[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

I have setup a new blog (actually my old one just renovated) called the Titanese Times at http://volcanopele.blogspot.com . I will cover Titan news as well as other outer planetary satellites except Europa. Hope you all enjoy the site and post a comment once in a while

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Any time you want to drop a house on the Space Station, it's all right by me...

As for the relative importance of Martian and Europan astrobioolgy, I've already repeatedly stated my reason for thinking that the latter may be a lot more important than the former. (I've also run it by several scientists, all of whom so far have agreed with it.) To wit:

If we find evidence of past (or even present) life on Mars, there is still a very serious chance that we'll never be able to prove that it evolved on the planet, as opposed to descending from carpetbagging microbes transported from early Earth via meteorite. (Indeed, our only hope of proving this is if we can prove that Martian life had such an unearthly biochemistry that it could not possibly have developed ion earth -- even during the planet's earliest days -- and that will be hard to do.) Alternatively, it may be possible in that case that life originally appeared only on Mars and got transferred here via meteorite -- but in either case there will still be a real chance that life appears only as an extremely rare pure-chance fluke in the Universe, and that it just happened to make one of its rare appearances on one world in this Solar System and then got transferred via meteorite to another one.

By contrast, meteorite transfers between any of the inner worlds and Europa are extremely rare -- so the discovery of Europan life, while it wouldn't quite rule out the possibility of life originally evolving only on one world in this Solar System, would show that life is likely to evolve in the Universe wherever conditions make it possible and is thus very common (at least on the microbial scale).