Goodreads asked E.C. Downes:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

E.C. Downes Whilst teaching at a university in Beijing China, I had a class of non English majors that opted to take my class. It was Earth week, and they were bored with the traditional activities based on recycling, how to save Earth's OZone and over population. Then as I tried to re-focus my students a random question came to mind.
"What if we did find a habitable planet in a Goldilocks zone would you leave Earth to go live there?" I asked. It was then that the idea of EUROPA first began to take shape.

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