If life exists on Titan, it’s even weirder than we thought
Anything that can call Titan’s lakes home would have to be one tough critter. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/)Saturn’s moon Titan would not be a comfy place for Earthlike microbes, even as alien worlds go. It lacks a global ocean like the ones found on Europa and Enceladus, and it doesn’t enjoy the (relatively) balmy climate of Mars. But it does look strikingly Earthlike in one respect—lakes with crinkled shorelines speckle its surface.Those lakes are filled with methane and ethane rather than water, and any inhabitants would have to deal with temperatures reaching 300 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, but where liquid sloshes, life might find a way. Specifically, life could assemble itself from a particular chemical building block uniquely suited to Titan’s harsh environment, some researchers have suggested. “People took this proposal very seriously. There’s not that many concrete suggestions in astrobiology,” says Martin Rahm, a chemist at the Chalmers University of Technology in...