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Cassini Peers Into Titan's Haze
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has peered closer at the moon Titan to reveal two thin, outer layers of haze high in its atmosphere."
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It is therefore thought that the kind of chemistry occurring on Titan today may be similar to that which created the conditions for the appearance of life on Earth.
Do the math.
Actually, this could mean a couple of things.
A: There is the possiblity of history repeating itself on Titan in a few million years.
B: There is already primitive or primordial life on Titan.
C: There is intelligent life on Titan, and all our base belong to it.
I'd be interested to see what the satellite may uncover as it nears the moon more.
the actual molecules that they believe may be forming. One of the biggest questions in biology is where the building blocks of life came from. I'm talking complex amino acids, strings of nucleotides, and such. This could very well answer that question, and finally settle the debate between the evolutionists and creationists. (Not that the creationists were ever near right, but one of their main arguments against evolution was the origination of the complex molecules needed to support life.)
It is interesting how delayed my [the public's] gratification for research like this is. I remember when they shot this thing up there. And here we have news of it again, but we won't get anything really interesting until December when the probe detatches itself.
There was talk that there were very special requirements of the probe so as not to contaminate Titan with life from Earth...
I personally have little doubt that if Titan is made the way they say it is, than it probably has some kind of simple life.
How will the probe be able to probe for this kind of information? Any particular sites to keep an eye on while this goes down?
Methane does not stink; it's completely odorless. Natural gas is in fact methane, but what makes natural gas (as burned in your stove) smelly is a substance named ethyl mercaptan, which is added specifically so that when gas gets out of the stove or the pipes, you can tell before the whole place goes up.
--73--
--JD--
Otherwise we'd probably have to rename the moon Hendrix
I wouldn't exactly call Titan "warm". Even with a small greenhouse effect, the temperature gets up to -180 C. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen, which has a boiling point of -196 C (at 1 atm pressure).
On the off chance that we actually do share the solar system with another intelligent species, all its base are most likely belong to us. We've already got weapons capable of global devistation if deployed in sufficient numbers(easier on a smaller world like Titan), and so far, we haven't seen or heard them moving around. If they were within a century or two behind us, you'd expect some radio transmissions, or even an artificial satellite or two. If we ever do run into actual Europans, Titans, or Martians, the'll be lucky to be out of the stone age before we finish dressing them up in Nike shirts for TV commercials.