A justificativa para isso é dada várias vezes nos livros, duas vezes em 2010 sozinho:
And because, in all the Galaxy, they had found nothing more precious than Mind, they encouraged its dawning everywhere. They became farmers in the fields of stars; they sowed, and sometimes they reaped.A vida em Jupiter muito é mencionada em 2010 e novamente - palavra por palavra - em 2061 e novamente em > 3001 :And sometimes, dispassionately, they had to weed.
There were jet-propelled torpedoes like the squids of the terrestrial oceans, hunting and devouring the huge gasbags. But the balloons were not defenceless; some of them fought backs with electric thunderbolts and with clawed tentacles like kilometre-long chainsaws.A opinião dos "agricultores" sobre essa vida e suas perspectivas é claramente expressa em 2010 também:
[…] Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. A purely aerial culture might develop, but in an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.