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."

Comments

Joins?

[Henriok]

Titan has been a prime candidate for life for as long as I can remember. Since they figured out that it had an atmosphere, it probably had lakes of some kinde and pretro.. possibility for life.

Re:Joins?

[Z00L00K]

Considering the vast variety of conditions where life exists on earth I would consider it likely that there is life elsewhere too.

And with life - it may be completely different from the life we know about, but if there is life it is single-cell organisms that we should expect.

Even here on earth we have bacteria that actually thrives in environments that would kill most other forms of life. All the way from extremely acid environment that easily would tear through human flesh to high temperatures well above the boiling point and radiation so hard that it cracks the DNA in the cells - which the bacteria resolves by joining it together again with processes still unknown. And freezing bacteria will just suspend them or make them behave in slow motion.

In any atmosphere where there is complex molecules - especially amino acids - there is a potential for life remotely similar to us on a cellular level. But of course - there may be life in completely different forms with completely different timespans, maybe so long that we wouldn't recognize it as life.

What about the subsurface ocean?

[localroger]

One of the recent blips on the Cassini-Huygens website (since scrolled off) is that Titan's crust seems to be decoupled from the moon's core, indicting that its "mantle" may be liquid -- an ocean of water hundreds of kilometers deep. Combined with all the organic crap sitting on top and the ice volcanoes I am starting to think it would be surprising if there weren't life on Titan.

On Titan, water ice is a rock

[mbone]

Titan is a very different place from Earth. Water ice is a rock (surface temperatures never come close to the melting point) and, critically, temperature / entropy gradients are much smaller than on Earth. (It's not just cold, the flow of energy is slow.) So, if there is life, i would anticipate not something like terrestrial extremophiles, but an entirely new form of life, which doesn't use water as a medium and which would be very slow from our viewpoint. I asbolutely think that such life could evolve, if it is possible at all, but who knows if it is possible. Going there would be one way to find out, but that will neither be easy, simple, cheap or quick.

I think that the article is misleading in one respect - a body of liquid water might survive for a while (in the same way that a pool of lava - molten rock - can survive for decades or longer on the Earth, and presumably on Mars), but, just like the pool of lava, it would be quickly encased in a layer of frozen water ice. You might have water at the surface, but you would not have water on the surface for any length of time (think polar ice caps in the middle of winter, and you are still way too warm). It is hard to see how extremophiles could evolve in those circumstances, and it is very hard to see how biological material from the Earth or Mars, blasted out by meteor impacts, could reach Titan intact.

Re:Don't worry.

[Roskolnikov]

ah, yes, I suspect if you wanted to burn it the suspected water/ammonia mix found in the ice could be a source of oxygen if needed, I also suspect methane would work really well in a fuel cell designed for it.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v400/n6745/abs/400649a0.html

when I said fuel, I didn't say burn.