Bayesian Astrobiology: Probability of Life on Titan Increasing

Meteorological anomalies parallel the predictions that were made for one possible solution for Titanian biochemistry.

The discovery of life on Titan would be much more exciting than the discovery of life on Mars. The idea has been floated that life on Mars and life on Earth could actually have a common ancestor, seeded on meteor fragments blasted into orbit off each other's crusts during the Eoarchaean when bombardment was much more frequent. If there's life on Mars and that's what it turns out to be, wouldn't that be boring? Sure, we'd get a couple new enzymes out of the deal, a few new twists in biochemistry, but nothing cutting deeply at the problem of life elsewhere in the universe, not much more than would finding a weird cyanophyte in Antarctica's Dry Valleys. Any replicator we find on Titan is much less likely to share a common ancestor with cells on Earth, not just because of the distance involved, but because the chemistry would have to be fundamentally different. If you want to reason inductively you want to generalize based on data from sources as diverse as possible. Life on Titan would teach us much more about chemistry, about early evolution, and about the probability of finding life elsewhere in the universe besides in our backyards.