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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."
Life is:
1. Ability to store information.
2. Ability to process stored information to make
replicas of oneself.
3. Metabolism (to power the above).
A quick trip to dictionary.com yielded this answer:
"The property or quality that distinguishes living organisms from dead organisms and inanimate matter, manifested in functions such as metabolism, growth, reproduction, and response to stimuli or adaptation to the environment originating from within the organism."
There are some pretty standard requirements; the rock doesn't respond to stimuli, doesn't gorw, doesn't reproduce and doesn't evolve over time. Standard geological phenomena such as erosion don't count.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
A nice definition of life is something like "Active maintenance of self in the face of entropy". In other words, something that actively (and successfully) keeps itself functioning and stable even though the vicissitudes of existence constantly try to tear you down.
Or, shorter, if you fight entropy you're alive. If you don't, you aren't.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Therefore, to expect the life on another planet may be complex-molecule-based instead of simple-carbon-based is feasible.
"Complex-molecule-based" versus "simple-carbon-based" ?? Did you make up those terms yourself? Could you please define them? And perhaps elaborate on how this is supposed to follow from the statement "acetylene is organic"?
Because the statement "acetylene is organic" doesn't mean anything in particular. It's saying that the acetylene molecule has a carbon-carbon bond in it.
But the other people saying 'no' are (as far as I can tell thru HISTORY) full of horse-hockey.
Who is saying 'no' to what?
Tell me exactly what in the world you know about organic compounds on another planet that will/will not produce life, please?
Since this is the first semi-intelligible statement in your post, I'll try and answer it:
1) Most scientists believe that life in all its forms, terrestrial or otherwise, follows the laws of chemistry. All life we know of appears to do so.
In the same way that we also believe that all the universe follows the same laws of physics. We have no reason to believe otherwise. (and the chemistry follows from the physics, anyway.)
2) We know that certain conditions are required to sustain life regardless of its form. For instance, life requires energy. This follows from the laws of thermodynamics being one of those things believed to be universal in 1).
3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.
Yes, it's flamebait/trollbait. How about you editors/moderators tell me your experience on Titan, [..]
No, it's just moronic. How about you tell me about all those atoms you've seen yourself? Still believe they exist though, don't you?
Let the organic/biological scientists determine this, not the uneducated populace.
David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".
Even I don't dare step into this conversation, except as far as I have made my agrument.
You didn't really make one.