Life on Titan

There is an interesting story on the NASA homepage, and circulating in various media channels about the possibility of life existing on Titan. Depending on your point of view that is all it is - an interesting story - and yet it raises many interesting intellectual and philosophical questions.

Life on Mars is something that we are, on the whole, comfortable with. While it would be a sensation should life ever be discovered, it would not be a shock. For well over 100 years the concept of Martian lifeforms has, at various times, dominated both the scientific and science fiction realms. Any postulated lifeform is essentially similar to Earth type lifeforms adapted for the relative harshness of the Martian environment. With this, we can cope.

Life on Titan, however, is a whole new ball game. The concept of a life on this distant world, where temperatures are so cold, and the atmosphere is not something that can easily be terraformed into something breathable. In fact the whole essence of this story is for methane based lifeforms breathing not oxygen, but hydrogen. With this, we cannot cope and this is a fundamental shift in thinking for the majority of the Earth's population.

The findings

So what is postulated? Well analysis of data from the Cassini spacecraft has consider the complex chemical activity on the surface of Titan. It is possible that non-biological chemistry offers an explanation, however some scientists believe the signatures create a plausible argument for methane-based life.

In one set of analysis, hydrogen molecules flow down through the Titan atmosphere and disappear at the surface; in the other, observations suggest a lack of acetylene at the surface. This is important because acetylene is the chemical most likely to be an energy source for methane-based lifeforms. The joining of these two results has lead scientists to speculate that the common thread between the two of them is some for of methane based life.

Comment

It is decidedly possible that the explanation is valid and that this data does indeed fulfill a number of key criteria for methane based lifeforms. There is, however, in my view an element of science invoking life as a desirable solution that does not require quite so much explanation. Again in my view, there is a clear agenda in some parts of the science community to find life and use it as an argument against religious views and I always feel that there is a danger in promoting results in this way drives more people away from good science. I have no evidence at all that those publishing these results subscribe to that particular view, but it is clear that people will use it to promote various agendas.

For all that, however, part of me is intrigued by the findings and the notion of non-carbon based lifeforms. It is the first time I can recall a serious promotion of such a concept and how our limited theories of how these lifeforms could matching existing observational evidence. It also ties in with the long held opinion that in millennia to come as the Sun expands and the Earth is no longer habitable, Titan might make an alternative home for mankind.