Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science » in reply to Just for the intellectual exercise

I'm not qualified to make any sense on the subject.

At a guess you'd need:

- a good solvent that's largly chemically inert. Hydrogen handles. Alcohol might fit the bill at those temperatures, but it is a much bigger molecule than water. Dunno.

- harnessable energy. I guess that there's chemical energy there. Probably replenished by chemical reactions in the atmosphere driven by the sun and maybe by lightning. Once life started, it might migrate to the atmosphere and capture the solar energy directly. It should be a lot easier to stay aloft on Titan than here.

- the chemistry itself. I think you need a way to make a near-infinite variety of chemicals that can be used to build life from. I don't know that it has to be based on one element (like carbon). Or that it has to be Carbon.

One of the arguments that either does not impress me or I do not properly understand has to do with the speed of chemical reactions at low temperatures. I think that the speed is meaningful only when compared to the lifetime of the chemicals in question. On earth, with earth-life, species have a hard time when it takes them 100 years or longer to reproduce, because it is tricky to keep things alive and genetically viable for that long. Radiation, ions etc. insist that the life-form take extreme measures to combat the damage over that period. In an ultra-cold environment, chemical reactions (and therefore life) work more slowly, but maybe the environment is more forgiving over a longer period of time. Dunno.

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