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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."
http://jamesphogan.com/books/book.php?titleID=2&ed=5
THE SEARCHER
1.1 MILLION YEARS B.C.
1,000 LIGHT-YEARS FROM THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Had English-speaking humans existed, they would probably have translated the spacecraftâ(TM)s designation as "searcher." Unmanned, it was almost a mile long, streamlined for descent through planetary atmospheres, and it operated fully under the control of computers. The alien civilization was an advanced one, and the computers were very sophisticated.
The planet at which the searcher arrived after a voyage of many years was the fourth in the system of a star named after the king of a mythical race of alien gods, and could appropriately be called Zeus IV. It wasnâ(TM)t much to look at: an airless, lifeless ball of eroded rock formations, a lot of boulders and debris from ancient meteorite impacts, and vast areas of volcanic ash and dustâ" but the searcherâ(TM)s orbital probes and surface landers found a crust rich in titanium, chromium, cobalt, copper, manganese, uranium, and many other valuable elements concentrated by thermal-fluidic processes operating early in the planetâ(TM)s history. Such a natural abundance of metals could support large scale production without extensive dependence on bulk nuclear transmutation processesâ"in other words, very economicallyâ"and that was precisely the kind of thing that the searcher has been designed to search for. After completing their analysis of the preliminary data, the control computers selected a landing site, composed and transmitted a message home to report their findings and announce their intentions, and then activated the vesselâ(TM)s descent routine. Shortly after the landing, a menagerie of surveyor robots, equipped with imagers, spectrometers, analyzers, chemical sensors, rock samplers, radiation monitors, and various manipulator appendages, emerged from the ship and dispersed across the surrounding terrain to investigate surface features selected from orbit. Their findings were transmitted back to the ship and processed, and shortly afterward follow-up teams of tracked, legged, and wheeled mining, drilling, and transportation robots went out to begin feeding ores and other materials back to where more machines had begun to build a fusion-powered pilot extraction plant. A parts-making facility was constructed next, followed by a parts assembly facility, and step by strep the pilot plant grew itself into a fully equipped, general-purpose factory, complete with its own control computers. The master programs from the ship were copied into the factoryâ(TM)s computers, which thereupon became self-sufficient and assumed control of surface operations. The factory then began making more robots.
Sometimes, of course, things failed to work exactly as intended, but the alien engineers had created their own counterpart of Murphy and allowed for his law in their plans. Maintenance robots took care of breakdowns and routine wear and tear in the factory; troubleshooting programs tracked down causes of production rejects and adjusted the machines for drifting tolerances; breakdown teams brought in malfunctioning machines for repair; and specialized scavenging robots roamed the surface in search of wrecks, write-offs, discarded components, and any other likely sources of parts suitable for recycling.
Time passed, the factory hummed, and the robot population grew in number and variety. When the population had attained a critical size, a mixed workforce migrated a few miles away to build a second factory, a replica of the first, using materials supplied initially from Factory One. When Factory Two became self-sustaining, Factory One, its primary task accomplished, switched to mass- production mode, producing goods and materials for eventual shipment to the alien home planet.
While Factory Two was repeating the process by commencing work on Factory Three, the labor detail from Factory One picke