Life 2.0

Listen to this, gang! NASA is working on a probe to find life on a celestial body, and you'll never guess which one it is.

I was unaware that NASA was working on this mission, but they're planning on sending a submarine to Titan, the largest moon in the solar system. Titan's radius is 2,575.5 kilometers, which is 1.48 times the size of our moon. It has a surface temperature of 90K or -179C. That's really cold and if there is water on Titan it would be hard frozen. Titan has the largest atmosphere of any moon in the solar system and it consists of mostly nitrogen with minor amounts of methane and ethane. In fact Titan has clouds of methane and other exotic organic molecules.

Not much was known about Titan until the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft went to Saturn and probed Titan with radar in 2004, which revealed some interesting topographical properties. The Huygens probe actually landed on Titan and revealed a surface that looked a lot like Earth, with oceans and lakes. However, these oceans and lakes were not filled with water but rather with liquid methane.

So, how the heck could life be on Titan? It's too cold for life as we know it. That's where the idea that life could exist that is not based on life we are familiar with comes from. The University of Arizona did computer simulations with the chemical molecules that exist on Titan and discovered that complex molecules that resemble the building blocks of DNA and RNA could form if energy was applied to the Titan chemical soup in its atmosphere and lakes. This is the reason to believe that life forms exist in the methane seas of Titan.

So, how would they locate these life forms? The answer is to send a submarine to Titan and have it explore the methane seas, going all the way down into them. In fact, this is the plan, and engineers at NASA are experimenting with designs that could work and move around in liquid methane with dissolved nitrogen.

If they do find anything alive it would be Life 2.0.

Thanks for reading.