These are my thoughts concerning the recent huygens probes look at titan a moon of saturn. Titan has oceans of hydrocarbon and an atmosphere and a magnetosphere; all of the components necessary to make a planet (and importantly a moon ) habitable. While titan's oceans are likely composed of liquid hydrcarbons scientists say that at one point so were our own earth's.
As anyone who follows space science and SETI knows there is a famous equation called Drake's equation that attempts to estimate the number of planets that exist that may have developed not just intelligent life but spacefaring civilisations. With the relatively recent discoveries of planets around other stars the likely hood of such civilisations was actually greatly reduced because of some 200 known planetary systems all but four had gas giants like jupiter and saturn hogging the habitable zone around their stars and of the four that didn't one is our own. The habitable zone is the space available for planets that has sufficient temperature for liquid water under normal circumstances and in our case Mars is at the outer extreme of our sun's habitable zone.
So with the gas giants taking up the habitable space the terrestrials if they existed at all were not in a location conducive to life as we understand it. But wait! All is not as it seems. Many of these gas giants around other stars are larger than Jupiter. some are many times the size of our largest gas giant. Even laying aside the obvious criticism that life does not have to follow our concepts of what is possible this does not harm the case for life much at all in my opinion.
Because these super-Jupiters likely have moons. And being supersized like they are they may have planet sized moons. even moons bigger than Earth. And if those moons happen to have a magnetosphere to block thier mother planets radiation and an atmosphere to breath and trap heat and liquid oceans then they too can harbor life and be stable enough to sustain prolonged evolution necessary to produce intelligent life and civilizations.
So rather than lowering the prospect of habitable worlds for exploring and of course for kindred in spirit civilizations out there this discovery only strengthens the possibility. And the Titan probe Huygens only punctuates that fact.
Topic: Thoughts on Huygen's probe decent to Titan and Drake's Equation (Read 1168 times)