OFF: Re: Interesting project

[M Holmes]

Jonathan Jarrett writes:

> On Thu, 22 Apr 1999, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>
> >      On a related notion, I'm sure I once read some SF story
> > about a life-bearing planetoid which was actually the moon of
> > a whacking great gas giant.  Well, the reckon a few of our
> > gas giants' moons could have life, theoretically.
>
>         Well, it's been suggested that Titan, moon of Saturn, could
> support life, being about Earth's size :-) But though the atmosphere being
> methane isn't so much of a problem (nobody light a match!) the cold I
> gather is

I have a print of an SF artist's (whose name escapes me temporarily)
"Geyser on Titan" up in my living room.

The prime candidates for life are probably Mars and Europa. Mars is
thought to have permafrost water under the surface, at least near the
poles and was warmer in earlier periods and so may have at least some
fossils of life. It now looks likely that there may be some water under
the very thick ice sheets of Europa (Heating due to gravitational stress
in the Jupiter system) and so there's some chance of life down there.

It'd certainly be quite amazing to discover extraterrestrial life. Even
more so were it not DNA or RNA based.

FoFP