We can't any more so than any other lander/prob/rover we've sent. And will it really matter when we eventually (probably not in our lives) send people there anyway. All their body-biome and other contaminants will come with them, too.
We are going to contaminate the solar system with humans eventually. A spore that may survive and MAY be viable is the least of the Europa's problem.
The surface of Europa is hard vacuum and its not landing there, with several miles of ice to the ocean. It's as protected from contamination as it's ever going to get.
We do hydrogen peroxide rinses of everything, but there are some organisms that can survive even this. I worked with some of them like B. pumilus that came back from the space station and exposure to space. Incredible resistance to hydrogen peroxide.
If an organism can survive a hydrogen peroxide bath, all our other sterilization methods, then a multi-year space trip bathed in UV rays and general radiation, then re-entry into Europa, and then proceeds to colonize that world... it deserves to.
It might already be there hitching a ride on a rock. Saturn and Jupiter have so much gravity the center of mass of the solar system can be outside of the sun when their orbits align. Who knows where the debris of the K-T event ended up.
Correct me if I'm wrong but is this (panspermia) the justification given in the Star Trek canon of why all the aliens have two arms, two legs, can speak, and speak English?
Regardless, it'd be extremely cool to have some distant cousins swimming around that far away. It'd also be extremely cool to find completely unrelated life.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all that aliens that can do space travel are bipedal. It’s just a great way to manipulate things with arms. No manipulating equals no spacecraft. Speaking would be the same. I always thought the aliens in Star Trek spoke their own language but the universal translators translated it?
> By the 24th century, universal translators had advanced to the point where a full-fledged UT could be built into the combadges worn by Starfleet personnel. The translation was so natural and seamless that beings unaware of them believed that others spoke their own language.
Whatever your body plan, I suspect higher order intelligence is a sort of snowball effect from having dexterous appendages you can use while walking and making noises at the same time.
Without that trio it may just be too difficult to keep going up the ladder to tool user and sentience.
That doesn’t eliminate crab people. It may not eliminate cephalopods. It may eliminate sea mammals without external help (David Brin gives dolphins prosthetic arms via human assistance).
It may also be that we need combustion to advance, or that may be only a problem on planets with our parameters.
There are creatures here on earth that would fit the bill if they evolved differently:
- monkey
- dry-land octopus
- eagle with four claws (perch on the back two and handle things with the front two)
- big raccoon (yikes!)
- big spider
- honey badger
- many lizards have hands
If any of these could be large enough and smart enough, they’d make a convincing alien. And these are based on Earth creatures - I’d expect a huge variety of much weirder things in a Star Trek universe.
My take is that fungi have built most of Nature. They are the first farmers. So if the right branch of the fungal kingdom and anything else lands on a planet, you’ll get the rest eventually.
If by "the rest" you mean complex life, sure. If you mean "aliens" that speak English with an accent but look suspiciously like human actors in funny hats... well, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief.
Star Trek is - I love it but still - kinda bullshit that way. The Hainish model is more likely.
Attempt at galactic empire fails completely, and hundreds or thousands of generations later some civilizations who remember their origins reacquire
the ability to travel between systems and attempt to remind each other that we are all brothers even though we have evolved very different traits.
Star Trek canon says that humanoids were deliberately seeded across the galaxy by an ancient race, not random panspermia. It was established in the TNG episode "The Chase". It's mentioned in some other episodes but it's typically kept on the down low to prevent hurting/contradicting religious feelings/origin stories (in universe).
I mean odds are good it already happened a long time ago. Some space crap crashed into earth, spewing some rock covered in microbes into space where it eventually collided with Europa. We have identified plenty of space crap from other planets and moons in our solar system that crashed into us.
Granted the environment on our space probes is a little different than a shattered rock sent from an impact event but still…
