[X] My Assistant

[jaredGalen]

Thought this article title was a little over the top, the kind of one you would
expect to see followed by lots of exclamation marks.

Interesting article though.

"IF LIFE exists on Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, we could soon know about it - as long as it's the methane-spewing variety. The chemical signature of microbial life could be hidden in readings taken by the European Space Agency's Huygens probe when it landed on Titan in January."

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn7716

[exoplanet]

I quote JRheling:

"Consider that some of 2004's top ten scientific discoveries (as rated by AAAI) concerned the chemical properties of WATER. If we don't yet understand H2O inside and out, forget about predicting life given some alternative chemical basis.

To put a spotlight on the problem, consider that a water molecule essentially consists of 15 particles, and so a pair of water molecules involves up to 435 interactions. Create a computer model of those two water molecules, and you have a lot of math to juggle. Fine, that's tractable, but make it 100 water molecules, and forget about it (although, admittedly, you could make simplifying assumptions -- not all of those interactions will amount to much). So simulating a water nanodroplet is a big task. This just goes to say that "brute force" computation cannot be the bridge between molecular chemistry and a hypothetical new kind of biology. And if water still holds secrets, you can see that no more-burly kind of chemical theory is in hand yet."

Thank you for your post. It is conceivable that if we do not know all the properties of water . . . how in the heck do we know what the limitations of life is. I am by no means from the astrobiological mindset, however, I do believe that from what has been discovered both from Cassini and Hyugens . . . a more complex probe/rover would be a highly rewarding endeavor for both NASA and ESA.

I would love to begin some very heated discussions about the surface and atmospheric chemistry of Titan and the implications to the possibility of life pro and con. It is already being discussed in some important scientific journals and I would like to begin the discussion here as well (Also, I don't have the $ to subscribe or a nearby university to access most of the recently published articles).

[dvandorn]

...I would love to begin some very heated discussions about the surface and atmospheric chemistry of Titan and the implications to the possibility of life pro and con.

The way you phrased that is interesting, since my argument is about heat.

If life exists on Titan, it would have to be adapted to very, very low temperatures. To the extent that any probe or rover we send to the surface of Titan would be considered "superheated" and would pump a not-insignificant amount of heat into the local area around the probe.

Thus, I think you could expect any terrestrial probe searching for Titanian life would kill any such life before it could get close enough to even look at it. Not only kill it, but possibly force it into such rapid decay that nothing recognizable as ever having been alive would ever be observable.

So -- for the sake of this thread, I offer the hypothesis that we cannot settle the question of Titanian life, because looking for it will destroy it utterly -- and that this raises serious ethical concerns over any such attempt.

-the other Doug