Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Search for life signal on Titan





"Scientists will comb data sent back from Titan by the Huygens probe for the chemical signature of life in a bid to identify the moon's source of methane."

If there's not life on Titan now, there will be eventually. In a few billion years the Sun will begin expanding, swallowing the orbits of the inner planets (including ours) and heating the frozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn, speeding up chemical processes.

Stephen Baxter does an admirable job depicting far-future Titanian life in "Titan," a novel that predicted (with eerie accuracy) the disintegration of the Space Shuttle Columbia as well as a dystopian America run by Christian Fundamentalists.

No comments: