Is there life on Titan?

Now that the excitement of seeing the first pictures from Titan has calmed down a bit, scientists around the world are taking on the long chore of analyzing all of that data and trying to see what it all means. One of the first questions they are tackling is, why is there so much methane and how is it being replenished? One possible answer: life. But there are some geological forces which could be producing it as well.

Methane is constantly destroyed by UV light so there must be a source within Titan to replenish the atmosphere.

Life is a possible - though some think unlikely - source of this hydrocarbon along with geological processes.

The surface is too cold for biology, but microbes could survive in an ocean within Titan, a senior scientist says.

Methane can also be released from a trapped form called clathrate and can be produced by a geological process called "serpentisation". Neither of these involve biology.

I'm not sure how they figured it out, but apparently there is an ocean of water on Titan. Or to be more accurate... in Titan. And where there's water, is life far behind?

"We cannot say there is absolutely no chance for life," Dr Franois Raulin, one of three interdisciplinary scientists on the Huygens mission told the BBC News website.

"There is no chance for life on the surface because it is too cold and there is no liquid water.

"However, models of Titan's interior show there should be an ocean about 100km deep at around 300km below the surface."

If the models are correct, this ocean would be composed mostly of liquid water with about 15% ammonia at a temperature of about -80C, said Dr Raulin.

"We have liquid water, organics not so far away; we have everything on Titan to make life," he explained.

Here's one of those "several centuries away" kind of ideas. The Earth, sadly, is going to come to the end of its natural lifespan at some point in the future. (Don't go sell off all of your stuff and join a monastery... it's not coming that soon.) Titan has been described as an early Earth in a deep freeze. It's full of water, hydrocarbons, and everything you need for life.

Imagine beginning the process of figuring out a way to move a planet. Of course, just saying those three words makes me a candidate for a rubber room. But that's today. What about one thousand years from now? Assuming we don't kill ourselves off by then or destroy the biosphere through global warming, what technologies might we achieve? Things may become possible which are beyond the realm of science fiction by that time. Is moving a planet completely out of the question?

If Titan could be moved into an orbit just outside of Earth's, probably in a counter-rotational slot, it could be warmed up. From that point, a bit of terraforming and some seeding, in no time at all (at least in geological terms) you'd have an oxygen atmosphere and everything you need for a new home.

Food for thought.