All These Worlds…

Source: NASA

Even the most dystopian science fiction is hopeful since it imagines a future where people are still around. And when something that sounds like science fiction becomes science fact, no matter what else is going on, it gives me a little hope. The Europa Clipper mission has launched on a six-year trip to study one of Jupiter’s moons that may be a home to life elsewhere in our solar system. Europa’s an intriguing little world that’s only a quarter the size of Earth but may hold twice as much water in an ocean hidden by an icy skin. The launch was delayed by hurricane Milton which is oddly fitting: Europa orbits Jupiter, whose storms are so enormous—that famous great red spot could hold three Earths—that studying them can teach us a lot about storms here on Earth. So there are good reasons to go more than four hundred million miles for a closer look at our biggest neighbor.

In Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 Europa becomes the one place in our solar system that’s off-limits to humanity even as the rest of it opens up to us, and the 2013 film Europa Report imagines people making the trip to study the frozen world for possible life. It’s an interesting premise but it doesn’t seem plausible; Jupiter itself generates an intense amount of radiation, twice as much as it gets from the sun. Any life on Europa will have adapted, but it’s more than our fragile little bodies could tolerate. We can learn a lot from Jupiter and its moons, which currently number ninety-five and counting, but I don’t think it will ever be a place we can get close to.

The Europa Clipper reminded me of another science fiction story, Contact, and Jodie Foster saying, “They should have sent a poet.” Engraved on the spacecraft is a poem by Poet Laureate Ada Limon. That also gives me hope.

You can listen to her read her poem here.

In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa

Arching under the night sky inky

with black expansiveness, we point

to the planets we know, we

 

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,

we read the sky as if it is an unerring book

of the universe, expert and evident.

 

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:

the whale song, the songbird singing

its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

 

We are creatures of constant awe,

curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,

at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

 

And it is not darkness that unites us,

not the cold distance of space, but

the offering of water, each drop of rain,

 

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.

O second moon, we, too, are made

of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

 

We, too, are made of wonders, of great

and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,

of a need to call out through the dark.