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

Re:Acetylene *IS* Organic....

[Khyber]

Well, for one, a complexs molecule can be more than simple carbon chains, as one "tool" said so in a post below this one.

Obviously that one had no knowledge of organic chemistry, in which nitrogen, oxygen, carbon, and I believe two, if not three, other elemtns make up almost the entirety of organic chemistry. So there's your complex molecule. Care to give examples where I'm wrong in my understanding of Organic chemistry on that standpoint? I'm getting this info directly from one University of Memphis professor. (Granted we're rated as one of the best medical schools in the country, so our understanding of biochemistry isn't that far lacking, if at all, and you can do the research yourself on that one.)

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.)

Part of that I already stated, next point, please?

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).

The Second law semantically conradicts itself. If energy cannot be created, nor destroyed, only transferred/transformed thru heat (which is how we measure all things energy-wise, by wattage) then the entire universe, as far as we can tell, is a perpetual motion machine (We cannot disprove this simply because we cannot test the entire universe, this is a theory much like the "LAWS" of thermodynamics (which we may disprove wrong to a point with the advanceent of technology.)

3) We have labs. We don't have to go to another planet to figure out how chemistry works at extreme temperatures and pressures.

Let's see you do that here on Earth, then do the exact same experiment directly upon the surface of Mars? Get the same result? Odds are, most likely not. regardless of how thoughtful scientists are, there's always something missing that we've not yet thought about, which adds to our own confusion about how the universe works. Until you do your own physics testing on another planet under controlled conditions, there's no way you'll get accurate enough data to even compare. Earth-simulated conditions !=Mars conditions.

David Grinspoon is an adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. Hardly "uneducated populace".

Has he been to Mars to conduct the very experiments I'm suggesting???? I thought not. Until he has and has written a book about it, (I'm expecting it to cover at least four full volumes) I'm not going to give him a lick of credit about Mars physics. Until he's been there to experience and test it all for himself, your quote basically means nothing to me.

Yes, I'll be an uneducated twit about that. Why?

Simple. Because none of us have put foot on Mars and then run comprehensive tests with our bare hands and our bare brains, right there at the point of gathering samples and putting them into a testing station. Until we're actually present on Mars and we're able to measure it all personally, I'm only taking the data we have with a grain of salt. I want to see a human on Mars showing the temperature rising, or the greenhouse effect happening without human interference.

And I have made my point/argument, you're just not thinking far enough ahead into the future, you're only thinking about the highly limited here and now.

Mod me again as trollbait/flamebait. Those of you modding me most likely couldn't respond, anyways.