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Could There Be Life On Titan?
Adam Korbitz writes "Astrobiology Magazine reports on new research indicating extremophile microbes may be able to live on Titan, the sixth and largest moon of Saturn — in spite of the fact that the moon is largely ice and covered with lakes of liquid methane. Titan joins Mars, Venus, Europa and Enceladus as a potential home to extremophile life in our solar system."
In the original 2001 book they went to Saturn, where Titan and Enceladus are. It would have been a long walk to get to Europa. In the movie and sequels they go to Jupiter, where Europa is. It would be a long walk from there to Titan.
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I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but as anyone following the wrangling over the next outer-planets flagship mission knows, we could easily not get a dedicated Titan mission for until the end of the decade after next.
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This is especially relevant, since Geisler found some (rather indirect) evidence that life was present on Earth just a few hundred million years after the planet solidified. This suggests that life can form relatively quickly in a water-rich environment. However, the lateness of the Cambrian explosion suggests that oxygenation of the biosphere presents a hard metabolic requirement to forming complex multicellular organisms, like us.
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I don't think anyone is arguing that Titan doesn't have the building blocks (by all accounts its atmosphere is probably pretty damned similar to the reducing atmosphere that the early Earth had). The problem is energy. Titan only receives a fraction of the energy that Earth does, and that's why it's in a deep freeze. It's hard to imagine at any point in the evolution of the solar system when Titan would have had, for any substantial amount of time, that much energy from either the sun or Saturn.
The fact that some highly specialized terrestial organisms might be able to make a go of it doesn't, in my mind, suggest that similar organisms could have ever evolved on Titan. These organisms have had nearly four billion years to slowly march into extreme environments. I simply don't think Titan would have ever have been in a similar situation.
I think our best bets for the moment are still Mars and Europa. Mars, because it does lie close enough to the sun and there is evidence that liquid water was once common. Europa because, while it's significantly farther from the sun, is in a rather special situation where Jovian tidal forces are quite likely keep the interior very warm, meaning liquid oceans, and possibly an active core.
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I once tried freezing a complete 2 litre of bottle of water in -20C temperatures. All but a central core of 1.5 inches froze - This gave me a solid ice tube which actually split the bottle itself. There was water in the middle - the pressure from the surrounding ice must have been enough to keep it liquid.
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Assuming the reasonable (if not proven) ideas that life on Earth began before the Late Heavy Bombardment, and that the Late Heavy Bombardment happened, there should have been lots of bacteria-infested ejecta from the Earth spreading throughout the solar system. Enough that some landing on Titan is perhaps not probable, but is much more likely than "essentially impossible". (One hundred miles per hour average speed, and you get from Earth to Titan in a mere 1,000 years; the distance, at least, is not a problem.)