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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."
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.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
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.
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It's Europa. And the Chinese will get there first.
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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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.
No... there couldn't. solar radiation was probably important for creating life as we know it, providing that critical energy input to build the first organic molecules. Titan is tooooo far away to get much radiation. Life could evolve there, but if it were a random event it would be MUCH slower than here on earth because it is so much colder over there. So we might have to wait a few more billion years.
And so by that rationale, we should be looking for remnants or indications of life on venus and mercury... or at least some interesting new molecular compounds.
I wish I were old enough to put "Computer" on my resume.
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.
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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
So of course there's life on it -- WHALES!
Precisely. So there's little to no chance of finding anything on the *surface* of Titan, which is the only place we have a remote capability to look.
We would need deep sea autonomous vehicles or autonomous digging machines, none of which are within NASA's budget (because we've never built them successfully here on Earth). We've never looked near Earth's core for life either.
It's too cold where we're looking, and we don't have the capabilities to look deeper into the crust.
Moreover, we only ever look for "Earth-like" life elsewhere (read: carbon-based, organic), and have no capacity or machinery to discover or identify non-carbon-based life (silicon, or iron-based), whether it be on the surface or below.
It's a heavily flawed search, which is why it amazes me that we give them money to do it.
I wish I were old enough to put "Computer" on my resume.
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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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.
why not hypothesize that there could be life on the Moon? If we're going to think wild thoughts about where an extremophile can live compared to Earth then let's hypothesize they are right in a "back yard". They could survive on Moon dirt. Why not, right? Who says they need water? We keep thinking too much along the lines of what extremophiles on Earth need to survive. Off this Earth another organism no longer abides by the rules of this planet. Using the Moon as our target to find other life will save money when we try to allocate millions (for the Moon) instead of billions (for Titan) trying to find the new organisms, plus traveling to the Moon is much quicker than Titan. Disclaimer: I don't believe in ETL and, no, that isn't extract-transform-load.
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Scientists are suggesting that it may be possible for extremophile life to exist on the 3rd planet from the sun. "Despite an oxidizing atmosphere, vast quantities of liquid and vaporous rock on the surface and in the atmosphere, and a ridiculously high surface temperature, it may be possible for some bizarre forms of life to exist on the planet."
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.
...do extremophiles have register with the local police?
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