I caught Europa Report (2013) on Netflix last night, a mixture of a stark, beautiful, and ultimately inspiring account of the first flight with people to one of Jupiter's moons, the one deemed most likely to have life, due to its water and heat signatures, both of which we knew (the water and heat, not life) in 2013 and at the end of 2017.
The movie pulls no punches, which makes its ending all the more awe-inspiring. [Spoilers ahead ...]
Everyone of the voyage dies, in one heroic way or another. But this first trip beyond the Moon (our Moon) by any human beings manages to get back communication to Earth, with an image of: a multi-celled organism! Proof there's life out there in our solar system, more advanced than some ancient bacterium.
I've been arguing with people in science and science fiction for years about the need to send humans beyond this planet. Why not send robots, these people ask, wouldn't they, in the Europa Report, have found the same life as did our human beings, without the loss of their life? Europa Report makes vividly clear why that wouldn't work: it's human ingenuity, unprogramable, that captured that extraordinary image of off-Earthly life.
There are also some people who don't and say they wouldn't find such a discovery amazing and Earth-shattering - in the best way possible - whether made by robot or human. We need to spend the money needed to get us off this planet on such problems as reducing poverty, fighting disease, and other crucial things on Earth. Although I agree completely that we need to spend more money on those pursuits, I believe even more strongly that those expenditures shouldn't be at the expense of space travel. (And in the Europa Report, the mission is private financed.) But to those people who don't get the inspiration of the Europa Report, I'd say: don't watch the movie.
But to everyone else: see it, if you haven't already. It's a great way to ring in the New Year. And even for those who don't find getting humans off this planet an essential way of learning more about what we're doing here in this cosmos - maybe see the movie, anyway, after all. Optimist that I am, I believe every human being ultimately will be inspired by the possibility of finding life on other planets, and it's just a question of how long that truth takes to break through to your soul.
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