The land of almost-enough atmosphere.

Contrary to what cartoons might have told you when you were a kid, the “primordial soup” from which life on Earth sprang was not, y’know, soup. If it tasted like anything, I imagine it tasted like sulfur and sodium. So… not unlike a bowl of canned soup, actually. Anyway, the primordial soup was, in theory, a puddle of primitive elements within which a bunch of microscopic things lined up just right to create microorganisms. It’s from those early microorganisms that all life as we know it eventually evolved, heavy emphasis on “eventually.”

As far as we know, no other celestial body in our solar system has life, at least on the scale of humanity, but we only know that for sure because we can’t see anything obvious on their surfaces. For all we know, there could be microorganisms brewing up in a smelly puddle on one of those planets in a process similar to our primordial soup.

One celestial body that has caught scientists’ collective eye is Titan, the largest moon of Saturn. The interesting thing about Titan is that, despite the fact that it’s not technically a planet, it does have an atmosphere like Earth’s, though it’s full of methane rather than oxygen. Still, that’s fine; the point is that it’s not a desolate wasteland perpetually baked dry by the sun’s heat, so theoretically, it could support early life.

In the not too distant future, NASA will be deploying an observatory probe to Titan in a mission codenamed “Dragonfly.” It’ll take a couple of months for the probe to get there, but once it does, it’ll take pictures of the atmosphere and scan the surface for any signs of micro-life. Who knows; in a few million years, Titan may look pretty similar to the Earth.