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Comment by rgbrenner | Hacker News Reader

The entire article is based on this sentence

"Thus, life on Titan could involve huge (by Earth standards) and very slowly metabolizing cells, in which case biomass densities would be higher than calculated above."

which the author interprets as

"a life form in our solar system that's not a puny, dumb little thing, but a huge dumb thing. Like dog-sized. Or maybe Volkswagen-sized."

I'm sorry.. but a "huge by (earth standards) cell" doesn't mean dog sized. It means a few times an earth sized cell. Otherwise, why compare it to a cell at all?

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Yeah with "giant" and "lurking" I was hoping for hints of a planet-sized creature existing in dark matter or some interdimensional plane or extreme wavelength or something. Title is a bit link-baity.

it hadn't even crossed my mind that it would be something that big... but now that you say that, I wish that it had been some gigantic solar-system sized being... now I am totally let down- damn you Robert Krulwhich... damn you.

same here. I was thinking that it might be a "lurking" magic bit in all particles that are working together to form a super-super intelligent...

I agree. I was thinking the exact same thing.

This is exactly what I thought as well. An interesting twist is to think whether we'd consider our entire universe to be alive - perhaps like an egg with an embryo in it. There you go, you have the "hugest" thing possible :)

> but a "huge by (earth standards) cell" doesn't mean dog sized.

Well, the smallest dog breeds have a mass on the same order as the largest cells on earth, so, yeah, "dog sized" is a pretty good standard for a "huge (by earth standards)" cell.

Such a large cell on earth is an 'outlier', not a 'standard'.

> Such a large cell on earth is an 'outlier'

Indeed, specifically a huge one. Making it huge, by earth standards.

See how that works?

Because it is a single cell. Also, apparently a single cell on earth can get up to 2 inches in diameter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valonia_ventricosa

If you're being picky please THINK before blurting. It says life could involve CELLS. Which is plural. Which points towards multi-cellular and NOT single-cellular organisms. Also look at definitions of cell. All of which imply cell as being a smaller unit of a LARGER whole. As for your utterly stupid question of why compare it to a cell: BECAUSE they are the basic units of which larger life forms are generally composed.

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