I daresay that lifeform exists here. And it's hard to ignore.
Posted on 07/24/2005 12:50:32 AM PDT by LibWhacker
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.
Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.
They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.
McKay and Smith calculate that if methanogens are thriving on Titan, their breathing would deplete hydrogen levels near the surface to one-thousandth that of the rest of the atmosphere. Detecting this difference would be striking evidence for life, because no known non-biological process on Titan could affect hydrogen concentrations as much.
One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended. It will take time to analyse the raw data, partly because hydrogen's signal will have to be separated from those of other molecules. "Eventually, I hope, we will have numbers for at least upper limits for hydrogen," says Hasso Niemann of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, principal investigator of the GCMS.
Acetylene could be easier to analyse, McKay says, and it too might betray life. "I would guess that there would be a similar fall-off of acetylene if the microbes are eating it." The work is to be published in the journal Icarus.
I daresay that lifeform exists here. And it's hard to ignore.
LMAO!
All those hydrocarbons waiting for an oxidizer.....
But wait - how many dinosaurs died on Titan to make all these free hydrocarbons?
So, should we kill those things? All that methane will cause global warming on Titan wouldn't it? On the otherhand, it would make a great refueling station for space scooters and space SUV's. Better yet, just drag it over and park it beside the moon for use as a fuel supply for the moon station.
How big is Titan? We know about 540 billion dinosaurs died in one spot in Saudi Arabia (I wonder what they ate? We can't even feed a couple billion people), so with a little math we should be able to figure out how many space dinosaurs died and fell onto Titan.
I got quite an unexpected laugh at 2:16 am thanks to you! :)
290 below ain't no thang!
Now we know that Kurt Vonegut novels were not all fiction. The Trafeldorians (sp??) communicated by "farting and tapdancing" as I recall. Are they from Titan?
Spot-on!
I can think of no other possible explanation for hydrogen (the lightest element) being found in higher concentrations higher up.
This would have to be proof of life.
No other possible explanation.
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