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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

Scientists have suggested that non-water based life could form [phys.org] on the surface of Titan [wikipedia.org], Saturn's largest moon:

A team of researchers at Cornell University has built and run a simulation that showed prebiotic reactions could possibly occur on the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan, suggesting the possibility of life evolving in a place where it is too cold for water to be a factor. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the simulation they created in response to the discovery (by the Huygens probe) that polymers such as polyimine might have already developed on the moon's surface.

[...] For life to come about in such places, researchers reason, there would likely need to be some sort of action going on—and that is why there has been so much focus on Titan; it is the only object in our solar system, besides Earth, that has both rainfall and erosion due to liquid movement. But the water it has is locked far underground and the moon is too cold to support an impact by water anyway. But, as the researchers with this new effort discovered after poring over data sent back by Huygens, the surface does have hydrogen cyanide in its sediment, brought down from the atmosphere by methane and ethane rain.

Polymorphism and electronic structure of polyimine and its potential significance for prebiotic chemistry on Titan [pnas.org] (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606634113)

Original Submission