IIf we’re to believe Hollywood storytellers about our first encounter with forms of life beyond mothership Earth, it will be a violent affair. Non-terran life forms always provoke a sort of panic in the popular imagination, but the reality of what our first meeting with ETs will look like is a lot more mundane. 

In June, NASA announced the Dragonfly mission which will deploy a quadcopter craft to sample Titan, one of Saturn’s sixty-two moons. It’s so cold up there (94K or -290.5 °F) that elements that would be gases here on Earth (methane, ethane, and other hydrocarbons) instead form large liquid oceans upon and under Titan’s surface. Water mostly takes the form of frigid ice while the predominant nitrogen fills most of the atmosphere. Hydrocarbons, nitrogen, and water. Sounds like the perfect soup to conjure up life, no? That’s precisely why I am convinced our first encounter with non-Earth bound life will occur a mere 840 million miles away on Saturn’s largest moon.

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