Cartoon Time.

Icy moon's lakes brim with hearty soup for life

by David Shiga for New Scientist

23 November 2009

Saturn's frigid moon Titan may be friendlier to life than previously thought. New calculations suggest Titan's hydrocarbon lakes are loaded with acetylene, a chemical some scientists say could serve as food for cold-resistant organisms. At about -180 °Celsius, Titan's surface is far too cold for liquid water. But two pairs of scientists proposed in 2005 that alien organisms might live instead in bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on the frigid moon. They suggested such organisms could eat acetylene that falls to the surface after forming in the atmosphere, combining it with hydrogen to gain energy. Since then, Cassini has spotted dozens of lakes on Titan's surface, thought to be made of a mixture of liquid ethane and methane. But since no probe has directly sampled them, no one knows how much acetylene they might contain. An estimate made in 1989 suggested bodies of liquid hydrocarbons on Titan would contain a few parts in 10,000 of acetylene.

But an updated estimate based on data from the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn now suggests the lakes contain much more food for any hungry alien life-forms that might be present. The new calculations were made by a team of scientists led by Daniel Cordier of the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie de Renne, France. Data from the Cassini spacecraft and the Huygens probe, which parachuted to Titan's surface in 2005, helped Cordier's team re-calculate the lakes' likely composition. This depends on factors like a lake's temperature, which affects how easily chemicals will dissolve in it, and the rate various chemicals are produced in the atmosphere and rain onto the surface. The team found that acetylene would be hundreds of times as abundant as the previous estimate, making up one part in 100 of the lake's content. "Having about a per cent of acetylene is potentially interesting from the life point of view," says team member Jonathan Lunine of the University of Arizona in Tucson. The idea of acetylene-eating organisms on Titan is "highly speculative" but intriguing, he says.

"I think the results are very exciting and further support the possibility for life on Titan," says Dirk Schulze-Makuch of Washington State University in Pullman, one of the scientists who proposed the possibility of acetylene-eating life in 2005. "Titan should be one of the two top targets for future astrobiology missions, the other being Mars." But Tetsuya Tokano, a Titan researcher at the University of Cologne in Germany, says the exact amount of acetylene may be less important than other properties of the lakes that remain unknown, such as the existence of currents to keep them well-mixed. Tokano pointed out in a recent study that without mixing, hydrogen and acetylene would stay in separate layers of the lakes, limiting reactions between them that might otherwise power exotic organisms.

[It does continue to amuse me that theists in particular seem to pour scorn on the idea that life could have evolved independently on other worlds. Although we have no hard evidence of this, the amount of circumstantial evidence and well founded speculation continues to grow. It seems increasingly likely that life exists somewhere other than on Earth and that it emerged and evolved there independently of this world. Once this is firmly established I think that many theists will have to examine their belief in unique creation. How they will incorporate alien life into their belief systems I cannot even began to speculate on but I do suspect that when we do find life elsewhere it will yet again undermine our unique place in the universe and maybe, just maybe, make us a little more humble.]

Poster Time.

Just Finished Reading: Quantum Theory – A Very Short Introduction by John Polkinghome

As part of my ongoing project to both widen and deepen my knowledge base I’ve been buying a selection of the ever growing list of VSI books. This is my first of the new batch – basically anything beyond the VSI philosophy books I’ve been working my way through until now.

I’ve had more than a passing interest in the very weird world of the Quantum for some time but haven’t managed to finish more than a few books on the subject. As I don’t really have that much of a background in the sciences it can be a little difficult getting into subjects like this – especially when even a half page of mathematical equations reduces my brain to mush. Thankfully there were only a few pages of professor Polkinghome’s book that required any math at all. Those I must admit I did pretty much skim over. The rest was math free and readable enough to keep me plugging away at the strangeness to begin to see some sort of comprehension dawning. I’ve still got a long way to go to get a real handle on this stuff but I think this book helped me to take a few baby steps in the right direction. Quantum physics, I think, holds the potential answers to some of the very big questions I see asked on the Web. I think it might answer how the Universe began. It might even say something about the origin of life and might explain some aspects of consciousness. But as this book quite clearly spelled out, we have a long way to go before we truly understand Quantum reality. Hopefully I’ll come across a simple book explaining the results when we finally do understand it! More VSI to come and more quantum mind stretching….

Pulp Fiction.

Cartoon Time.

My Favourite Movies: The Magnificent Seven

My love of Westerns can easily be traced back to my father who was a huge fan of the genre. This particular example is, in my opinion, one of the best of its type. Based on the Japanese classic The Seven Samurai it tells to story of an oppressed Mexican village who seek help from American gunfighters down on their luck. Fortune is with them when they hire Chris – played iconically by Yul Brynner – to find the men they need. Each of the six additional gunfighters are introduced in cameo scenes that give an insight into their character as well as their character flaws. They are all, including Brynner himself, lost souls who have spent their lives being the best at what they do (with the noted exception of the youngest member Chico) that of killing rather than being killed. Now, as guns for hire, they have the opportunity to reflect on their profession and wait for their opportunity to redeem a part of their humanity buried under years of brutality.

The reason I think that this movie has stood the test of time and remained one of my favourite films is that it is much more that a simple cowboy film. It’s a film about life choices, it’s about regrets and above all else it’s about honour. The two main characters – played by Brynner and McQueen (pictured above) - are, despite their backgrounds, men steeped in ideals of honour. Despite the fact that they are being paid hardly anything at all they put their lives on the line and even return to the fight because of their agreement with the peasants. This is the fact that so confounds the bandit leader played by Eli Wallach because he is a man singularly without any idea of honour – as an aside I was most impressed by the fact that when asked Chris failed to answer the question why they came back, underlying the fact that Wallach should have known.

For years after seeing this film I simply wanted to be the Yul Brynner character. I guess in some way he became one of my childhood heroes – for reasons I’m only now beginning to understand. It obviously struck a chord with other people too when ‘Chris’ was resurrected in robot form – as an unstoppable killer – in the classic 70’s Sci-Fi Westworld. As a standard western The Magnificent Seven is a classic of its type but, digging just a little deeper, it is also much more than that. Watched with a critical eye it’s about the choice of virtue over vice, good over evil. It’s just so much more than a cowboy film.