>>11911247If life exist there it's probably microbial and centered around thermal vents, the trouble is that since the heating isn't coming from the core and instead is mostly friction from tides there might simply not be many or stable vents that life could exploit.
Theoretically there's nothing stopping more complex life from evolving but practically the energy density there is too low for anything but maybe first order predators (think some kind of filter feeder)
As for the actual mechanism it would be similar to what we have around thermal vents. The vents heat up water and break chemical bonds which is then exploited by some kind of microbial life to form usable chemicals. It's called chemosynthesis. Then said bacteria would form the basis of a short foodchain with predatory bacteria or plankton and potentially the filter feeders like our tube worms.
Under ideal conditions something akin to fish might also develop though they would most likely be inert and simply ride the great currents from one vent to another while catching prey bit like jellyfish. Complexity like intelligence and even moving beyond stretching your eaty bits back and fort would most likely not pay off. Outside of that it's hard to say what might be there, it really depends on the energy available which is pretty much impossible to confirm without better study.
It would be pretty cool if there was a race of blind intelligent squids living there. Imagine when you can't see the stars and your existence is simply a circular sea few kilometers thick with a roof and floor of ice and rock. There probably are that kind of intelligent species trapped in many ice worlds on the universe but probably not in our ice moons.
