Ocean worlds: The search for life in the solar system’s other seas
Our best chance to find alien life lies in the vast oceans inside the icy moons of Saturn and Jupiter – and we don’t have to leave Earth to start looking
By
Valerii Ilnitskii
SUDDENLY, out of darkness, a ghostly city of gnarled white towers looms over the submersible. As the sub approaches to scrape a sample from them, crew-member Kevin Hand spots something otherworldly: a translucent, spaceship-like creature, its iridescent cilia pulsing gently as it passes through the rover’s headlights.
This is not a dispatch from an alien world, but it could be. Hand is a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, and one of a select few to have visited the carbonate chimneys of the Lost City at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the site of an extraordinary ecosystem – one that Hand suspects might be replicated on icy moons orbiting distant gas giants. “In my head, I was saying to myself: this is what it might look like,” he says.