Aliens 'Could Exist On Saturn Moon'
By Roger Highfield - Science Editor - The Telegraph - UK -
10 January 2005
When the Huygens probe lands on Titan later this week, the pioneering
space mission could encounter a bizarre form of life, a scientist
claims.
The European probe will parachute down through the hazy atmosphere
of Saturn's largest moon on Friday after a seven-year voyage.
Now an American team has challenged a basic assumption that has
been used to guide the millions spent on the search for life elsewhere
in the cosmos that life could only exist where there is unfrozen
water and suggested that Huygens could encounter an alien on Titan.
Titan is an environment of yellow clouds and oily black methane
lakes, which is thought to resemble that of Earth billions of years
ago.
The search for water has guided efforts to find life on Mars, on
Jupiter's moon Europa and further afield. Titan is too cold for
large quantities of unfrozen water to exist but Dr Steven Benner,
of the University of Florida, says that life could flourish without
water.
In the journal Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, he and colleagues
describe how organisms could survive in exotic environments.
The Florida team identified two absolute requirements for life to
exist a suitable temperature range to allow chemical bonding and
an energy source (for example, the sun or radioactive decay). Titan
meets both requirements.
"This makes inescapable the conclusion that if life is an intrinsic
property of chemical reactivity, life should exist on Titan,"
Dr Benner says.
"Indeed, for life not to exist on Titan, we would have to argue
that life is not an intrinsic property of the reactivity of carbon-containing
molecules under conditions where they are stable."
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