It has always been considered that there could be plant-life on Europa.
Okay, so, like I said above, the thing about this is that it has not changed our idea of what structure of an organism can exist in the universe. It simply alters certain mitigating factors of energy/nutrient exchange to sustain life. In the end, this organism is still carbon-based, and marginally relies on nitrogen and water to exist. And, again, when we look for life on other planets we have always looked for liquid water and a nitrogen-based atmosphere. These are the largest precursors to life that we know, and this organism has not changed that. If this organism could survive with a cytoplasm lacking liquid water and hydrogen-based energy exchange then this would be a significantly more profound discovery. This is simply another extremophile bacteria that has been able to properly cripple itself in order to survive. It is a compensation, not improvement.
The implications of this discovery are little in the ways of extra-terrestrial life, and moreso beneficial to biochemical and bioengineering projects, as the industry absolutely loves to discover things like this and then immediately put them to work in developing new experimental structures and gene alterations and pharmaceuticals. Despite the NASA spear-heading, this discovery will probably find itself more in our medicine than it will in our space programs. Perhaps an immunity to Arsenic could be developed, and then we could immunize our soldiers to it for Chemical Warfare.
