Probably very little of it is in the form you have pictured. Almost all it will be frozen and probably in the form of scatterd crystals.
Yes. I didn't mean walking-talking aliens. The importance is still there. Alien bacteria? It's impossible to know all the things we could learn from that.
You might be mixing Europa and Io here. Europa has about 12 miles of ice over what appears to oceans or at least one homongus slushy.
This is from an article that can be found
here.
"Like other solar system bodies, Europa is about 4.5 billion years old, but recent analysis of the crater density on its icy surface reveals that Europa is very geologically active—the surface is only about 50 million years old. The pull and tug of Jupiter’s gravity and magnetic fields keep Europa’s subsurface ocean liquid, and drive the surface recycling system."
It is largely believed that there is a liquid ocean 5 miles under the ice sheet.
"Data collected earlier this year by the Galileo spacecraft has now generated what some scientists are calling virtually undeniable evidence that Jupiter’s moon Europa has a significant water ocean churning beneath its icy surface.
The data, which was collected by Galileo’s magnetic-field-detecting instruments when the spacecraft flew close to the icy moon, showed that there is an electrically charged layer of some substance stirring possibly as close as 4.7 miles (7.5 kilometers) below the moon’s ice crust. Planetary scientists say the most likely explanation for the data is a liquid-water ocean similar to oceans found on Earth"
Now this is just not true. IIRC Jupiter is somewhere between 50 and 100 times too small for hydrogen fusion to ever have occured. It does however radiate more energy than it recieves from the Sun and so has a greater impact on its satellites than the Sun does.
I went back and did some reading on this subject. Apparently, Jupiter is large enough, and is even made up of largely the same elements our sun is, but isn't massive enough to be catagorized as a star.
However, I *did* read this, so I'm not pulling this out my ass:
"Jupiter was once a miniature sun according to our current concepts of solar system formation," he said. "It only lasted a short time - a few million years at most -but this was long enough, Hoagland estimates, "for molecules that are suspected life-process precursors to be created as they have been in thousands of earthly laboratory simulations. As Jupiter's early star-like period ended, the ocean's surface soon froze, locking the primordial soup' into an underground sea."
But I'm glad we're on the same page. Life could very well be living on Mars (and Europa) as I write this. It may not be intelligent or complex, (then again, maybe it could -- who knows whats there until we go look), but it's possible and worthy of exploration.
