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

What is life, anyway?

[darkmeridian]

Reading the article makes we wonder exactly what life is, anyway. It sounds as though we only require chemical conversion. What if there is a big rock that serves as a catalyst for this conversion of acetylene and hydrogen to methane. Would we think of that as a life form? Or would we require reproduction? Would reproduction be possible in this slow-motion frozen gel we find on Titan?

It is interesting, though, how the life and the planet co-evolves. Life has really changed Earth and it may have affected Titan, as well.

Re:What is life, anyway?

[QuantumG]

I like the definition of life which is based on complexity theory. Anything that shows less entropy than the environment of which it is contained is typically alive.

Re:What is life, anyway?

[Rei]

False. For example, BSE ("Mad Cow Disease") prions have no "blueprints".

The earliest lifeforms will inherently have no "blueprints". In fact, the earliest proto-life won't necessarily make a copy of itself. What you're likely to see is chemicals that tend to catalyze reactions with various ligands to create chemicals similar to themselves. When the local "soup" becomes more concentrated with chemicals similar in form, eventually self-catalytic cycles can emerge - basically, a puddle of self-catalyzing goo that is a non-distinct "organism" which expands itself slowly outward. Large hypercycles may have many processes (even independent processes) competing for the same ligands and reactants; a particular cycle can benefit itself over its neighbors by beginning to poison its competitors' reactions. Even without membranes walling off distinct "organisms", and with each set of reactions scattered throughout the same space as its competitors, the individual processes can sabotage and even consume each other as ruthlessly as any modern day life. Eventually, membranes can form (membranes are surprisingly easy to establish; many chemicals inherently line up into sheets, which other chemical reactions or simply natural currents can make into small spheres) which provide defense for a tiny area. This area being small, all but one competing hypercycle gets killed off within it. If the remaining side hypercycle contains the processes for producing the membrane itself, you have a very inefficient, but functional, Ur-cell.

"Information" isn't needed for life. In fact, "information" is a concept that is context-sensitive; nothing inherently has "information", and in fact, our genes only contain "information" when we put those chemical structures in the context of "what will this do to us after a storm of chain reactions ends up down stream?". By themselves, they're just chemicals, reacting as chemicals do.

I wonder...

[Spy der Mann]

Suppose there is intelligent life in there, what will they think of earth creatures?

"Amazing! The third planet creatures support temperatures so high that none of the titan lifeforms could withstand. Let's call them extremophiles".

Kinda makes you think...

Reminds me of a Hal Clement story

[StefanJ]

Clement's Ice World was set on a unthinkably frigid world where sulfur was a solid and liquified steam covered the surface!

It was Earth, of course. The protagonist was an alien scientist kidnapped by drug smugglers and forced to analyze a horrific drug they'd been buying from the natives. It's a juvenile, really, but enjoyable by adults as well.

Further study needed?

[jacks smirking reven]

Who elsewould like to see 10 billion taken out of that moon landing money and put towards a few swarms probes to Titan to confirm this. Something to researhc this, and the JIMO mission are what i'd really pushed up schedule. Life outside our planet is the type of scientific and philisophical question that we should make all strides to answering. Jupites moons and Titan are the only places we essentially have left in our immediate solar system that might contain life. We really owe it to ourselves to research these to their final conclusion. I'd be happy to expand humanity into the solar system once we know we're not the only thing on it.

Re:Farts for dinner?

[__aaclcg7560]

We should be feared when we eat bread (the farts of yeast) and honey (the piss of bees). Or a can of beans.

The Bigger Question

[lcreech]

Is the impact on religion. The 7th day and so forth. Like Copernicus and Gallileo popping the churches/government bubble isn't pleasent and because of the current polical atmosphere, these times are no exception.

Not anonymous because I am not afraid, though I may regret it in the near term.

Re:Farts for dinner?

[Jeremi]

honey (the piss of bees)

As I understand it, bees create honey as a convenient way to store sustenance for themselves, not as a waste product. So it's not so much the piss of bees as the cud of bees, or perhaps the canned food of bees.

Re:life on titan

[mormop]

Or it could have been touched by his noodly appendage