviathan-sized" but they could easily provide food for something that big. The base of this food chain would be chemosynthetic bacteria. After that, energy is not the limiting factor on size.

Broadly, yes, but chemosynthetic organisms tend to be benthic (afaict, IANA marine microbiologist), so they can stay close to their food source. So something big that feeds on them would probably be a grazer more than a swimmer. Unless, perhaps, they need to swim between vent sites or something...

So I asked my friend who knows things about marine microbiology and she was actually pretty optimistic about free floating chemoautotrophs as the base of a food web. You just need enough chemicals dissolved in the water (which I guess is how they grow them in the lab). Some other ideas we discussed were bacteria growing on suspended particles and as endosymbiotes in larger animals like the aforementioned tube worms. So yeah, leviathans are on the table.

If it turns out to not have life, we should introduce Earth life and let evolution run amok there.

I realize some conservationists disagree.

_highly_ recommend the "Red Mars" series - deals with questions I never thought of before, namely "to what extent should we preserve the surface of other planets?

This could be the cause of our presence

The Venusians certainly weren't conservationists.

Gotta pay it forward!

I mean if it's confined to geothermal vents I'd think bugs would be the absolute outside limit for most complicated life, and realistically it's probably prokaryotic life if anything.

That would still be mindblowing, and also horrifying when you think about the Fermi paradox.

Wondering if we could eat fish born on Europa and if there would be any ill effects.

No doubt on some Europan version of HN right now they're posting wondering the same thing about us.

Probably a prerequisite is their biosphere has a common origin with ours, so the biochemistry is shared. Otherwise you wouldn't fare much better than someone eating random chemical compounds from an organic synthesis lab.

This is where chirality rears its ugly head.

I am excited to see what can be in Europa's deep oceans. But I've always felt Enceladus would be a better place to start looking. Europa requires a lot of burrowing into ice, whereas Enceladus could reveal some of its secrets with a couple of proper flybys.

technically, most exciting part of our solar system is Earth. Have you never been to Vegas?

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