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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."
Still, when I hear about Titan, I am reminded by Vonnegut's book "The Sirens of Titan." Quite a good read. As for the article, eh, no idea.
That line is even funnier if you imagine Peter Griffin saying it.
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Well, you got one thing right, you are *bait.
Pathetic.
Sig
Oh there are no Russian jokes here...
By the way, a description of life is: An open, coherent spacetime structure kept far from thermodynamic equilibrium by a flow of energy through it---a (carbon-based) system operating in a (water-based) medium, with higher forms metabolizing (oxygen). I wonder if we can consider Stars as living beings, because similar arguments can be made for them too. Heck, everything has life!