Europa Has Life

I bought a brand new intuouse 3 tablet. First of all, I highly recommend buying one if you have the money. They are a must-have item for any digital artist, but only if you get painter classic for the program. I say painter classic and painter classic only because it has THE BEST set of tools. No other painting program I have ever used has such an absolutely perfect and refined life-like simulation of drawing material as Corel's Painter Classic. Get it. Got it? Good! In particular, the tool I use most often is the Sable Tip Paint brush. Next to that would be the fat stroke air brush, then the 2B pencil for general doodling.

Anywho, this is a work in progress called "Europa Has Life". I'm thinking of doing a series of paintings that catalog the first life forms we might encounter on Europa. Europa is a real world and it exists in our very solar system. It's one of the four largest and well known moons of Jupiter the fifth planet from the sun, a gas giant.

Some facts about Europa: Europa is smaller than the size of Earth and has a very thin and cold atmosphere. It has a completely solid surface covered in frozen water. You heard right, frozen WATER!!. H2O. The same stuff we drink here on Earth, it's covering Europa in a solid state. But not only that, Europa also more than likely...very likely has a LIQUID OCEAN of WATER just beneath a few hundred meters of the surface ice. It's theorized that the tremendouse gravitic tidal forces of Jupiter cause Europa to stretch and compress like an acordian which in turn causes the solid surface of the moon to remain geologically active and warm. This warmth generated by the constant squeezing and pulling causes volcanic activity which melts the ice into a luke warm ocean with a frozen crust. The surface is shattered into a million fragments, it looks somewhat like a home made disco mirror ball from space. The fragments are constantly moving, shifting, subsiding, convecting, vexing, colliding, and merging, because of the tidal forces of Jupiter's gravity.

This planetary dynamic might give rise to some very very interesting alien life forms.

Let's look at the odds here. It's not exactly known how long Europa has been a body in this Solar system but we can be sure that Earth has had life on it for a longer period of time than that. Life existed on Earth only about 1 billion years after it was fully formed. Considering that microbes or at least the primary molecular building blocks of life on Earth can hitch a ride on meteors and asteroids, and Earth has probably had life on it since before Europa had a liquid ocean, then one can postulate the possibility that life not only lept from Earth to Mars (or even visa versa!) that life also hopped, skipped, and jumped all the way to Jupiter's tiny satelite Europa. And perhaps those first little spores or nucleaic acids might have simmered in the oceans of Europa and evolved into highly complex and diverse organisms.

Europa is probably just a single whole ocean underneath that icy exterior, which might lead to a lack of huge diversity across its globe, but even still, on Earth, the oceans are the largest biospheres that there are, with many differentiating climates, and then there's the sea floor geography. Life is far more diverse and plentiful in the ocean than on the surface.

However, the thing is, Europa is pretty close to Jupiter and has very little atmosphere and so it is bathed in deadly and intense radiation. But why should something that is lethal to Earth creatures be so harmful to a being from a completely different lineage of life? Why should life depend on liquid water at all come to think of it? Perhaps life had become accustomed to the radiation, or even dependent upon it. Maybe gamma rays are at the foundation of their food chain. Maybe bacteria synthesize the radiation into electrical energy directly by fusing hydrogen atoms at a low temprature. And maybe these bacteria feed small radiation loving shrimp who are consumed by radiation loving sea slugs, who are consumed by radiation loving highly intelligent octopus??? Why not?? Equally extreme lifeforms can be found on Earth, living inside solid rocks, on volcanic vents, living off of methane gas and hydrogen sulfides. Basic biology and chemistry dictates through the simple laws of entropy, thermo dynamics, and the dynamics of the elements themselves show that there are only a few possible ways for life to evolve from the elements as we know them. Carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, iron, calcium, sodium, these are the basic elements for which life can be built upon. Carbon and hydrogen in particular for their amazing covalence properties and ability to store and transfer energy. Then again, the universe tends to be more exotic than we are capable of imagining. Many questions about the cosmos still puzzle us to this day. Life can be in many unrecognizable formats all across the milky way. Life itself, is a question mark. You can't really ask why life spontaniously arrose on Earth, it just seems to be a natural property of Earth-like planets, given enough time in the right conditions, life wont just probably develope, it has to. Or maybe, Earth is one of the most hostile conditions in the cosmos to have ever evolved life. What if some kind of highly advanced species of intelligent organism is populating the surface of every star in the universe and they've been trying to communicate with one another with focused beams of radiation pulses in a kind of mathematical rythem that is unrecognizable as any kind of pattern because we are so accustomed to a type of nature and law which is vastly different to those of the sun people. But I digress.

This painting isn't finished, but It should be in another few days. I'm quite proud of the image of Jupiter in the sky. I did use references too. Speaking of which, I'm sick and fucking tired of these retards in the sci fi digital arts section constantly churning out these pictures of planets they did in photoshop that they learned how to do from a step by step tutorial they read somewhere on DA. First of all, these retards don't know anything about astronomy, astrophysics, geology, the nature of stars and nebula, or even planetary weather patterns, and yet they are winging these pictures of balls with clouds and a sun with a stupid lense flare. OMG!!! OWNZ!! dis planet is da bondz yo! lolz!!!11. What the fuck?! Seriously, look at some refferences, and actually PAINT IT YOURSELF instead of following some instructions and then improvising some of the smaller details with your (complete and utter lack of) "artistic license". I swear to god, if I see one more of those get picked as a daily deviation so help me I'll...

But anyways, questions comments?