The Beckoning of the Ice Worlds - Issue 25: Water
▻http://nautil.us/issue/25/water/the-beckoning-of-the-ice-worlds
I have seen the future of space exploration, and it looks like a cue ball covered with brown scribbles. I am talking about Europa, the 1,940-mile-wide, nearly white, and exceedingly smooth satellite of Jupiter. It is an enigmatic world that is, in many ways, almost a perfect inversion of Earth. It is also one of the most plausible places to look for alien life. If it strikes you that those two statements sound rather contradictory—why yes, they do. And therein lies the reason why Europa just might be the most important world in the solar system right now. The unearthly aspects of Europa are literally un-earthly : This is an orb sculpted from water ice, not from rock. It has ice tectonics in place of shifting continents, salty ocean in place of mantle, and vapor plumes in place of (...)