Tropical Meth
The Cassini probe recently discovered persistent lakes of liquid methane in the tropics of Titan. If you're not a subscriber to the "life has to be based on water" conceit (which I am not), this is extremely interesting.
posted by Jar(egg)head at 12:20
2 Comments:
I am no biologist. But life is just a chemical reaction, a process. At such low temperatures as to make methane liquid, such processes are very slow, difficult, or non-existant. But, by no means impossible.
That is also a conceit. The fact that we have not observed life operating at relatively low temperatures in non-carbon systems is no reason to discount it as a possibility.
There is a very strong human tendency to restrict our conclusions to that which fits within our experience. History has proven time after time that such arrogance is a mistake. If we restrict our definition of a living organism to a heat/light/radiation band within which our experiences show it may exist, we risk overlooking that which operates outside of our experience.
Tycho Brahe was a brilliant observationalist. He was not, however, able to draw the correct conclusions from his own data, due to the fact that those conclusions did not fit within his preconceived notion of how the universe MUST work.
Observe, hypothesize, experiment, conclude. Any other order of operation and you risk overlooking the obvious. We may not even recognize a methane-based (or any other -based) life form as such if we assume from the outset that it is extremely improbable based upon our very limited experience within a single gravity well.
Yes, it is possible that years spent studying a pool of methane on a distant moon will yield no other conclusion than "it's a pool of methane." But any less effort means you are engaging in economics, not science. The key, of course, is to find the balance between those two imperatives -- and that is where private sector excels.
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