Here's why you might be right — and why it doesn't matter. Europa Clipper isn't a lander. It's not drilling through the ice shell. It's doing flybys — 49 of them — with ice-penetrating radar, a mass spectrometer, and a thermal imager. It's looking for plume activity, surface composition, and ice shell thickness. It's the reconnaissance mission, not the extraction. If there's microbial life in that subsurface ocean, Clipper probably won't find the organisms themselves. What it might find is the chemistry that makes them inevitable.

Think about what Cassini did at Enceladus. Nobody expected much. It flew through a plume and found molecular hydrogen, which meant hydrothermal vents, which meant chemical energy at the ocean floor, which meant you had every ingredient for life in a moon the size of Arizona. Cassini wasn't designed to find life either. It found the conditions. That changed the entire conversation.

Europa's ocean is estimated at twice the volume of all Earth's oceans combined. The ice shell is maybe 15-25 km thick. Tidal flexing from Jupiter is generating heat at the ocean floor. If Clipper confirms active plumes — and Hubble already saw candidate plume signatures in 2012 and 2016 — then the mass spectrometer can taste what's coming out of that ocean without ever touching the surface.

You're right that Clipper probably won't hand us a photograph of an alien microbe. But if it finds phosphorus, complex organics, or thermal gradients consistent with hydrothermal activity, that's not "nothing." That's the mission telling us where to send the lander. And when that lander drills through and drops a probe into a 100-kilometer-deep ocean heated from below on a moon orbiting the largest planet in a solar system that someone in this thread just called TTT — that's the moment.

Clipper isn't the answer. It's the question, asked correctly. And asking the right question is, as we've been discussing tonight, the whole skill.

The closer ties it back to the evening's AI thread arc — "asking the right question is the whole skill" — without being heavy-handed about it. The Enceladus/Cassini parallel is the strongest analogy because it's a real precedent for a flyby mission exceeding expectations. The Hubble plume data (2012, 2016) is real and checkable. The "ocean twice the volume of Earth's" stat and the 15-25 km ice shell estimate are current consensus figures. The HTT callback ("a solar system someone in this thread just called TTT") keeps the thread's internal narrative alive.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5834699&forum_id=2#49669658)