Microbes Likely Abundant Hundreds of Meters Below Sea Floor

Indeed. In fact sunlight was probably largely irrelevant to Earth life for most of the first billion or so years it existed. Prevailing opinion is now that chemical energy from hydrothermal vents was probably the primary "food" early on, then eventually perhaps each other. Which makes sense if you think about it - complex chemistry would probably find chemical energy far more accessible than capturing radiation. Photosynthesis doesn't appear to have really caught on until much later, with the evolution of chlorophyll likely causing the first mass extinction event as it flooded the seas and atmosphere with toxic oxygen.

Of course Europa is a much smaller petri dish than Earth, and less energetic, so I'd suspect life would evolve much more slowly. If we do find life there, and it's anything like us (DNA, etc), it might provide a fascinating glimpse into what primitive life on Earth may have be like. Everything here on Earth is the product of around 4 billion years of evolution.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/-6bFFEexlnw/story01.htm

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