Life on Titan: stand well back and hold your nose!

Research by astrobiologist William Bains suggests that if life has evolved on the frozen surface of Saturn’s moon, Titan, it would be strange, smelly and explosive compared to life on Earth.

…”Hollywood would have problems with these aliens” says Dr. Bains. “Beam one onto the Starship Enterprise and it would boil and then burst into flames, and the fumes would kill everyone in range. Even a tiny whiff of its breath would smell unbelievably horrible. But I think it is all the more interesting for that reason. Wouldn’t it be sad if the most alien things we found in the galaxy were just like us, but blue and with tails?”
Dr Bains, whose research is carried out through Rufus Scientific in Cambridge, UK, and MIT in the USA, is seeking to work out just how extreme the chemistry of life can be. Life on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, represents one of the more bizarre scenarios being studied. Titan is twice as large as our Moon and has a thick atmosphere of frozen, orange smog. At ten times our distance from the Sun, it is a frigid place, with a surface temperature of -180 degrees Celsius. Water is permanently frozen into ice and the only liquid available is liquid methane and ethane, which the…

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Life on Titan: stand well back and hold your nose!

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