[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

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Actually, even if Mars doesn't pan out for the purpose, there's another way to try setting values for M besides the inspection of the outer planets' moons' suburface oceans: using Terrestrial Planet Finder and its successors to look directly for worlds that show signs of photosynthesis or of biological methanogenesis. (I'm not happy about the fact that Griffin -- along with cancelling Mars Telecom Orbiter -- just lopped $20 million out of the FY 06 funds for TPF, although I still think he probably had no choice.)

I've heard the argument used previously that the early appearance of life on Earth does provide significant positive evidence that the evolution of life on a suitable planet is more or less inevitable -- but, as has been noted above, this depends entirely on just how long on the average it takes intelligence to appear after life first appears. And that latter figure is so bloody uncertain that I really think it pretty much removes the early appearance of terrestrial life as a piece of usable evidence for the value of M.