Microorganisms In Titan's Lakes? - Largest Moon Of Saturn
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 8 ก.พ. 2025
- The presence of liquid methane and ethane lakes on Titan quite often leads to the conclusion that there might be life in those lakes, the idea being that the liquid methane could be a substitute for water in a life form. In this video I examine how likely is it that Titan's lakes really do have some organism lurking in them and with that also see whether or not liquid methane could be an alternative.
Intro, outro and many other clips in this video were made with Space Engine.
Music:
1. Kevin MacLeod - Ossuary 1 - A Beginning
2. Kevin MacLeod - Ossuary 6 - Air
3. Kevin MacLeod - New Direction
4. Kevin MacLeod - Spacial Winds (Slowed version)
There is one important issue - the speed of a chemical reaction. Every catalyzed chemical reaction requires the overcome of activation energy and thus this requires a corresponding temperature. In average, by temperature increase about 10 K, it doubles speed of a chemical reaction. At such low temperatures, it may be too low for any biological activity.
Titan is such a cool and interesting moon
Im gonna be putting a mansion on Titan, and a yacht in the liquid methane
Titan’s low gravity and thick atmosphere makes it free real estate for flying organisms.
The way you narrate in your videos is immersive, I love it.
Unique. Theres no one like him. I hope he will forever stay with us.
I love his buttery smooth finland accent
3:12, love your graphics!! Top notch with the lake with dim sun overhead
Can't wait for Dragonfly, even if it's not equipped to detect life directly.👍👍
There will be next time. Anyone can design a rover to equip microscopes with a lesser budget someday if any of the experts we have can do it.
Surprisigly informative video, I liked it very much. I always imagined Titan as a rogue gas station or an oil raffinery. Probably even smells like one. It may not harbour life, but it would be the best possible gas station in the whole solar system.
We would never know for sure unless we visit Titan for ourselves.
Using advanced robotics
How about subsurface oceans of methane and ethane?
we did actually we had a rover and even took a picture of its surface
@@As4i-06it wasn’t a rover, it was a lander
Yes. But we seem to be more interested in killing each other over inane reasons. So sad.
Nice one ! One of your best videos I have seen is 'What if Titan becomes moon of earth ?' . A highly hypothetical but an interesting video to watch...
Wherever we've investigated some form of life is possible on earth, inside rocks, around black smokers, at the very bottom of the ocean. Life finds a way.
I confidently expect some form of life, recognisable as such, to be found on Titan, which has a carbon solvent, as well as Mars - if only in rocks.
You should have millions of subs and views the best youtube channel
Collaboration with Kyplanet? He endorsed your channel in his “Why did everyone fall for the J1407b myth?” video. Would be great. Your narration, presentation and background music style/choices are amazing. Love the topics as always!
I checked out that video, it's interesting. There does appear to be an endorsement, nice. I also completely forgot about J1407b, currently I am not into learning about exoplanets. As with regards to a collaboration that does seem interesting, maybe a tier list of objects in the solar system would be fun. Still at the moment I am mostly busy with making more videos and studying things for college so I don't currently also have a lot of motivation to set up that collaboration. Also thank you for the compliments.
Just image how much more will be discovered when more missions arrive
What could possibly be a contender/alternative for water on other planets for harbouring life? Could life develop on a planet with a different liquid then water? It would be interesting to see what those life forms would look like.
For what it may be worth, the atmosphere of Titan -- like that of Earth, but not Mars -- is not in equilibrium. So SOMETHING is continually acting upon it. On Earth, that 'something' is life.
I find the idea that large bodies in our solar system are 100% sterile to be an absurd hypothesis. I find it far easier to believe that anywhere there is liquid (doesn't need to be water) in a relatively stable environment, life will be found. My saying is, the cosmos is so old... it's moldy. The reason we haven't found life yet because the only place we've looked for it has been from chairs on the surface of the Earth.
I'm not so sure about that. I think life is way more common than we give it credit for, but I don't think we have any reason to see liquid and assume that means life. There's so many other factors that may be at play. For example, we don't know the minimum temperature life needs to survive, and we KNOW it probably can't FORM in the cold. So a planet probably needs to be at least relatively warm at some point in its time to develop life.
Earth is a very bizarre planet. Nothing like it has ever been found. Mars could have never been like Earth because it has an imbalanced core that was doomed to fail very quickly. Venus and Mars never developed plate tectonics, which are critical to making life possible on Earth. Mercury, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto have always been hellscapes. While extremely hypothetically, there could be single-celled organisms in the upper atmosphere of Venus, or underground on Enceladus and a few other subsurface ocean candidates, there are serious problems with those ideas which you would have to do some research on. One example is that the distance between the top of the global ocean on Enceladus and the bottom is much, much too large, around 60 miles. That means that if there were life forms near volcanic vents, they would have all the weight of 60 miles of ocean bearing down on them, which would amount to ridiculous pressure like we have never seen anywhere on Earth. If there is any life on Titan, it is surely extremely primitive. While we have found evidence of simple aquatic life in Lake Vostok on Earth, the temperature is much, much higher than the lakes of Titan. Going underground, like on Earth, you would encounter the average temperature of the planet in the underground caves, which is -180 F. There is no guarantee that there is life able to withstand cold temperatures to such extreme like we see hot extremophiles in volcanic springs on Earth. Earth life has nearly been completely wiped out on several occasions, e.g. the Great Dying. In fact nearly 100 percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct. It is very possible that all other planets in the Solar system are sterile.
Anywhere there is liquid? I mean eh, ok. But what you're sort of implying by "doesn't need to be water" is that life could come from stuff like mercury (the liquid, not planet), which I mean, I'm not a biochemist but that doesn't exactly seem very plausible lol.
@@catpoke9557 maybe very simple life
@@mrdraco3758 I didn't say ANY liquid.
Yay long video!❤
We have been studying mars for 40 years and still haven't found anything definitive. So, do you really think we will ever have a definitive answer about Titan ?
Welcome to science
Titan is so cold it can make methane liquid, i have no idea how life would show up there since having energy is a must
@@Euler271"Life finds a way"
@@Euler271 Though heat isn't the only form of energy that living things could rely on.
@@Euler271 That's my hang up with Titan. Abiogenesis is basically chemical reactions left up to chance, and chemical reactions happen twice as fast for every 10 K increase in temperature. Reversing that I think chemical reactions happen very slowly on Titan. This will greatly reduce the chance of abiogenesus happening there.
Well... Life as we know it. Life finds a way.
When exploring the possibility of life beyond Earth, we often focus on the factors that allowed life to thrive here. However, in examining the liquid methane lakes of Titan, we must consider that an alien environment like this could potentially support life as well.
It's possible that there are organisms out there, capable of adapting and evolving in environments vastly different from our own, such as lakes of methane rather than water. We need to shift our perspective and move away from Earth-centric views and light conditions in our search for extraterrestrial life. After all, we’re not looking for life on Earth; we’re investigating a moon of another planet. We cannot expect the scientific conditions to mirror our own, and this narrow mindset may be what is hindering our progress.
Our mindset about life needs to update because it's more water-centric we're pretty stupid still. Even Google considers methane to be gasoline even though water is also gasoline or a mineral by other alien life forms (possible to respect their culture if we ever encounter them in the future) as methane-based life might consider it as water instead of natural gas they would be surprised if we call their water gasoline for energy. People in NASA are already claiming they found life on Mars too so there could be life on Titan too... or something else.
I think the dark cold of the universe away from stars is also habitable for hydrogen and helium based liquids since it's the right temperature for them to exists. Which means they could be more common than water or methane based life forms. The universe is mostly dark and cold and the rogue planets are left invisible but I know they're everywhere in the universe. A real tropical paradise for hydrogen or helium based life. We also need to update about life isn't light-centric, temperature-centric, or star-centric either.
Habitable zones are everywhere in the universe honestly not for H2O goldilocks zone based at all. Someone should give a methane-ethane based goldilocks zone in every solar system.
I think we could live on Titan right now just by having our own oxygen. Mars in other hand is a radioactive vacuum hell.
..And something to keep us warm in -179C temperatures
@@Kerbisttheres tons of hydrocarbons to burn that could be used no?
I believe Titan is a world worth exploring, considering its unique attributes in terms of being a moon.
Yo wake up, Dreksler Astral uploaded
Yo we need to talk, your mother and I are taking a break. A lot of things might start to change in the next few months
@@FLAGMACHINE11yo mama!!
Love you videos
Excellent explanation. Thank you,
DROP MORE VIDEO CANT STAY WITHOUT
I do have to wonder if there is perhaps a temperate version of Titan out there that does have earth like life.
Maybe it would be a larger moon to hold on to an atmosphere in the habitable zone, and orbiting a Much more massive gas giant,
But if a Semi habitable moon emerged in our solar system, who's to say a similar configuration to the Saturnian system can't emerge somewhere else?
I LOVE HIS SONG!
I’m more interested the idea of _bringing_ life to Titan. If the moon truly is devoid of life, we could “seed” life by placing organisms in the lakes and letting nature take its course. Some scientists even suggest that something like that could be the reason for life on Earth, it’s known as the theory of panspermia.
I had this interesting idea is I wonder if oceans hydrogen or helium worlds in rogue planets exist because the space seems to be the right temperature for these elements to exist since these elements have very low temperature at liquid state. So we would be swimming in hydrogen or helium in the darkness of -260C or something. Starless worlds might be habitable for these elements though.
There's also hypothetically an underground body of liquid water under Titan's cold icy surface.
Don't forget the radiation and energy beaming off Saturn* onto Titan itself. Might not need the sun so much for photosynthesis type activity
*Saturn
Don't forget Titan's surface is GOD DAMN TOO COLD!!! LITERALLY MINUS -180 DEGREEES!!! Also applies to every lakes too!
@@JaviAnt7747 Thanks man, I had no idea I even typed Jupiter. Why the hell did I type Jupiter??
What If Mercury, Venus, Mars, Vesta and Ceres were replaced and substituted by Earth's exact copies 🌎🌍🌏
I like seeing how long I can stare at the sun
The "Mercury" Earth would likely be a planetary pressure cooker, since Mercury is too close to the sun to ever be habitable. The "Venus" Earth could either be a planetary pressure cooker like Venus, or could be a hot earth (A "hot earth" is a potentially habitable planet that's warmer than Earth but still cool enough to retain liquid surface water). And Earth sized Mars would probably be a cold earth, colder than Earth on average but warm enough to prevent all the surface water from being frozen solid. Finally, the version of Earth at the orbit of Ceres or Vesta would be frozen solid, not to mention be in constant danger of asteroids striking (although the asteroids average 1,000,000 km apart, their orbits are far from stable).
@@FLAGMACHINE11please dont you will damage your eye sight
@@Libertaro-i2u humans should not disturb the atmosphere on that hot eart venus with their pollution, global warming would be far more devastating there
@@Libertaro-i2uAlso Mercury-Earth would end up as a superheated oven, hellish thermal blanket, smoldering hothouse planet, Venus-type hell world and scorching hot inferno with an atmosphere so rich in Water Vapor and CO2 trapping heat all over the planet and Sulfur Dioxide where it rains sulfuric acid like on the surface of Venus. Most noticeably, an Earth-type planet in Mercury's orbit would end up like Venus where the planet's atmosphere would be a greenhouse effect run wild.
At first i read Microplastics instead of Microroganisms and nearly had a breakdown
😂😂😂😂
12:31 thats an odd take considering that methane is cooking gas
You should do a video of what the singularity of of a black hole looks like
I believe you omitted the deleterious effects of radiation hitting the surface of titan…. That by itself would be a hindrance to any type of simple life forms !
Actually it has a thick atmosphere so it good on that point. It is the lack of basic sunlight at the surface that means it is so truly cold. At 1/10 of 1 percent of what we have.
Titan is far away enough from Saturn to not be strongly affected by its radiation the way Jupiter affects its moons. Plus the thick atmosphere helps.
I stand corrected
The nice thing about skycrane it that it allows us to avoid obstacles. So what happened to John Cline,I understand he died before curiosity landing,but why wasn't he given more credit for this guided entry and landing ?
I fucking love your intonation/accent
The big problem of Titan is that it's crust is made of ice, not rock or carbides. The low density of Titan means that there's a big crust made of ice with miles thick away from the mantle and core, making the surface poor in heavier elements. If the surface was made of carbides and graphite, if those liquid hidrocarbon lakes were near volcanos or another source of heat and right above a crust richer in metals and elements like calcium, sulfur and phosphorus, life would be much more probable. If those ethane lakes were in contact with metals and heavier elements, even silicon, and if there was more heat under those lakes and seas, Titan would be much more similar to Earth. Low density worlds are bad for life. I expect that the interior of Titan is much more similar to Ganimede and Callisto than Europa. If that's the case, almost no hopes for life!
I think you're confusing Titan for another moon that is an actual ice moon.
@@Gelatinocyte2 But the surface of Titan is made of water ice, with organics above it, not rocks as our moon. Titan is not that different from other moons of Saturn, with the difference that it's bigger and have an atmosphere. In fact the most similar moon to Titan is Iapetus, because that also has organic material above the water ice crust, but it's smaller and has not an atmosphere. Titan and Iapetus are brothers. If Iapetus was as big as Titan, it would also have an atmosphere and a similar surface.
@@EnioGuedesPereiraJunior I don't get it; the video literally shows images of Titan's surface, which has rocks.
@@Gelatinocyte2 those rocks are made out of frozen water; ice. loks can be deceiving
@@Gelatinocyte2 Those are not rocks, but frozen water ice. Those lakes and seas of hydrocarbons are above a layer of frozen ice, not rock. If there are rocks, they are way below the surface, below a mantle made of ice or liquid water mixed with ammonia. The temperature is so low that water ice behave like rocks. Also, the surface is very poor in heavier elements, because Titan is an ice world, like all other moons of Saturn, that are mostly made of ice too, and their surfaces are also poor in heavier elements. Titan is only different because of it's atmoshere and size. But if you see it's low density, you'll realize that it has a density of an icy world. Worlds with densities below 2 g/cm³ are mostly made of ice or gas (like the gas giants). Titan may have silicate rocks, but most of them are way below the surface, near the core. If Titan was a rocky world like our moon, it would have a density of at least 2.5 to 3 g/cm³, not 1.88 g/cm³
I think that life on Titan’s surface is not possible due to the extremely low temperature of -290° F. That’s way below a habitable temperature for life, so no life can be born there.
Probably an even chance we’ll find alien life on Titan. Such a discovery would the greatest in the history of science.
16:26 Excuse me, why the FUCK are we not putting Dragonfly at a lake?????
Dragonfly should stop by Mars on the way there, and see what those two munchkins are doing.
Wow I’m early to a video😮
Could Titan's methane be made into fuel for space travel ?
What is producing the methane on Titan ???
If Titan is active, im sure there would be vents at the bottom?
What if life evolved in the water-ammonia ocean below the surface where the temperature is warmer and then adapted to the surface conditions
if true that could be so cool
One certainty about possible biology on Titan is that it wouldn't be carbon based, so it would be life as we DON'T know it!
tbh if life is possible it exist but im not certain its 100% possible
yes
Does the titan lakes have salt and acidic levels too?
Plot twist: The lakes arent liquid methane. It's the black liquid from Prometheus which is what created all life in the "Alien" movie timeline.
Funny how mfs wanna invest all this money into going to Mars (a dead and lifeless planet) but not fund missions for Titan or Europa to see if their waters contain any type of organisms.
Our moon is the most important thing for humanities future in space. Its our gateway to every other place in our solar system. It’s way easier to beat the moon’s gravitational pull than earth when trying to leave with a rocket, so it should definitely be our base for space exploration and other businesses.
mars is close to us, europa is drenched in radiation from jupiter and is like 15x farther, and titan is even more far away. But still we should probably at least be spending lots more on those moons but they are way harder to colonize.
Mars is still extremely interesting and worth the study.
Or Venus.
Just give them better microscope cameras, what the fuck?Just give the military 20 less rifles and give them a microscope camera worth a damn wtf
diatomic hydrogen? what a mouthful, just say elemental hydrogen
Dreksler rises above the others!!!!!!!!
Oh are you humans in for a whole bunch of surprises.
4:23 _"... such as _*_proteins,_*_ DNA, _*_enzymes,_*_ ..."_
You said the same thing twice. Lol
9:17 No, organisms don't necessarily react oxygen with sugar. The oxygen is used as the Electron Transport Chain terminus in mitochondria; it's the final electron acceptor. The sugar is reacted in the host cell without oxygen needed, leaving behind a byproduct of 2 pyruvate molecules, and mitochondria are very good at making more energy (and nutrients) out of that byproduct.
I've been interested in organic chemistry for a long time; lately, I've been trying to wrap my mind around cellular chemistry, and I have to say...it gets confusing.
@@MootingInsanity I sincerely believe it's because the way it is taught is misleading, or the way it's communicated is fundamentally broken.
A second proto-earth?
One day we will find life on other place in the universe but it won’t be same that of Mother Earth different from.
Scientists, particularly those receiving funding from political entities, must be very very conservative. For one of them to stand up and design a feature that is designed to detect “little green men” would be laughed out of congress and quickly defunded.
hello again
Can we bring gasoline engine on titan?
The atmosphere doesn't have oxygen, so it wouldn't burn.
_Kinda_
Bring a “Fuel” tank with Oxygen and take in the outside Methane to burn and it could work.
@@MDE_never_dies so reverse gasoline engine?
Betting on no.
Oh please, NASA has "almost" found life in 3 other places or more now. Most are highly probably to varying degrees of complexity THERE IS MORE OUTSIDE OF THE EARTH THAN MAN EVEN IN THE DEEP PAST MORE POWERFUL BEINGS EXISTED BEFORE US😅
14:21
Hi
Titan is the best planet
Dang, you’re losing so much likes I feel so poor for you dude😢
Especially because his content is so amazing. He’s not playing by TH-cams algorithm. Kinda his fault but in actuality the algorithm nowadays pushes completely brainrot things, so its TH-cams and humanities loss in reality. I watch him for many many years now, its so sad. At least one of the newer growing and amazing space/astronomy channels named Kyplanet gave him a shoutout for making amazing content in the vast array of fake AI Michio Kaku “we’re doomed” “its finally happening” “im sorry” space content.
Titan
Sym bionic titan attack on titan
Teen Titans
Raccontate solo fesserie.