Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougmwne | Hacker News Reader

This doesn’t seem to be a very meaningful theory to draw conclusions about life. We have no idea how much carbon is already present in Titan’s ocean and if there’s need for a water cycle that connects to the surface. Also this study only considers impact craters, not surface tectonics. And there could be plenty of carbon sources from ocean floor interactions.

View on HN

The journal authors agree with you. The "most likely uninhabitable" conclusion is an invention of the popsci article's author.

The actual article's conclusion is basically "for there to be life on Titan, there needs to be more carbon in the ocean than would be transferred solely by surface impactors". It absolutely does not rule out the existence of those carbon source.

As usual, the reporting on science ends up distorting or even inventing conclusions out of thin air.

To quote the two concluding sentences of the journal article:

> It is unlikely that the calculated ﬂuxes are sufﬁcient to maintain a detectable biosphere, unless the thickness of organics on Titan’s surface is greater than currently estimated, abundant biomolecules are available from Titan’s rocky core, or surface biomolecules can be delivered to the ocean by a process other than impact. Our calculations suggest that despite Titan being the most organic-rich ocean world in the Solar System, this does not automatically imply an organic-rich and habitable ocean.

I feel like science reporting would actually be greatly improved if they simply had ChatGPT write the articles. The human "reporters" they have now are terrible.

Unless the GPT would be responsible for setting up the incentive structures, you’d end up with the same monotonous clickbait. The problem are people who give bad (science) reporting their attention and therefore money. PopSci journals are just answering the demand.

Non-scientists aren't going to be very good at telling bad science reporting from good. There's no way to fix that: you can't expect non-experts to be good judges of the experts.

With GPT, at least the writing quality would be better.

Perhaps, but recognizing clickbait should be within the grasp of everybody, even if they aren’t experts on the subject matter. Maybe that’s where an LLM would fit - evaluating the likelihood of an article offering something of substance.

The whole point of clickbait is to get non-discerning, ignorant laypeople to click on stuff and watch it. If it didn't work, it wouldn't be the problem it is now. You can complain that people aren't intelligent or educated enough on things far outside their domain of expertise (which may be something as mundane as flipping burgers, though to be fair making a great burger isn't that easy), but obviously your expectations do not line up with reality. The entire field of marketing, after all, is based completely on weaponizing and using human psychology against people in order to extract money from them. People have fundamental weaknesses based on their biology, so just complaining that people aren't overcoming their built-in limitations is futile, IMO.

Titan doesn't have an ocean floor; there's an intervening ice shelf.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon)#/media/File:Titan...

https://www.planetary.org/space-images/interiors-of-icy-bodi...

At one point Earth was largely molten, it's a safe bet that Titan was substantially warmer for awhile after it accreted in the first place. Then there's major impacts, which really stir things up.

There were plenty of opportunities for compounds in the rocky center of the moon to get mixed into its ocean.

We don't even know why Titan, alone among the solar system's moons, has a thick atmosphere. The idea that we could know how much carbon has been transferred to a subsurface ocean over the course of the moon's lifetime is pretty fanciful.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com