We Might Find Alien Life In 1827 Days

[Music] Arthur C Clark had a sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey it's called 2010 Odyssey 2 and at the end of it an alien intelligence converts Jupiter into a star as a group of astronauts narrowly escape the implosion they receive the following message from the aliens all these worlds are yours except Europa attempt no Landing there now that was just a novel but it suggests that already in 1982 we suspected that Europa might offer our best chance of finding alien life in our solar system 42 years later in October 2024 NASA is actually launching the most advanced mission to hunt for signs of alien life and it's going to Jupiter's moon Europa there's just one problem Jupiter kills everything around it so how could life even exist there and how do you make a probe that can withstand the perilous conditions deep inside Jupiter there is so much pressure that hydrogen is believed to take the form of a metallic liquid and this metallic liquid hydrogen generates an incredibly powerful magnetic field almost 20,000 times stronger than Earth if you measure at the same distance away so if you could see this magnetic field from Earth it would appear twice as big as the full moon on its own that magnetic field is harmless but right in the middle of it is the most volcanically active world in the solar system Jupiter's moon IO the volcanoes on io's Surface shoot out tons of sulfur dioxide and every second one ton of this material gets ionized and trapped inside Jupiter's magnetic field and the field accelerates these particles to rotate incredibly fast with Jupiter so they whiz around at over 300 km/s their inertia actually pulls back on the field stretching it out and this trap material slams into other moons ejecting even more particles from their surfaces this cycle forms massive radiation belts which span past Europa and the other moons of Jupiter now for electronics this intense radiation is Kryptonite in the 1970s the Pioneer 10 and Voyager missions only briefly passed by Jupiter but the radiation caused glitches gave the instruments false commands and corrupted some of their data even with modern shielding a spacecraft within the radiation belts would only survive for around 3 months so how will NASA's new Mission the Europa Clipper orbit Europa for over 4 years without getting ...