Water myth surfaces with Titan
The excitement over the photographs of Saturn's natural satellite, Titan, is understandable. But the exaggerated claims about what they indicate are not.
Much is made of "river- like" channels on its shriveled surface. Yet little is said about the fact that Titan's surface temperature is in the neighborhood of minus-300 degrees Fahrenheit!
Eager to make news, some science reporters forget that among the many types of liquids that might be found in outer space, water, especially in a potable form, is the rarest. So far as is known, most other liquids are lava (magma), poisonous, fluvial solutions like hydrochloric and sulfuric acids, melted dry ice, etc. All these compounds can carve out river-like, dendritic patterns on the surface of a celestial body. But to imagine that such forbidding liquids even faintly resemble water, as we know it on Earth in harboring and maintaining organic life, is fallacious.
It is time for the public as well as scientists on government payrolls, who have a vested interest in hyping "the possibility of life" beyond Earth, to admit that the Earth is likely to be a unique or at least a very rare cradle of life. As Dr. Steven A. Benner, biochemist at the University of Florida, pointed out in The New York Times (Jan. 11): "If there's no life on Titan, no life on Mars, and we go somewhere else and find no life, no life, no life, you're going to get this notion that life emerged on Earth through very special circumstances."
Yet this "notion" is already shared by a number of level-headed, independent scientists, whom the media seem reluctant to quote.
For obvious reasons.
Dr. Albert L. Weeks
The write is a former assistant science editor for Newsweek magazine. He resides in Sarasota.