NATURALLY, there are many who feel that the £812m European Space Agency mission to the moons of Jupiter is a ludicrously expensive initiative, particularly when half of Europe is already in debt to that tune and more.
Cheaper, they say, to simply fly Greece itself into space, somewhere closer perhaps, like our own Moon, where the Acropolis would look splendid on the shores of the Sea of Quantitative Easing. That way, both our need to explore the heavens and the European debt crisis could be solved in one fell swoop.
But this view is short-sighted. After all, when you break it down, that £812m figure is only the equivalent of 10 or so Edvard Munch paintings. The Scream was sold at auction in New York this week for £74m, plus £5.99 postage and packing. Ask yourself this: if we are to leave the solar system, if we are finally to colonise another planet and thus ensure the survival of the human race, which would you rather have? Ten frankly slightly-depressing paintings or a spacecraft? See my point? Even if you nail them together, the paintings are going to be useless for leaving Earth's atmosphere. They might work as a raft across the pond in your local park, but against solar flares? Forget it.
The mission's primary target is Ganymede, which doesn't so much sound like a moon as a character from Lord of the Rings. Or a little village in Dorset. "Now don't 'ee come lookin' for young Tess down Ganymede way. She's away across the valley some three months now, 'appen so it is." Ganymede is apparently thought to conceal a deep ocean of salty water beneath a thick crust of ice – which, coincidentally, is also a dish made famous by Heston Blumenthal.
By all accounts (not that anyone has actually been there, so how do they know?), it is a pretty desolate, forbidding place. It has its own magnetic field and an ancient surface littered with many types of crater – unlike the average teenager's bedroom, which resembles a crater scattered by many types of ancient litter, much of it screwed-up Standard Grade past papers.
The mission is due to lift off in 2022 with arrival in 2030, by which time The Scream is bound to have been sold again and its iconic troubled figure once more to have shouted "They paid HOW much for this?"
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