Fishing on another planet

2/28/26

I was thinking last night about all these moons and planets that scientists theorize about having massive oceans. That it seems the most likely place we'll find some life at the moment exists in some kind of embedded ocean. We already have life at the bottom of our oceans where there is no sunlight at all, so why not on some moon floating around?

Then because I'm a bit addicted to ice fishing, I thought, what would it take to do some ice fishing on Europa if you were so inclined? This brought me down a rabbit hole where I found that most of these moons with theorized massive oceans under thick ice, can get really thick. So I'd have to bore through possibly 10km of ice, although it seems you might be able to find thinner sections closer to 5km depth. The deepest hole we've dug here on earth was the Kola Superdeep Borehole, which got to about 12km of depth. On Europa they wouldn’t need to worry about temperature, although I think we might struggle with the ice being way more unstable than the rock of earth.

Plus, it seems that geologic activity, tidal forces with the planets, etc. actually cause a decent amount of pressure under all that ice. So there are volcanoes of water spewing out of the ice. So even if I managed to drill all the way down to the water, I’d probably have a crazy geyser spew up in my face. So I was thinking then I’ll have to create a diving bell of sorts to keep the opening pressurized to let me drop a line down.

At that point maybe it would be easier to bore or melt my way all the way down to the ocean in a diving bell? Getting down would probably be a one-way trip through the ice with all the activity of the surface. But then once in the ocean maybe you explore around, fishing out the bottom for fun while you look for a geyser. A less bloody Iron Lung adventure. Then when you’re ready to leave just pilot into a geyser and let that thing blast you back into space!

Anyways my vision of an astronaut sitting on a bucket fishing through a hole in the ice of Europa, taking in the view of Jupiter is dashed a bit. However the thought that there really could be something living down below that ice is really cool to think about. Could you even fish for them? Being actual aliens, would they eat bait? What would attract an alien fish living in a dark ocean under kilometers of ice?

Guess I'll just have to live long enough to find out. -Guntar

_________________________________________________________________________________________

I kinda feel less worried about climate change when reading scifi

2/25/26

I noticed this first when I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. The thought of just completely destroying and rebuilding planets and such just seemed to be a matter of fact to the characters in the story. Humans had swarmed the galaxy so thoroughly and for so long that nobody actually seems to know how the stars were conquered, or where humans came from, a major plot point later in the series, which I won't get into because it's spoilers for the later books.

The next time I noticed this was when reading Jack McDevitt's "Engines of God" and subsequent books in The Academy series. The first book primarily focuses on the impending terraformation of a planet which at one point was inhabited by a spacefaring civilization, but whose inhabitants were no longer present. In fact, there was still untintelligent native life on this planet, however that was not important or even a concern to even the archeologists on planet. Nukes and comets of ice were destined for the surface to make way for an Earth 2.0 and trivial things like an existing ecosystem or evidence of past advanced civilizations was not going to stop that. The next entry in this series, Deepsix, takes place on a doomed planet teeming with life destined to collide with a gas giant. A similar lack of concern for such cosmic events is present in this book.

I think that a major part of why books like this have such an effect is that it zooms out our perspective substantially. We're never very concerned at the idea of say, chopping down a tree or clearing a plot of land for a house. However for many living organisms within that sphere, such event might be equivalent to the planetary events witnessed in these books. Lary Niven's Ringworld is so large, that our whole planet earth is essentially a grain of sand in a desert. I could scoop a handful of thousands of planets, scatter them into the wind, and it makes no difference to the universe. So it goes.