Icy moon's lakes brim with hearty soup for life

[Soylent Brice]

Titan's hydrocarbon lakes, seen here in radar images, boast life-friendly chemistry (Image: NASA/JPL)

Saturn's frigid moon Titan may be friendlier to life than previously thought. New calculations suggest Titan's hydrocarbon lakes are loaded with acetylene, a chemical some scientists say could serve as food for cold-resistant organisms.

At about -180 °Celsius, Titan's surface is far too cold for liquid water. But two pairs of scientists proposed in 2005 that alien organisms might live instead in bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on the frigid moon. They suggested such organisms could eat acetylene that falls to the surface after forming in the atmosphere, combining it with hydrogen to gain energy.

Since then, Cassini has spotted dozens of lakes on Titan's surface, thought to be made of a mixture of liquid ethane and methane. But since no probe has directly sampled them, no one knows how much acetylene they might contain.

*snip*

But an updated estimate based on data from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn now suggests the lakes contain much more food for any hungry alien life-forms that might be present. The new calculations were made by a team of scientists led by Daniel Cordier of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Renne, France.

read more: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18183-icy-moons-lakes-brim-with-hearty-soup-for-life.html

[Ian David]

1. I welcome our Titanic Overlords. n/t

[Soylent Brice]

3. we shall be their intergalactic pets.

[Ian David]

5. We welcome them with a laurel... and hearty handshake.

[Soylent Brice]

6. !!

:rofl:

[panader0]

2. 'There's a lake of stew

and of whiskey too, and you paddle all around 'em in a big canoe' (Big Rock Candy Mountain)

[Odin2005]

4. That looks like the topography of Minnesota lakes country.

[Ian David]

7. Let's send Michelle Bachmann to represent the Titanic Slime Creatures. n/t

[Ian David]

8. Even if the acetylene and hydrogen are in separate layers, life could still combine them...

... if the lifeforms are built around giant, Saragossa-like seaweeds.

The top of the organism could float in the hydrogen layer, with the roots in the acetylene layer.

The actions of the "seaweeds" would themselves create mixing for other organisms.

Heck, it's possible that this could be done with long, vertical chains of single-celled organisms.

[Soylent Brice]

9. one can hope for football sized amoeba though, right?

lol