Saturday, May 29, 2010

Maybe the Moons are the Key

Titan - Saturn's most promising moon in the search for life. A world of mountains, valleys, ravines and oceans; a landscape sculpted not by our own sacred H2O - rather the most unterrestrial liquid methane. The palpable shift in focus from the war god red planet to the moons of the gas giants in the search for extraterrestrial life in the solar system has lead the space agencies to begin to consider moons of gas giants from other solar systems as perhaps the most likely sources of life (given that gas giants seem to be far more numerous than those of rocky earth types).

In the end the small step to our moon may be nothing more than a portent, a chance pointer in our search.