Methane-Based Life On Saturn's Moon Titan? Possible, Says Team Of Researchers

Saturn's moon Titan

I'll begin with quotes from two articles in two separate publications, because this seems a subtle "discovery" (if that's even the right word) that requires some pondering.

First, from Safar Haddad at Perfect Science, we have an article titled Life not dependent on Water could exist on Saturn’s Moon Titan:

Researchers have recently presented a template for life that could exist in harsh, cold conditions of Titan, the giant moon of Saturn. Titan has a great possibility of harboring methane-based, oxygen-free cells. What the researchers have suggested from their new theory is that absence of water in seas of Titan does not undermine the chances of life existence.

A cell membrane has been theorized by the scientists, claiming it to consist of smaller organic nitrogen compounds. The cell membrane has the potential of functioning in liquid methane temperatures of 292 degrees beneath zero, said the researchers. The details of the theorized cell membrane have been published in Science Advances.

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And from Muhammad Ashan at SMN Weekly, an article titled Methane-based Life Possible on Saturn’s Moon ‘Titan’:

In a new study researchers have modeled an oxygen-free form of life that can sustain on methane gas and also can reproduce in [a] way being done on earth. That type of life may exist on the methane lakes [that] exist on Saturn’s moon Titan.

“We didn’t come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that, we knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, what can you make out of that’,” said lead researcher Paulette Clancy.

“We’re not biologists, and we’re not astronomers, but we had the right tools. Perhaps it helped, because we didn’t come in with any preconceptions about what should be in a membrane and what shouldn’t. We just worked with the compounds that we knew were there and asked, ‘If this was your palette, what can you make out of that,’” said Clancy in a statement.

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Next, let's make it clear what the team did NOT do. They did NOT...

• send a spacecraft to Titan;
• discover living organisms there, say, birds which they named, say, "the shy wrens of Titan";
• do actual experiments, on Earth, with chemicals known to be present on Titan.

What they did do is use best available information about methane-based compounds present on Titan to construct a mathematical/chemical model of interactions among those compounds which might result in the formation and operation of a cell membrane, similar (if possible) to CHON-based cells on Earth. Maybe what they formally modeled is "life"; maybe not... but that's not the question they set out to answer. Theirs is perhaps a first step toward that much larger question: are all the components present on Titan to construct a methane-based cell, and what might be the processes of its chemical operation?

I'll take their question, unmodified, without any quibbles: it sounds like a good question to me, and an affirmative answer would go a long way toward suggesting that somewhere in our universe (not the whole multiverse; just what we've got here), if not on Titan then elsewhere, cells that could act "alive" could exist. I'm not betting on Yes or No, but I'm surely intending to keep track of what they find out.

(Oh, how we need Leonard Nimoy now, to write the poetry...)