Is there life on Europa?

My Times column on how earthlings communicate with life in space:

The Hubble telescope has revealed that Europa, a moon of Jupiter, has fountains of water vapour near one of its poles, which means its ocean might not always be hermetically sealed by miles-thick ice, as previously assumed.

Europa’s huge ocean, being probably liquid beneath the ice, has long been the place in space thought most favourable to life, so the prospect of sampling this Jovian pond for bugs comes a little closer. My concern is a touch more mundane. Who’s in charge of the response down here when we do find life in space?

Even if we only find a blob of protoplasmic ooze, the arguments could get wild. Who is allowed to study it? Who sets the rules about not polluting or harming it? And if instead we receive a radio signal from intelligent life — and such a broadcast might arrive any day — imagine the chaos. President Obama will make a soaring but content-free speech, while his generals will act as if the matter is entirely for them; Ban Ki Moon will set up a committee with gold-plated expense accounts; Vladimir Putin will send a reply unilaterally; the Chinese (who released a rover on the Moon this weekend) will hack the aliens’ computers; Lady Ashton of the European Union will issue directives.

And that’s just the governments. Before the news is cold, Green lobbyists will have demanded — and been granted — observer status at any meetings being held to decide what happens, will have persuaded European commissioners to divert funds their way to lobby them on the matter (this circular feedback is known as  sock puppetry) and will have announced they are to sue governments for not taking the life forms’ interests into sufficient account when launching communication satellites.

Meanwhile, a shady group of the Green Great and Good — those rich people who like telling others to live more frugally — will meet in a luxury resort to draw up ethical guidelines for the rest of the world to follow when dealing with extraterrestrials. The guidelines will surprisingly include the suggestion of well-salaried jobs for themselves.

The International Academy of Astronautics drew up a protocol in 1996 for deciding whether and how to reply to a radio signal from aliens. It’s fairly vague, but it does suggest that “the United Nations General Assembly should consider making the decision on whether or not to send a message to extraterrestrial intelligence, and on what the content of that message should be, based on recommendations from the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space of the United Nations and within other governmental and non-governmental organisations”.

Somehow that prospect horrifies me. Who would be on the committee set up by the UN to write the reply? The Pope probably; a chap from the Pentagon perhaps; an ex-Norwegian prime minister almost certainly; the head of the World Wildlife Fund; and of course Bono. The mind boggles.

In the movies it’s all so much simpler. Scientist (Jeff Goldblum or Sigourney Weaver) goes and tells president (Tommy Lee Jones or Morgan Freeman) he’s made contact, then hero (Will Smith or Bruce Willis) does the necessary violence. There’s neither need nor time for summits, protocols, plebiscites and arguments over money. In real life, things would very quickly get a lot more bureaucratic, a lot more bad-tempered and a lot less exciting.

Within days of first contact with alien life, the news coverage would become deadly dull and all too earthly. You can almost write the BBC News report now: “The Prime Minister today defended his decision to fund the UK’s 2 per cent stake in the mission to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms by cutting language courses for Bulgarian immigrants. Protests at the awarding of the contract to a private security firm are planned for later today.” That sort of thing.

Another alarming thought: the place is called Europa. What adjective are we to use for the creatures: Europans? Spellchecker nightmare. Then imagine the preening that will go on in Brussels, and the gnashing of teeth at Tory headquarters. Is it not just our bad luck that the most promising body in the entire solar system for alien life should turn out to have the same name as that bane of our existence, that byword for boringness, Europe?

I mean, why could a frozen ocean not have turned up on Callisto, Io or Ganymede? Or Hegemone, Sinope, Callirrhoe or Eukelade? (Jupiter’s big moons are named after Zeus’s conquests, small ones mostly after his offspring and would-be conquests.) Actually, there’s a glimmer of hope: in 2005 the spacecraft Cassini found good evidence of water plumes near the south pole of Enceladus, a small but hospitable-looking moon of Saturn that also seems to have a frozen ocean. Do let’s check that one out first.

Last year I was lucky enough to meet the man who is putting together for Nasa some of the technology for exploring the ocean on Europa. A ridiculously capable Texan named Bill Stone, he dives in very deep caves in Mexico, travelling underground for weeks on end; he also designs highly sophisticated autonomous  robots, and he thinks deeply about space exploration. One of his probes has successfully solved a key problem already. Unleashed beneath the four-metres-thick ice of an Antarctic lake, it went off exploring on its own, then came back, homing precisely on the hole in the ice where its journey started.

That combination of autonomy and homing skill will be necessary on Europa, where radio messages from Earth would take half an hour to arrive and would probably never penetrate the ice. Now it’s just a matter of getting Bill Stone’s probe on to the surface of Europa, and working out how it will melt its way down through miles of ice and back again.

All very simple really, at least compared with solving the politics of deciding what to do about alien life forms.