The Lakes of Titan

Abstract

In January 2005, an electronic eye gazed on the fresh landscape of new land on a previously unexplored world. It saw a landscape that would, at first sight, have been familiar to many human eyes. The scenes that it recorded looked like the Lake District of northern England, the Finnish Lakeland, or the hilly areas of the Pacific Northwest, with rivers flowing through the world’s hills to large lakes. One major difference between this world and ours was that this world had no life on it—no trees, no grass to cloak the shapes of the bare rock, no animals to give an air of domestic tranquility or savage wildness to the scene. What was not immediately obvious was that, underlying the scenery, behind the landscapes, was the potential for life. The landscape was like that of Planet Earth before life had arisen here. This land was a preserved fossil, like Earth was 4 billion years ago. This world was pregnant with prebiotic chemistry, literally awash with chemicals that span the gap between the inanimate and the living.