When the Huygens probe lands on Titan later this week, the pioneering space mission could encounter a bizarre form of life, a scientist claims.
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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."

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 9:05 AM  |