Saturn's moon Titan could harbor life, but only a tiny amount

> The researchers specifically focused on one organic molecule, glycine, the simplest of all known amino acids.

This is such a goofy assumption. That any life on Titan would use the exact same amino acids as earth-based life. If you have no clue whether something is possible, sometimes it's better to predict nothing at all.

It’s not goofy. We find these amino acids in meteorites and it is clear that they are widespread in space. Glycine being the simplest is probably the most common and most likely to be incorporated by life. It is a good proxy for an estimate.

> This is such a goofy assumption. That any life on Titan would use the exact same amino acids as earth-based life.

I might be wrong, but I think they use this assumption because they KNOW life has already formed this way, it would be goofy to assume methods that we haven't witnessed right ?

That's still a bit goofy; it's essentially the same thing as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult phenomenon.

And if they found loads of this amino acid, would you say the same thing? Science isn't about getting the best answers, it's about getting accurate answers. Now that we know all about this amino acid in relation to titan, we can follow the rabbit hole to find sources of it on Titan or we can decide to look for alternatives.

Maybe I missed the mark here but is it not similar to saying "it seems goofy to look on planets with water just because that's what life required on earth"?

I'm not in any way educated on these things but are these not basic building blocks kind of things?

We know the basic building blocks for Earth life.

We currently have zero evidence for any life off the planet, water/carbon-based or otherwise. It would likely be a mistake to assume that we're the only possible setup. Maybe life spreads primarily and very slowly in Oort clouds, and we're a bit of an abberation.

Even here on Earth, we've been surprised to find life in boiling water and miles underground.

The search for water in outer space, and other life-sustaining elements, has ulterior motives.

I believe that the search for alien life is subordinate to the search for things that will sustain human life and/or industry, as we expand further outwards.

Most scientists and engineers don’t actually expect to encounter significant alien life in our solar system, and it’s merely a meme they use to tease middle-schoolers, Senators, CEOs, and naïve newspaper readers. Searching and discovering life forms would be really really fraught with terror and doom, if we indeed expected to find it when we looked.

Any natural resource that exists on a moon of Jupiter, or of Saturn or in the Asteroid Belt, and if we can exploit it and extract it and turn it into something useful, for example refueling, or life support, or repairing existing vehicles en route, or simply dragging raw materials back down the gravity well to Earth, then that is a natural resource we’ll want to investigate as we expand. Dyson spheres won’t be built in a day, but we’ll need a good start on the resource extractions real soon now.

This is the quiet part they won’t say out loud, because it’s much more exciting and non-threatening to say we’re looking for alien life forms rather than sustaining our own self-interest. But it’s all about self-interest when it comes to humans.