Like deep-sea hydrothermal vents.
Or 1 mile deep down within the Earth.
That's about Planet Earth. But what about alien life forms within our solar system?
Check this report by Tom Randall in bloomberg.com :
"Saturn's Titan Moon May Harbor Hidden Ocean of Water (Update1)
By Tom Randall
March 20 (Bloomberg) -- Saturn's largest moon, T, is covered with miles of ice and land that may slosh across a huge hidden ocean capable of supporting life, astronomers said.
The theory explains why geological features such as dunes, lakes, channels, craters and icy volcanoes have drifted tens of miles in three years, according to a study published today in the journal Science.
Titan is the only known space object besides Earth with bodies of liquid, mostly methane, on the surface, and the only moon with a dense atmosphere. The Saturn moon is covered with rich combinations of organic materials, and the presence of a liquid ocean under the ground would complete the building blocks of life, said Ralph Lorenz, who has written two books on Titan.
``Titan is really a unique world in our solar system,'' said Lorenz, the study's lead author and a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Maryland. ``A world where there's both water and lots of organic material is a very powerful combination that promises to tell us about the chemical evolution that leads to life.''
Radar images from the robotic spacecraft Cassini Huygens taken in 2004 surprised scientists by showing that the majority of Titan's surface was solid, covered with ice that's miles thick. Researchers had thought it would be topped with a global hydrocarbon ocean. More images from the spacecraft and a probe that descended to the surface revealed dunes, lakes, channels, craters and icy volcanoes.
Three years later, Cassini sent a second round of images that showed the same features, only not where the astronomers expected to find them. Early theories for the shift included a periodic wobble of the moon's axis or an enormous recent impact, though there was no evidence of such events.
Miles of Drift
The Earth's atmosphere creates a drag that shifts the surface of the planet about a millimeter every year, Lorenz said. Titan's greenhouse-gas atmosphere is much thicker than the Earth's, and the influence it has on Titan's smaller surface is much greater. That still didn't explain the miles of drift on the surface. The movement could happen only if it the surface is riding on an ocean of water, he said.
Titan is about half the size of the Earth and bigger than Mercury, Pluto and Earth's moon. It is much farther from the sun than Earth is, and only the dense atmospheric gases keep the temperature at about 290 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (180 degrees below zero Celsius). Liquid methane rains from the skies and collects in lakes. Dark sand and icy mountains cover broad sections of Titan's equator.
``If the presence of an ocean is confirmed, Titan would be the fourth object in the solar system with a deep ocean'' underground, and the only one with liquid surface pools and organic processes, according to an editorial in the journal by scientists Christophe Sotin and Gabriel Tobie.
Future missions to Titan ``will help us to understand the cycle of the elements and organic molecules that play a key role in the formation and evolution of life,'' the scientists said. "
But may I add:
WE are afraid of higher - intelligence life forms......evident from all those Martian sci-fi movies.
IMHO, we should be more careful of any microbial life forms that have survived billions of years.
Reason is: these microbial life forms can MUTATE RAPIDLY and can cause havoc if INTRODUCED EVEN ACCIDENTALLY from a spaceship coming back to Earth.
