Lowlife on Saturn

Scientists have apparently found life on Saturn ! !

Which is to say, they’ve found evidence of life on one of Saturn’s moons, called Titan.

Which is an imprecise way of saying they’ve found evidence which may suggest the possibility of a form of life on Titan.

Oh, alright, it may even be only a ‘precursor’ of life.

This ‘life’, it is thought, will possibly be methane-based — which should immediately ring alarm bells about “us” being invaded by “them” for the growing stockpiles of methane we’ve horded in our atmosphere.

The existence of exotic forms of life in the outer reaches of our solar system is a possibility Arthur C. Clarke foresaw at least three decades ago. In his sequel to 2001 A Space Odyssey, Clarke told of how the Bowman Entity descended into Jupiter where he/it discovered life-forms based on the petrochemicals in the atmosphere of the gas giant.

Skirting the foothills of the drifting foam mountains were myriads of small, sharply-defined clouds, all about the same size and patterned with similar red and brown mottlings. They were small only as compared with the inhuman scale of their surroundings; the very least would have covered a fair-sized city.

They were clearly alive, for they were moving with slow deliberation along the flanks of the aerial mountains, browsing off their slopes like colossal sheep. And they were calling to each other in the metre band, their radio voices faint but clear against the cracklings and concussions of Jupiter itself.

Nothing less than living gasbags, they floated in the narrow zone between freezing heights and scorching depths. Narrow, yes — but a domain far larger than all the biosphere of Earth.

They were not alone. Moving swiftly among them were other creatures so small that they could easily have been overlooked. ... But they too were alive — perhaps predators, perhaps parasites, perhaps even herdsmen.

A whole new chapter of evolution ... was opening before him. ...

He was searching a world more than a hundred times the area of earth, and though he saw many wonders, nothing there hinted of intelligence. The radio voices of the great balloons carried only simple messages of warning or of fear. Even the hunters, who might have been expected to develop higher degrees of organisation, were like the sharks in Earth’s oceans — mindless automata.

And for all its breathtaking size and novelty, the biosphere of Jupiter was a fragile world, a place of mists and foam... Few of its constructs were more substantial than soap bubbles...

Jupiter was an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Consciousness would never emerge here; even if it did, it would be doomed to a stunted existence. ... In an environment where fire was impossible, and solids scarcely existed, it could never even reach the Stone Age.

• Arthur C. Clarke — 2010 Odyssey Two

So... the Bowman Entity at the behest of his/its Masters nuked Jupiter, with all its living wonders. They had it coming.