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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."
TFA is not about Titan being a candidate, but some research trying to recreate (some) of the conditions on Titan.
Of course TFA also is a long, long way away from life. But knowing the building blocks can form there is another step forward.
We know there are certain types of bacteria that can exist in extreme conditions on earth, but to my (untrained) mind that doesn't imply it is possible for abiogenesis to occur in the same conditions.
What does it take for life to come about from non-life. Do we have an idea?
1. Lets suppose, for a moment that extremeophile life exists on Titan. The conditions on Titan are far more prevailant in the universe than "habitable zones". Which means we are an extremely delicate form of life. "narrowphile" 2. Etremophiles would then be a more likely, and more dominant life zone than us. 3. We're looking for the wrong conditions through the universe to support life. We should be looking for energy rich (metane, sulphur), hot and cold "extreme" environments.
meh
Considering the vast variety of conditions where life exists on earth I would consider it likely that there is life elsewhere too.
The catch is that although life can exist in extreme conditions as we observe here on earth in places, the likelyhood of genesis in such conditions is much lower than the odds of genesis in more gentle environments. So it makes sense to look for either existing conditions, or previously existing conditions, that are "gentle" and are statistically much more likely to experience genesis. If there is only a hostile environment presently, it's more likely that conditions were more favorable in the past, and life evolved to survive in the more hostile present conditions. That's why they not only look for signs of water, but for past signs of water.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
What does it take for life to come about from non-life. Do we have an idea?
The error - and even most scientists have not understood this - is, to make a spearation between the two.
There is no single moment, where something became "alive".
It's a veeery gradual process, starting with the simples physical/chemical reactions, and evolving to more complex systems.
Even we ourselves are such very complex systems.
See... I do not even have to mention the word "life".
It's just another one of those egocentric concepts, like seeing humans as separate from animals, thinking we were the center of the universe... and so on....
So the problem is purely psychological.
This is the only reason, such an obvious concept is still mostly repressed.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
IAWTP 100%
Egocentric mankind (generally speaking, science community excluded) thinks life means Youtube, Social Networking, Church, and High End Tennis shoes.
I really wish children were taught an early age about the Universe and the life breeding ground that it is. Different conditions produce different forms, it is now up to mankind to acknowledge and accept this.
Inter-planetary meteor crossing are not rare. Dozens of Mars rocks have been identified on earth, probably a sample samples of thousands that have fallen. Hundereds of thousands lunar meteorites have been found. Over the vast stretch of time, probably at least one sample from every rocky planet or moon has reached all others.
Earth life is very hardy. It lives six miles undergound, at the boiling point of water, high in clouds, etc. It survived on a moon lander for a decade. Some could be likely to survive centuries if would take meteors to travere the solar system.
There's not enough energy for complex reactions to happen quickly, but they can still happen. And there's nothing that says life has to be able to form there today. Assuming it has a large, rocky core, it must've gone through a long cooling phase after forming, so there would have been significant geothermal energy at some point. It's also a pretty crowded orbit. Collisions would provide at least short term heating; there's no reason it has to happen all at once.
Thing is, life on Titan doesn't need to evolve on Titan . . . it just needs to survive the journey to Titan from where it evolved. Endospores are quite durable.
Titan is only about five percent farther away from Saturn than Europa is from Jupiter. Europa has a special resonance setup with Io and Ganymede but Titan also has some fair sized moons and a big planet to pull on it.
There's a quite reasonable theory that life on Earth could have originated with organic molecules brought into close contact in ice. The article describes research that shows some of the probable constituents of Titan's atmosphere undergo promising chemical processes even around the freezing point, and liquid water is believed to flow out of the interior of Titan, even today.
There are also other sources of energy. We have life right here that derives its energy purely from chemical reactions and Titan is a big chemical sea. The reactions (and the life) might happen very slowly, but it could happen.
Since there are at least three or four good theories about how life might have originated on Earth (if it did), it seems a little premature to suggest that life needs a certain amount of energy, of a certain kind.
These statements are all true... on Earth. Plenty of reactive silanes are possible. All known biochemistry is based on carbon, so of course silicon is not going to catalyze many biochemical reactions. But carbon-based reactions do not go so efficiently in the cold... Iron chemistries might have gone wild on Mars. Why not metal-based life (lots of metals form strong alloys)?
Carbon itself is highly unreactive. This is why pencils and diamond rings are allowed on airplanes. It needs bonded groups such as amines, hydroxyls, thiols, etc. to get any meaningful work done. Carbon is just the backbone.
We simply haven't tried every possible chemical reaction in all possible environmental conditions to know which reactions might be "spontaneous" on other planets. We can sure try and guess. However, chemists are surprised every day by reaction kinetics, behaviors, and mechanisms here on Earth. We still don't understand chemistry that well. So why do we need to stifle ideas of how things might evolve on other planets with vastly different experimental conditions?
We should be looking closer at Venus instead... it's nearby, lots of strong chemicals and lots of heat make for an intriguing place for reactions to take place. Moving far away from the Sun is misguided if we're looking for interesting chemistry...
I wish I were old enough to put "Computer" on my resume.