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Hints of Life Found On Saturn's Moon Titan
Calopteryx writes "New Scientist reports that in 2005, researchers predicted two potential signatures of life on Titan. Now, thanks to research done with the help of the Cassini spacecraft, both have been seen, although non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations. NASA's writeup has further details: 'One key finding comes from a paper online now in the journal Icarus [abstract] that shows hydrogen molecules flowing down through Titan's atmosphere and disappearing at the surface. Another paper online now in the Journal of Geophysical Research maps hydrocarbons on the Titan surface and finds a lack of acetylene. This lack of acetylene is important because that chemical would likely be the best energy source for a methane-based life on Titan, said Chris McKay, an astrobiologist at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., who proposed a set of conditions necessary for this kind of methane-based life on Titan in 2005. One interpretation of the acetylene data is that the hydrocarbon is being consumed as food. But McKay said the flow of hydrogen is even more critical because all of their proposed mechanisms involved the consumption of hydrogen.'"
The worst thing that could possibly happen for any form of life anywhere would be its discovery by us.
...The Sirens of Titan.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Mare_Explorer (hopefully not postponed to be part of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Saturn_System_Mission )
Titan, and Saturn system generally, is a really big thing for our distant future. People like to imagine the colonisation of Jupiter system, but the radiation belts there make it not exactly feasible; only Callisto out of 4 big moons might be fine. Saturn doesn't have this problem; is still decently close and with huge system of moons.
Discovery of life on Titan might of course complicate things...OTOH, with it (if any) being probably so vastly different, there's little risk of crosscontamination in either direction.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I think you misunderstand. The mechanisms that would cause life to consume the substances that are 'missing' are totally alien to life as we know it, but fit the model for methane based life very well. It could well be that there are non-biological chemical processes doing it, but the odds of it being from any contamination from Huygens is astronomically remote. Hugyens was also very, very carefully sterilized. Granted, a microbe or two might have made it to Titan, where it would most likely die rather than reproduce.
I do see your point and we need to continue to be careful, but I see nothing in these findings that makes the Hugyens discussion at all relevant to this story.
It would be fairly easy to tell earth based contamination from native stuff. For starters, I'm not aware of any bacterium that you would find on the surface of the earth that eats hydrocarbons in that way and can live in those conditions. Below the artic ice? maybe... but in a clean room in texas? not likely.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
Breathing hydrogen basically works in the opposite direction of terrestrial biochemistry. The proposed organisms are breathing hydrogen and presumably fixing it to something (say, oxides they've eaten) rather than the other way around as for Earth life.
And even if it was possible, Huygens could not have contaminated things to such a degree as to affect widespread atmospheric phenomenon.
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Life doesn't have to "get" there. If the chemistry is right, it will start itself.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That seems like an Occam-worthy assumption, yes.
If you're like me (and most serious scientists, I gather) and believe life on Earth formed spontaneously, then it's reasonable enough to assume it can happen again. We have absolutely zero ideas how easy this is to happen, so there's no good reason to claim it can't be happening all the time.
If you're of a spiritual persuasion and believe life was kick started by some ghost or other, then you'll probably have to admit that there's no reason your omnipotent-being-of-choice doesn't do the same thing on every planet that it'd work on. Most holy texts are scrupulously silent on the subject of extraterrestrial life, so we mortals are left to just guess.
In short, it seems more likely that it'd happen again than not. And for all we know, Titan is paradise incarnate for methane-drinking, hydrogen breathing life.