Acetylene Based Life on Titan?

mindpixel writes "Astrobiology Magazine's Leslie Mullen has a fascinating interview with funky science dude David Grinspoon about the possibility that there may exist a whole new biology on Titan where the extreme cold slows normally explosive reactions to a biologically useful pace." From the article: "What's really new in our paper is that we go into the question of energy sources. If there's life there, what's it going to eat? What kind of food is there? And it turns out there's abundant food because of all this photochemistry in the upper atmosphere, where methane is being turned into other organic molecules. Some of those organic molecules are very energy-rich, and one that we consider in the paper is acetylene. We know it's being made in the atmosphere, we know it's raining down on the surface, and it's been detected at the surface with the Huygens probe. We calculated that, if acetylene is reacting with the hydrogen gas to turn it back into methane, quite a bit of energy is being released. So that's our basis for saying there is something to eat on Titan. We don't know if there are any customers, but there's something on the menu."

Comments

Misleading headline

[millennial]

Even just from the summary, it would seem that the life itself is not acetylene-based, just the food the life would eat.

Original Article (long)

[Greg Hullender]

Here's a link to the original NASA article by Grinspoon and others. It's pretty long (and part of a longer set of papers) so you might just search for "Titan" and go from there. However, if you have the time, it's fascinating reading, and it does have cool pictures. :-)

--Greg

Now I understand why Huygens lasted 3x too long!

[Herve5]

Because the Huygens probe had many platinum-covered appendages, this (catalyst) triggered out the chemical reactions depicted in the OP, which heated the probe much more than expected (it is notorious that the probe's temperature was well above manufacturer's predictions during all descent).
Then once on ground, this heating continued, and Huygens whose batteries had been designed to last "the 3-hours descent + some margins" in a -150 degree environment, lasted indeed six hours more for being much hotter...

Hervé, part of the Huygens technical team

OK, as we are not april 1st now I wonder wether I shoulnd't have posted anonymously :-)