Titan: Waiting for the Sun

LONDON: Scientists with the European Space Agency say the picture is getting clearer: Titan, Saturn's moon, is just like Earth -- only colder. Data from the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), which is orbiting around Earth but looking at Saturn, indicates that not only is water rather plentiful on Titan, it may have been brought there by comets -- long theorized to be the way water came to Earth, allowing life to begin.

"Titan could indeed be the Walt Disney of the solar system," says TIME Science correspondent Jeffrey Kluger, "a cryogenic version of Earth waiting to be revived." And its time is coming. Six billion years from now, as the Sun expands outward in Elvis-like death throes and Earth and Mars have long been incinerated, Titan will enter its spring. Its surface temperature will creep above freezing, and life may indeed sprout -- giving the new organisms about 500 million years to evolve and achieve space travel before they, too, are engulfed in flames.

Unfortunately, says Kluger, "that's long enough to evolve, but not nearly enough to get off Titan." Maybe we could drop off a probe, and leave instructions on the dashboard.