Forget Mars: Saturn's moon Titan offers glimpse of "genesis" of life

A moon of Saturn where 300-foot dunes of frozen chemicals roll across the surface could offer a better chance of finding the origins of life than Mars, scientists have claimed.

Instead of searching for signs of life on Mars’s dusty surface, we should turn our telescopes to the vents, rivers and clouds of Titan, scientists sugggest.

Titan, a billion miles from Earth, offers hot vents, organic chemicals and water - with rivers flowing into takes, storms, wind-swept dunes, and clouds in the sky.

Titan’s wealth of hydrocarbons - crude oil - is thought to be 10 to 100 times greater than Earths, and its chemistry is a “lab” which could unravel where life comes from.
   
Dr Jonan Lunine of Cornell University, said that Titan offers a chance to understand how life began on our own planet 3.5 billion years ago - and why.

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"Data sent back to Earth from space missions allow us to test an idea that underpins modern science's portrait of the origin of life on Earth," Lunine said.

Titan’s unique mix of buried water, hot vents, and a “chemical soup” might be similar to the mixture which spawned the first organisms on Earth.

"We think that simple organic chemicals present on the primordial Earth, influenced by sunlight and other sources of energy, underwent reactions that produced more and more complex chemicals.”

“At some point, they crossed a threshold — developing the ability to reproduce themselves. Could we test this theory in the lab? These processes have been underway on Titan for billions of years. We don't have a billion years in the lab. We don't even have a thousand years."

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is the only natural satellite with a dense atmosphere, and liquid on the surface - as well as 300-foot dunes of frozen hydrocarbons, which roll across the surface.

There are four million square miles of dunes on Titan, an area the size of the United States.
   
Lunine explained that only two celestial objects in the solar system have the large amounts of organic substances on their surfaces to provide information on how life forms from organic chemicals.

 They are Titan and Earth. Organic substances on Earth, however, have been cycled through living things countless times. Titan's organic materials, which include deposits of methane and other hydrocarbons as large as some of the Great Lakes, are in pristine condition — never, so far as anyone knows, in contact with life.
   
Titan is the only moon in the solar system known to have an atmosphere. Like Earth, most of it consists of nitrogen, with methane the second-most abundant.
   
"We've got a very good inventory of what's there in the atmosphere," Lunine said. "What we've only recently begun to understand is the fate of these organics at the surface of Titan."
   
Lunine explained that for a long time, Mars had captured the public's and scientists' imagination as a possible location to find interesting organic chemistry and hints at life outside the Earth — and for good reason: It is an Earth-like planet relatively close to the Sun. But scientists have only found simple organic materials on the red planet.
   
Recent research has provided fascinating hints that liquid water may exist deep under Titan's surface.

Other data suggest that areas of Titan's seafloor may be similar to areas of Earth's seafloors where hydrothermal vents exist.

These passways into Earth's interior spout hot, mineral-rich water that fosters an array of once-unknown forms of life.

The catch is that Titan, nearly a billion miles from the Sun and a little larger than the Earth's own moon, is mostly frozen. It only receives about 1 percent of the sunlight that Earth gets. As a result, it is unimaginably frigid.

At minus 180 Centigrade its water ice is rock solid, at least on the surface.

And the rivers and lakes? They are made of liquid hydrocarbons, ethane and methane, which on balmy Earth are the main components of natural gas.

Titan's deposits may be 10-100 times greater than all of Earth's oil and gas reserves, estimates suggest.