In 1492, when Columbus reached the New World, people in the Old World knew little of it. It took time for the news of the New World to spread. The common people were engaged in routine affairs, like farming, house building, selling goods, etc. Some probably reacted with excitement at the news of the New World; others probably had no time to spare from their daily affairs for such fanciful news.

“What good is that?” is probably what many cynics thought. “Leave me be while I milk this cow” others may have said. The common person often lacks imagination when news of such tremendous discoveries is presented.

These days, unmanned probes to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn have been used to discover enormous amounts of water. These discoveries are as important as the discovery of the New World!

According to Physorg.com, Europa – a moon of Jupiter – contains about twice as much water beneath its surface as all of the Earth’s oceans. Callisto, another of Jupiter’s moons, and Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, are also believed to have bodies of water beneath their surfaces.

Of course, travel to Jupiter and Saturn requires a long time. It took the Galileo spacecraft six years to reach Jupiter, but it went to Venus first, and that’s a considerable detour. The New Horizons spacecraft reached Jupiter in just 13 months! That means human travel and colonization of one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn is feasible.

Are the moons of Jupiter and Saturn the New World? Given the increasing population on this planet, the depleting of natural resources like water, and the problem of nuclear proliferation, a human mission to one of these moons would be visionary. It is little surprise that world leaders have yet to grasp the importance of such exploration; Columbus left Italy for the same reason. Only when he came to Isabella did he find a visionary leader.