by Mike Gray

Can Titan be the home of living organisms? YES! — if you ignore the laws of biology and information science:

Imagine a puree of plant matter in a blender. Then imagine an army of very tiny tweezers selecting and throwing out most of the important chemicals and elements, like the lipids, vitamins, metal ions, phosphates, sugars, and most of the amino acids. Then add a broad mixture of thousands of other random chemicals to the few remaining but now pulverized and randomized plant-derived chemicals. Finally, imagine tossing the brew into the atmosphere and claiming that it is now ready to serve as a “springboard to life.”

. . . . [however] for this chemical mixture to springboard, or even crawl, toward becoming a living cell, it would—for starters?have to be added to, taken away from, sequestered into compartments, and organized according to a real biological “language.” Failure of any of these processes to shape molecules toward a cell is a deal-breaker for life to “springboard” out of chaos. The long series of specifying processes would follow such a torturous track that not even an intelligent investigator would be able to do it. And so far, it has not been done, despite massive efforts to build “life.”

Decades ago, there was optimism that successful origin-of-life experimentation would be achieved. But each passing year adds another layer of newly discovered, complex, and specified information found in real living cells.

— Brian Thomas, “Is Life Forming on Titan?”, ICR

And what about that indispensable factor, information?

In the end, when granted all the chemicals of life, like those in the imaginary plant puree, the mixture would be light years away from a living cell because it would be missing the most important ingredient: information.