00:00An alien life lab for a long time, scientists believed that liquid water was essential for life to begin.
00:07But what if that's not the whole story?
00:09Recent NASA research suggests that the basic building blocks of life for something similar could be forming right.
00:16Now in a place that is utterly alien to us, the freezing hydrocarbon lakes of Titan, one of Saturn's moons.
00:24Titan is the only place besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface.
00:29But its lakes and seas are filled with liquid methane and ethane.
00:34So how could anything resembling a cell form there?
00:37On Earth, life is based on cells with membranes that act as containers.
00:42These membranes are made of molecules called amphiphiles, which have a water-loving end and a water-fearing end.
00:49When they come together in water, they naturally arrange themselves into double-layered spheres, creating a tiny compartment called a vesicle.
00:57This is a crucial first step toward creating a protocell.
01:01But on Titan, there's no liquid water.
01:05The environment is completely different.
01:08Scientists had to think outside the box.
01:11They looked at Titan's weather cycle, which consists of methane clouds that cause rain, which in turn fills its rivers, lakes, and seas.
01:19This is where the ingenious process proposed by NASA researchers comes in.
01:24When methane rain hits the lakes, it creates splashes.
01:28The theory is that both the lake's surface and these spray droplets could be coated in a layer of amphiphilic molecules, created by the complex chemistry in Titan's atmosphere.
01:408.
01:40When a coated droplet falls back onto the coated lake's surface, the two layers of molecules merge, creating a stable, double-layered vesicle that encloses the original droplet.
01:52Why is this so important?
01:54Because if it's actually happening, it means that cell-like compartments can form naturally in an environment without liquid water.
02:02The creation of these vesicles demonstrates an increase in order and complexity from simple chemistry.
02:07This expands our view of what makes a world habitable.
02:17Titan could be a natural laboratory for studying how life might have begun, showing us a potential pathway that is completely different from what happened on early Earth.
02:26Although NASA is sending a mission to Titan, the Dragonfly spacecraft won't have the necessary instruments to detect these tiny vesicles.
02:35Its main goal is to study Titan's surface composition and overall habitability.
02:41However, this research is incredibly exciting.
02:44It changes how we might search for life on Titan in the future, and expands our understanding of where the precursors to life could arise in the universe.
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