The Writing Life: Reality

There is a perception that writers, particularly writers of specular and fantastic fiction don’t have a good relationship with reality. Maybe there are writers like that, but speaking for myself, and most of the writers I know, I love reality. Reality is cool. I mean, apart from the fact that I have to live here so it’s just as well, but I find the world and the universe wonderful. I’m just, perhaps, most in love with the odd little nooks and byways that many people find strange, or hard to believe.
Like, say, the possibility of life on Jupiter’s moon Europa.
I’m not kidding about this. In fact, I’d lay a bet on it. Europa is an incredibly strong candidate for not just life, but Life As We Know it. First of all, beneath its ice layer is a liquid ocean, and not just any liquid. It’s salt water. Every place, and I mean EVERY place on earth where there is salt water, there is life. Even places where there is no light, even places where it is deathly cold. Even the Dead Sea is not completely dead.
One of the problems people have had, despite the presence of so much liquid salt water has been the ice layer. It’s been thought to be so massively thick there couldn’t be anything under there. But that ice may be the key to life rather than the barrier to it. I spoke with Richard Greenberg, author of EUROPA: THE OCEAN MOON. He’s done analysis of the ice formations on Europa, and found they compare to the ice formations in the Arctic, where the ice is thin, and breaks up and reforms. Like from tides, and waves. Which mean there could be currents, motion, layers of water interacting, in short, circulation, which provides a better possibility for complex life than stagnation.
Then he went on to explain that ice sheet would create a shield from the fast-moving particles Jupiter emits. Not a friendly neighbor, Jupiter. Gives off some very nasty radiation, which has also been considered a point against the possibility of life on its moons.
Eeeeexxcceeeept, this just came in; those nasty fast moving particles from Jupiter hitting the Europan ice sheet may bust apart the H2O into H and…O Oxygen. Some of which would get into that salt water, which circulates around the world.
Some experts now believe the Europan ocean may be heavily oxygenated.
This is COOL. In fact, this is totally and completely BEYOND COOL. Almost all my life, the experts have been moving the possibility of life out farther and farther, not just into other star systems but maybe all the way into other galaxies. Now, we’ve got a real, fact-based possibility of not just life, but NEIGHBORS. Not fossilized Martian neighbors either; but living, breathing beings right here (relatively speaking), right now.
How can anybody NOT want to write about this?