They Thought Our Solar System Was Empty Until This Discovery

Its underground prison clears into space, which means we won't need to drill into one of the largest ice cubes in the

solar

system

to get some samples. But unfortunately, with no mission planned for Enceladus, it is not likely that we will discover in the short term if there is life inside

this

small moon. ## Titan Enceladus may be the most likely place to find life in our backyard, but, for my money, the most exciting is another moon in the Saturn

system

: Titan. As the name suggests, Titan is a burly boy. Titan, Saturn's largest moon and the second largest in the entire

solar

system after Jupiter's Ganymede, is almost as large as Earth and larger than Mercury.

But it's not Titan's planet-like size that has me scientifically excited and upset. It's the fact that Titan happens to be the only body in our solar system, other than Earth, where stable bodies of liquid are found on the surface. It is a world with wind, rain and different seasons, all of which combine to create a landscape strikingly similar to that found on Earth, with rivers, deltas, lakes, seas and sand dunes. Titan is also the only moon in the solar system known to have a dense atmosphere. So far everything is brilliant... but there is one small drawback.

You see, the rivers, lakes and seas that dot Titan's surface are not filled with water:

they

flow with liquid hydrocarbons like methane and ethane. For that reason alone, Titan's surface is certainly *not* a candidate for life as we know it. But he may well be a candidate for something... different. At the beginning of

this

video I said that finding life elsewhere in the solar system would virtually guarantee the existence of untold billions of other life forms throughout the universe. And that's absolutely true...except for one small problem. If we found evidence of life on Mars, for example, it wouldn't necessarily mean that life originated there independently; there is always a small chance that it got there from Earth, or vice versa.

For example, when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs slammed into our planet 66 million years ago, it did so with such force that it sent billions of tons of debris into space. Some of that material will have crashed into other parts of the solar system, potentially taking with it some stowaway-extremophile microorganisms that could have "seeded" other parts of the solar system with life from Earth. The concept of life traveling from one planet to another in this way is known as panspermia (which is a fancy way of saying that we impregnate our neighbors) and, to this day, is largely a fringe theory that is out. from the scientific mainstream for the simple reason that there is no real evidence to support it.

But if we *were* to find life elsewhere in the solar system, particularly if that life bore any similarity to life forms found on Earth, it would certainly lend more weight to the argument. However, if we found life on the truly strange world of Titan, we could be incredibly sure that panspermia was not the cause. Titan is a world governed by completely different rules, and life on Earth would have no hope of surviving its rain of methane and seas of hydrocarbons. That's actually one of the biggest challenges we'll face when looking for life on Titan: It will be so different from anything we've seen on Earth that we'll have a hard time recognizing it as life in the first place.

As intriguing as the question of whether life could be possible on a moon like Titan is, we're going to have to wait until at least 2034 for answers; That's when NASA's Dragonfly mission will get there with the express goal. to hunt for life. That's one of the most frustrating things about the search for extraterrestrial life, even here in our own solar system. The distances are so great that everything takes bloody centuries. Not to mention the fact that space exploration costs quite a bit of money: NASA has cost the US government around $650 billion since its creation in 1958. And yet, we humans are a curious bunch. and, collectively, we have decided that the chance to learn more about the universe we find ourselves in is worth the time, effort, and cost.

As I speak, probes are sweeping the solar system, heading to many of the planets and moons I've covered in this video. Will

they

find life when they get there? Your guest is as good as mine. But I, for one, can't wait to find out. Thanks for watching.