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+--- Thread: Exotic Ultracold-Resistant Life Possibility (/thread-597.html)
Exotic Ultracold-Resistant Life Possibility - Yazata - Mar 3, 2015
Saturn's moon Titan is one of the most interesting places in the solar system for planetary scientists. That's because it has a thick atmosphere, mountains, rivers and seas (of liquid methane). The big difference between here and there is temperature, Titan's average surface temperature is a chilly -179 C.
That suggests that life must be impossible there.
... or maybe on second thought, that's not true.
Here's an interesting report:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ultracold-resistant-chemical-on-titan-could-allow-it-to-harbor-life/
that centers around a hydrocarbon called acrylonitrile that's known to exist on Titan.
Investigators at Cornell have discovered that acrylonitrile can form membranes with characteristics very similar to cell (and nuclear and mitochondrial) membranes on Earth. What's more, computer simulations suggest that these membranes will form into hollow balls (the investigators call them azotosomes).
RE: Exotic Ultracold-Resistant Life Possibility - C C - Mar 4, 2015
(Mar 3, 2015 10:33 PM)Yazata Wrote: Investigators at Cornell have discovered that acrylonitrile can form membranes with characteristics very similar to cell (and nuclear and mitochondrial) membranes on Earth. What's more, computer simulations suggest that these membranes will form into hollow balls (the investigators call them azotosomes).
Homegrown even. In past fiction, many could only imagine any Titanese "life" as having orginated from elsewhere, like the mechanistic Taloids adapting to the environment and evolving over a million years. [Prologue]
RE: Exotic Ultracold-Resistant Life Possibility - Yazata - Mar 8, 2015
(Mar 4, 2015 03:50 AM)C C Wrote: Homegrown even. In past fiction, many could only imagine any Titanese "life" as having orginated from elsewhere, like the mechanistic Taloids adapting to the environment and evolving over a million years. [Prologue]
Yeah, I read that. It's a very interesting speculation into how what originally were self-reproducing alien mining robots could evolve by natural selection over millions of years, giving rise to countless phylogenetic variants including intelligent sentient beings. Hogan imagines an entire mechanical ecosystem on Titan analogous to life on Earth.
I always liked James Hogan's science-fiction stories. (Unfortunately he died in 2010.)
Perhaps my favorite was his earliest book, Inherit the Stars. That was perhaps the best philosophy of science science fiction novel that I know of. It starts when a lunar expedition discovers a mummified corpse in a space suit on the moon. Tests show that it is something like half a million years old. But the remains are definitely anatomically modern human. So how did the ancient astronaut get there at a time before anatomically modern humans existed and Earth was still inhabited by Homo erectus?
The book's characters examine everything, suggest all kinds of hypotheses and try to test them. Issues in the philosophy of science arise naturally in that dramatic context. Eventually it turns out that the history of the solar system is a lot stranger than anyone ever imagined. The ending is haunting and poignant.
Another of Hogans books that I really liked was The Proteus Operation. Besides being a fascinating alternate history story set in World War II, it was also a very cool speculation into time-travel and into the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.