It's official, folks! The ESA has finally confirmed that Earth indeed is still habitable (here’s why!)

In a “groundbreaking" discovery, the European Space Agency (ESA) has officially confirmed what scientists, environmentalists, and pretty much every living organism has known for millennia: Earth is habitable. Yes, you heard that right. Thanks to a flyby from ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) spacecraft on August 20, we now have yet another confirmation that Earth hosts life. Phew, glad to get that settled.

A quick Earth check-up

Now, you might be wondering why ESA's shiny new spacecraft, designed to explore Jupiter's icy moons, is double-checking whether Earth is alive and kicking. Was it a slow news day? Did the spacecraft get lost on its way to Jupiter? Did scientists wanted to reconfirm given all the anthropogenic destruction?

Launched in April 2023, JUICE is on an epic eight-year journey to the outer solar system, where it will study Jupiter’s moons — Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa — all of which might have oceans hidden beneath thick layers of ice. These oceans could potentially support life. But before JUICE gets to analyse alien seas, the team needed to make sure its instruments were working properly. And what better place to practise than the only planet we know has life?

As Olivier Witasse, ESA’s JUICE project scientist, noted, "We are obviously not surprised by these results; it would have been extremely concerning to find out that Earth was not habitable!"
Scientists define ‘habitability’ as having conditions necessary to life to arrive and survive. Unsurprisingly, ESA instruments detected a cocktail of life-sustaining ingredients on Earth: water in the atmosphere, as well as carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur, commonly referred to as the "CHNOPS" elements. These are the are the most common ingredients of living organisms on any planetary body.

Off to Jupiter!

During its Earth flyby, JUICE used two of its instruments — the Moons and Jupiter Imaging Spectrometer (MAJIS) and the Submillimeter Wave Instrument (SWI) — to scan our home planet. Now that JUICE has confirmed that its instruments are functioning properly, it can focus on its primary mission — determining if life could exist elsewhere in our solar system.

JUICE is taking a short cut to Jupiter through the inner Solar System, after it completed the world-first lunar-Earth flyby last month. When the spacecraft finally reaches Jupiter's moons, it will repeat the same tests it ran on Earth, analysing the moons’ atmospheres and surfaces for any signs of life.
Interestingly, JUICE also gathered data on Earth's atmosphere, including its oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, to serve as a benchmark. If the Jovian moons have similar concentrations of these gases, scientists might be looking at potential homes for future space fish — or, more realistically, microbes.

While this might not be the most shocking news of the century, it’s still a fun reminder of how unique our little blue planet is — at least until we find something similar in the Jovian system. But for now, Earth keeps its status as the only known entity in our solar system that hosts life as we know it.