Someplace Like Home, Sort Of

摘要

Saturn's moon Titan may be my favorite place in the solar system. The creature comforts of Earth notwithstanding, our planet can be incredibly complicated to study-everything here is so intricate and so teeming with life that we often need to look out into the solar system for analogs to help us understand the basic mechanisms here at home. And that's what makes Titan so extraordinary. It lacks pesky things like people and plants that can interfere with scientific observations, yet it has so much of what we take for granted here on Earth-lakes and seas, wind and tides, even volcanoes-that it is irresistible to a planetary scientist like me. And we still haven't ruled out that those seas may host something on a path to life.