Oh dear, the Europa Clipper mission, scheduled to launch today, was delayed by Hurricane Milton, sweeping across Florida including NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. See astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez’s coverage of the mission here and here. The delay is frustrating to the folks whose mental and emotional picture of reality, though they won’t admit it, really needs there to be life somewhere else besides Earth.

According to NASA, “There’s scientific evidence that the ingredients for life may exist on Europa right now.” The objective of reaching Jupiter’s frozen moon with its ocean under the ice is to “Determine if Europa has conditions suitable to support life.” But let’s be honest, “conditions” and “ingredients” alone wouldn’t really satisfy the people who are spending the tax money ($5.2 billion) here. 

A Key Difference

After all, there’s a key difference between adherents of scientific materialism and those on the intelligent design side. The case for ID, or for what Dr. Gonzalez and philosopher Jay Richards call the Privileged Planet hypothesis, would not be damaged by the discovery of life elsewhere, whether primitive or advanced. Life on Earth was once primitive, after all.

But materialists must hold out hope (however dim in the case of Europa) that life exists somewhere else. It must be “easy to evolve” — as a lady I met the other night at a dinner asserted to me that it is. She had asked me about Discovery Institute and what ID is and I reluctantly began to tell her, sensing from other remarks she’d made that she was not going to like the idea. I was right. The origin of life is “easy”? I started to respond, “Well…” To my relief, she cut me off: “I don’t want to have an argument about it!” 

From the perspective of this lady and many other people like her, if life is easy to evolve, then it had better be out there in the cosmos! If not, then life on our planet starts to look very special, and to the materialist that would be a nearly fatal thing to have to admit. 

For even a slim chance of a different outcome, five billion dollars is a bargain. That’s also why NASA is planning a follow-up mission to Enceladus, Saturn’s moon with its own buried ocean and with similarly long odds against harboring life. Projected cost: $4.9 billion. However desperate the hope for alien biology, how much of your money will they NOT spend to try to find it? Ask yourself that.