In 2010: The Year We make Contact (the movie, at least), we are warned to stay away from Europa. I never read 2061. So what was the deal with Europa?
I think that it simply had life there that the monolith-people didn’t want humans to disturb.It’s been a very long time since I read 2061, so I could be wrong or missing some important aspect of it.
No, you got it. That’s the reason.
Damn the 2001 sequels 
Europa was (and is) neck-and-neck with Mars as the most likely place in the solar system, speculatively speaking based on the best current information, to find life off the Earth. We got a hint of this when the Voyagers passed through in the late seventies, but we didn’t know how unusual Europa was until Galileo. Before those probes went into orbit and started returning photos of Jupiter’s moons, we assumed they were largely uninteresting balls of rock like our own.
Question: Was Clarke the first SF writer to capitalize on the new knowledge and make Europa a major element of a story? (And how much of the 2010 story was Clarke’s, anyway? Did the moviemakers come to him with a general concept that he fleshed out and turned into a novel, or did they make an open-ended request for a sequel story, and then adapted the resulting novel? I’ve never been clear on this.)
How advanced?
Remember too that there was other life in the Jovian system. Gaseous creatures lived in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but whatever intelligence it is that decided to intefere decided that the organisms on Europa had a better chance than the Jupiter creatures did.
Of course, the book has the mission going to Saturn. Considering what Cassini has already found about Titan, maybe they should’ve stuck with Saturn. At least, it sounds as interesting as Europa.
Sorry, don’t remember.
Very primitive, and on the edge of extinction, just like the protohuman life on Earth the aliens helped.
I’m not aware of anyone using Europa before. As for your second question, the book came out with no relation to the movie. Check out The Odyssey File which is a compilation of the emails Clarke and Peter Hyams about the movie. 2010, btw, was the first book Clarke did on a word processor.
Everything I’ve ever read by Clarke on the subject indicates that he came up with idea, based on the new data coming back from Voyager, and that when the movie folks got wind of it, they immediately optioned the rights to the story. AFAIK, Clarke’s the first to capitalize on the Europa data, certainly he’s the most well known writer to do so. Other authors, before the Voyager probes have speculated on Europa being a life bearing body, but I don’t think that any of them had it as being a world surviving under ice.
I think it natural that he followed the movie so as not to confuse people. For those who don’t know, the movie went to Jupiter because they couldn’t get Saturns rings right.
In the book, the monolith is on Iapetus, which has vastly different albedoes on either side, and so which looked suspicious. We now know there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for this.
In the book, 2010:
The Chinese bamboozle the Americans and Russians by secretly assembling a ship to travel to Jupiter – every thinks it’s a space station until the Chinese attach booster rockets – and launching it. The ship lands on Europa to refuel, but the crew is attacked by a monster, and everyone is either killed by the monster or is marooned on the planet and dies of lack of supplies. (This section was completely cut out of the movie, which was probably a good choice – what happens here, however interesting, doesn’t really affect the other sections.)
So, basically, the life on Europa was more than just blobs of goo, but not advanced enough to have created strip malls, microwave popcorn or “The Simpsons.”
IIRC the life form had the potential to develop intelligence (making and using tools), but not quite there yet. The aliens (the ones who made - or are - the monoliths) value intelligence above all else, so they are trying to raise the intelligence of the Europans, just like they did on Earth millions of years ago (i.e. beginning of the 2001 story). Turning Jupiter was a major part of this operation, since without the heat source the Europans are locked beneath the ice.
Well, how advanced were the critters that lived in Jupiter’s atmosphere, but ended up getting deep fried? And what were they like?
BTW, in the movie…
[spoiler]…The Russians discover traces of chlorophyl on Europa, from orbit. And some patches of green, close to the surface.
And at the end of the movie, we see what looks like a swamp/jungle on Europa…with a monolith standing in the middle of it. I don’t know if the swamp was supposed to have formed almost immediately after Europa thawed out, or if the scene is supposed to be taking place thousands or millions of years in the future.[/spoiler]
Very, but there was no hope of them developing tools, on an essentially solid-free world. So from the viewpoint of the Starchild, they were a dead end as far as intelligence was concerned. The Europans, though, needed only an energy source.
OK all this is off the top of my head here.
The monoliths were built and programmed by their creators to help advance life to sentient awareness in the area to which they are assigned. Each is attached to a larger (or perhaps just more important?) one that conveys orders. The creators no longer care so much about what the monoliths do, having moved on to another stage of evolution, relying on their complex programming to keep the system running smoothly.
In this way the monolith on Earth cultivated intelligence in a certain species of proto-primates that would eventually turn into humanity and then monitored this experiment from Tycho on the moon. When humans discovered the Tycho monolith, it sent back a report to a much larger one around Jupiter. From that point on, as far as the monoliths were concerned, the experiment phase of humanity was over. They collected a specimen for further study and use in communicating when so desired then moved on to other possibilities.
It was faced with two choices in the solar system for a new experiment.
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Jupiter. In a thin layer of the atmosphere, between the freezing heights and scalding depths, life had evolved from the chemical soup into big gas bags of various purposes. Some of the more advanced communicated to one another via radio waves for similar purposes as whales in our oceans. This life was necessarily limited in its ability to evolve intelligence, since there were no drives pushing them towards it and the resources available for any intelligence to utilize would be nearly non-existent. A dead end, as far as the programming was concerned.
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The oceans of Europa. Due to the constant kneading of the moon by Jupiter, a warm liquid core remains deep under the ocean depths. In much the same way that life evolved on Earth at crushing depths, the lava vents and outgassings formed small oases around which plants could feed and live in a reasonably warm range of temperature. Further creatures fed on the plants, and creatures fed on the herbivores. One herbivore species was nearing sentience in its drive to protect itself from the predators that fed on it, constructing primitive hide-outs to keep safe. However, even if these Europans did evolve intelligence, they would be confined to that one small strip of ocean bottom due to the vast cold waters between one “island” and another until finally Europa cooled into a solid block of ice.
The solution was to destroy the Jupiter ecosystem and create a mini-sun from its mass, which would be dubbed Lucifer. Due to Europa’s proximity, the heat from this sun would give a sentient species the chance to populate the entire world and eventually, perhaps, even reach out towards the stars. In order to ensure that nothing interfered in this process, the monolith used Dave Bowman to send a message that Europa should be left strictly alone or serious consequences would result.
In his preface to 2061 Clarke mentions that he had hoped to wait until Galileo reached Jupiter before writing 2061. Had the Challenger disaster not occurred it would have reached Jupiter around 1990 or so (it would have been launched with a more powerful booster out of the shuttle and taken a less circuitious route to the planet). But with the mission on indefinite hold he went ahead and wrote the book without it and the book came out in 1987. As it was, Europa surely lived up to its 2010 speculations, and I think Ganymede & Callisto proved to be far more interesting than the Voyagers showed.
In 2061…
A colony has been established on Ganymede, which is slowly developing a breathable atmosphere. Europa is wrapped in clouds and the “no landings” request has been honored. Dr. Heywood Floyd, a healthy 100 year old, has hitched a ride on an interplanetary “cruise” ship with stops on Halley’s Comet and then to the Lucifer system, but an accident causes them to crash land on Europa. The remnant’s of Jupiter’s diamond core also are featured prominently in the story.
Unlike 3001, 2061 is readable if not up to Clarke standards…the last “readable” Clarke book in my mind…
I read both 2061 and 3001 yet I have no recollection of either of them, other than him revealing his hand so to remove any mystery or intrigue from the series. :dubious:
The movie Independence Day and the book 3001 rely basically on the same fairly hokey logic in their endings:
Massively advanced alien species still use computers that we can easily interface with, so we can beat them by uploading viruses.
I’m inclined to give the movie a free pass because it’s a pretty watchable piece of crap that doesn’t pretend to be anything but a fun, explosion-filled romp, but I expected better of Clarke (who no doubt realized how hokey he was being, since he quoted some maxim by some obscure scientist in the book to defend his logic).