The ID Report

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In January of 2005 a space probe called Huygens arrived on the surface of the Saturnian moon of Titan. Four years on the landing continues to draw interest within the scientific community, one reason being that the atmosphere on Titan is believed to resemble the atmosphere that existed at the inception of life on our own planet. When the probe landed, the hope held by many was that Titan's surface would reveal some of the molecules that might have been important to get life started. One review of the Huygens mission wrote of Titan as "a world with much of the preorganic chemistry that Earth had 4.5 billion years ago" later calling Titan "a one-of-a-kind window into our vanished past"(Ref 1). The same review went on to speculate on how a similar atmosphere on the early earth might have provided a life-seeding platform:

"Rich in nitrogen as well as ethane, methane and other carbon-based gases, the Titanian air contains the raw chemical material believed to be needed to give rise to life and just the kind that probably existed on the primordial earth...over time the candlelike heat of the distant sun may have slow-cooked some of the organic materials forming more complex molecules...if there is lightning in Titan's atmosphere, the random jolts could have shocked even bigger molecules into existence"(Ref 1)

Likewise Jack Lissauer from the NASA Ames Institute wrote of a possible Titan-like early earth in which photochemical reactions would have created conditions for life-critical molecules (Ref 2).

Tethered to NASA's Cassini spacecraft, the Huygens probe was launched on October the 15th of 1997 from Cape Canaveral (Ref 3). The entire Hugens/Cassini mission was touted as "the most ambitious and expensive planetary expedition ever mounted" by Nature journalist Tony Reichhardt- not a surprising revelation when one considers the 3.3 billion dollars that both NASA and the European Space Agency invested in the mission (Ref 4). For Cassini's spectacular departure from earth, NASA used a state-of-the-art launch vehicle called the Titan IVB/Centaur- made up of a booster rocket and two additional rockets (Ref 5). Clearly NASA did not overstate the mark in its assertion that Cassini had been one of the largest, heaviest and most complex interplanetary spacecraft ever built (Ref 6). Together with the intricacy of Cassini's 1,630 interconnecting circuits and just under 7 .5 miles of cabling it was easy to see the basis upon which NASA was making its claim (Ref 7).

Because Titan is held as a model for the conditions of our earth before life began, much of the equipment aboard Huygens was designed to study Titan's chemical and physical properties (Ref 8). Not only did the Huygens probe carry extensive gas chromatography and spectrometry equipment on board for measuring the gas composition of Titan's atmosphere (Ref 8) but it also carried sophisticated devices for detecting complex organic molecules (Ref 9). Today, scientists claim to have found evidence for lightning in Titan's atmosphere as they probe for energy sources that might have provided the 'spark' upon which such molecules were formed (Ref 10).

News of the arrival of the 319 kg Huygens probe on Titan generated a great deal of emotion. "I've seen people with tears in their eyes" European Space Agency scientist Mike McKay told reporters (Ref 11). David Southwood, the director of the European Space Agency, told of the high hopes that he held for the Huygens mission (Ref 12).

After a journey that had lasted 20 days and had covered 4 million kilometers from the Cassini spacecraft, Huygens descended through the Titan haze decelerating as it went to a final speed of just 300 kph (Ref 12). The first results to come back were met with excitement. Photographs revealed a Titan moon with mountains and river channels perhaps not unlike the water-eroded features we see on earth (Ref 13). Toby Owen from the Honolulu Institute for Astronomy called Titan "a flammable world" in clear reference to the abundant methane that, in the intensely cold temperatures of Titan's surface, formed a liquid not unlike water here on earth (Ref 13). Elsewhere, photographs of channels, ridges and gullies taken by Huygens provided evidence for precipitation- maybe a methane rain- that would have fallen recently on the harsh terrain of Titan's forbidding surface (Ref 13).

As discussions began to heat up on the significance of these first results, it became clear just how little we really did know about Titan (Ref 14). Because Titan has an atmospheric haze that scatters sunlight so effectively, scientists had had little opportunity to study its chemical makeup (Ref 14). Now, with Huygens probe having penetrated Titan, scientists from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were obtaining some impressive radar data that indicated the possible existence of oozing river-like flows of organic compounds (Ref 13). Chris Mckay from the Ames Research Center re-emphasized his belief that the presence of organic compounds might signal the existence of bioreactors similar to those that are thought to have existed on the early earth (Ref 14). Even before the Cassini/Huygens mission, radar studies had revealed that as much as 75% of Titan might be covered by huge lakes of methane some spanning areas several hundred kilometers in diameter (Ref 15).

And yet while the initial photographs of Titan suggested the existence of a sea of methane complete with its own islands and coastline (Ref 16), we were still a long way from obtaining even a sketch of how life might have arisen on our own planet. Rather than being a 'golden spike' event as biologists Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada might have hoped for, in which primordialists and evolutionists finally united the animate with the inanimate world (Ref 17) , the landing of the Huygens probe served only to widen the chasm between simple organic compounds and complex biotic polymers. After all, the methane lakes, channels and open seas on Titan that had initially generated so much euphoria, provided no clues as to how the simplest biochemical processes might have arisen or even as to how a primitive membrane, needed to separate such processes from the damaging and disruptive forces of the surrounding environment (Ref 18), might have been formed.

In September of 2005, Francois Raulin from the International Space Science Institute in Switzerland made some astounding announcements on the chemical content of Titan's atmosphere (Ref 19). According to an in-depth chemical analysis, the Titanian air contained Tholins- a reddish 'goo' that could contain biologically-relevant molecules such as amino-acids and nucleotides. Raulin claimed that all the components for the emergence of life were present in Titan's shrouding haze including water and essential organic compounds (Ref 19). Raulin went one step further by suggesting that life itself may have been able to gain a foot hold on such seemingly inhospitable conditions as those observed on Titan, citing the existence of 'extremophiles' here on earth as evidence for his assertions.

Still, Raulin's imaginings supplied no avenues for explaining the origins of specified information found in biological systems. DNA and proteins are after all more than random assemblies of nucleotides and amino acids. They are in fact molecules rich in informational content. DNA itself is organized into genetic sequences that do not show the repetitious ordering found in, say, ice or clay. In fact the aperiodic, information-carrying assembly of DNA, RNA or proteins is analogous to complex sentences such those that make up human language. How natural processes could have brought about such information through de novo chemical synthesis is a question that challenges our deepest sense of logic. Natural selection is a case in point. Since there would have had nothing to select until genetic information had been built up, it is easy to understand why natural selection would have been powerless to arrange nucleotides into an information-rich code on a prebiotic earth . As Discovery Institute philosopher Stephen Meyer wrote,

"natural selection can do nothing to help generate new functional sequences, but rather can only preserve such sequences once they have arisen, [so] chance alone-random variation- must do the work of information generation- that is, of finding the exceedingly rare functional sequences within the set of combinatorial possibilities. Yet the probability of randomly assembling a functional sequence is extremely small."(Ref 20)

Natural selection needs something to select, something that is already functional. To appeal to chance as an alternative and to thereby assume that the random assembly of nucleotides and amino acids could generate functional strings of information-rich code is to appeal to the miraculous.

Even before Huygens landed, astrobiologists were adamant that whatever was found on the surface of Titan it would not be "life as we know it" (Ref 21). Such a statement should not be allowed to steer us away from the fundamental conundrum of life's origins- that is, how the genetic instructions that form the blueprint for the existence of every organism on earth simply emerged. Science journalist Denyse O'Leary sent a cautionary note to those eager to formulate an answer, warning of "the risk of seeing things that are not really there, because we want them to be there so badly" (Ref 22). We should take stock of O'Leary's words and follow the evidence wherever it leads. That applies as much to origin-of-life studies as it does to any other field of science.

References
1. Dan Cray (2004), Secrets of the Rings, Time Magazine, July 12th, 2004, Volume 164 (2) pp. 52-61

2. Jack J Lissauer (2000), How Common Are Habitable Planets? Nature Volume 402, C11-C14

3. Ring Word 2: Cassini-Huygens Mission To Saturn And Its Moons, A joint production by the National Aeronautics And Space Administration and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA

4. Tony Reichhardt (1997) Cassini mission blasts off for Saturn, Nature Volume 389, p. 769

5. Cassini-Huygens Launch, See http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/files/launch.pdf

6. Cassini Mission to Saturn, See http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/59910main_cassini.pdf

7. The Cassini Spacecraft, See http://cassini-huygens.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features/saturn-story/spacecraft.cfm

8. Huygens Probe Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer, See http://huygensgcms.gsfc.nasa.gov/

9. NEWS Titan: tapping the flood of data, Nature 438, 538-539 (1 December 2005)

10. Rebecca Carroll (2008), Electricity Found on Saturn Moon--Could It Spark Life?, National Geographic News, October 28th, 2008,
See http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/10/081028-titan-lightning-life.html

11. Stephen Battersby (2005), Huygens beams back first discoveries from Titan, NewScientist, 14th January 2005, See http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6881

12. NEWS Europe reaches new frontier - Huygens lands on Titan, See ESA website at http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Cassini-Huygens/SEMQ1QQ3K3E_0.html

13. John Leicester (2005), It's raining methane on Titan, Wisconsin State Journal, January 22nd, 2005

14. Science Hopes Ride On Huygens, See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4164587.stm

15. Stuart Clark (2003), Radar reveals Titan's methane lakes, NewScientist , October 2003, See http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994227

16. Sharp images show methane haze on Saturn's moon, See USAToday, January 15th, 2005, See http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/space/2005-01-15-titan_x.htm

17. Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada (2000), The Spark of Life- Darwin and The Primeval Soup, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, Massachusetts, pp.57-58

18. Fazale Rana (2000), Biotic Borders: Cell Membranes Under Scrutiny, Facts for Faith, Issue 10, Reasons To Believe, See http://www.reasons.org

19. F. Raulin (2005), TITAN: HABITABILITY AND GENERAL ASTROBIOLOGICAL ASPECTS, International Space Science Institute Workshop on "Geology and Habitability of Terrestrial Planets", Bern, Switzerland, 5 - 9 September, 2005,
See http://www.issi.unibe.ch/workshops/Geology/Abstracts/Raulin.pdf

20. Stephen Meyer (2004), The Origin of Biological Information and the Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington Volume 117, no. 2, pp.213-239

21. Jean-Pierre Lebreton (2002), ESA to search for life, but not as we know it, 19 September 2002, See http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Cassini-Huygens/ESAV5SPV16D_0.html

22. Denyse O'Leary (2008), Origin of life: What can the Saturnian moon Titan tell us?, See http://collidinguniverses.blogspot.com/2009/01/origin-of-life-what-can-saturnian-moon.html