The probability of life on Jupiter's moon Europa just got a lot higher

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Human beings have long looked to the stars and hoped that alien life might look back at us.

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Yet the truth is that the first extraterrestrial life we discover is far more likely to be microbial

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— a prospect less romantic perhaps than the idea of bipedal aliens shaking hands with humans after landing on Earth.

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Such microbial life has been theorized to have existed in the early days of Mars, before its water dried up, though we still don't know for certain.

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Now, astrobiologists are turning their gaze towards another nearby neighbor, Europa — an icy gray moon of Jupiter — as a suddenly much more alluring candidate for simple life.

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Renewed interest in Europa's potential to harbor life stems from a new study about the peculiar moon.

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