Word: saturne
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Many scientists think that life appeared on earth when the atmosphere, instead of being its present mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide, contained methena, ammonia and hydrogen. These ingredients, still to be found in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, slowly combined into larger and larger organic (carbon-containing) molecules, according to the hypothesis. At last one molecule, a complex protein, showed the ability to absorb other molecules and create replicas of itself out of their material. This "Adam molecule" was the first life; it could grow and reproduce itself...
...soft glow, the dead-black background of the murals seems to recede. Saturn with its rings stands out almost in three dimensions, clear and cold and quiet. The waving streamers of the aurora shimmer in a delicate pastel curtain. Flamelike solar prominences erupt from the surface of the sun with more clarity than in the original coronagraph pictures. Nothing seems to stand still: the murals vibrate with energy...
...moon would be a poor, dismal place to start a colony. It has no detectable atmosphere, certainly no water. Other planets are not much better. Mercury is fiercely hot on the side that it keeps toward the sun and fiercely cold on its sunless side. Outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune) are cold worlds with hostile atmospheres of methane and ammonia...
...atmosphere of a pre-life planet, Urey believes, is not like the earth's. It is highly "reducing": i.e., it contains large amounts of methane, ammonia, water vapor and similar compounds, but no free oxygen. The atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn are believed to be like this. As millions of years pass, the sun's light causes chemical reactions among the atmospheric gases. Larger molecules begin to form (e.g., aldehydes, amines, organic acids), and they rain down into the oceans below. There they react with one another and with dissolved salts. All possible chemical compounds are formed eventually...
...other proof is being sought by studying Titan (one of the satellites of Saturn), which is somewhat bigger than the moon. Titan is too cold for life as the earth knows it, but it has an atmosphere containing much methane. Chemist Urey hopes to find that sunlight is slowly making organic compounds out of this simple gas. If Titan were warmer and bigger the process might already have clothed it with oxygen-and life...