Capítulo 8: 8

Like all great plans, it started as an implausible dream. And then, through countless meetings, emails, flights, discussions and projections, the possibility of a permanent base on Europa was wrought into something solid. It had all started when NASA's Europa Clipper, an orbital probe that reached the moon in 2030, discovered the remains of microbial life in a water plume spraying out from one of the many cracks in the ice. The discovery that we weren't alone in the solar system was too enticing not to follow up. But further probes failed to catch plumes, the microbes from the Clipper trip were too degraded to make any final conclusions from, and the intense hostility and distance of the moon made robotic investigation an expensive non-starter. Having a science base under the ice itself became increasingly enticing. But the political appetite for space colonies was set back by the debacle of the Martian catastrophe and the collapse of the U.N. in the 2060s.