Saturday, the Telegraph published an article deceivingly titled, "Titan: NASA scientists discover evidence 'that alien life exists on Saturn's moon'" Sounds pretty cool, right?

Wrong. In more ways than one. It's not cool to over-sensationalize your headline to the point that it comes close to being flat-out-wrong. So-called alien life was no more discovered on Titan than we've discovered life on Mars (which is to say--it hasn't.) Come on, Telegraph. You can do better.

Chris McKay at NASA Ames was the first to write an article that made sense of this mess: in it, he details results of the Cassini mission to which the Telegraph story in question refers. Evidently, acetylene and hydrogen flux on the surface of Titan + a reduced quantity of ethane = a prescription for methane-based lifeforms written by McKay and Heather Smith 5 years ago. Now here's the important part...everybody listening?

This is a still a long way from "evidence of life". However, it is extremely interesting.

In Chris McKay's plain English. Let's compare it to the Telegraph's first line..

Researchers at the space agency believe they have discovered vital clues that appeared to indicate that primitive aliens could be living on the moon.

Wow.

I caught wind of the Telegraph's bad journalism--which seems to have influenced later pieces at Huffington Post and Daily Mail--from Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy, who covers the topic well, as usual, in his blog post "Has life on Titan been discovered? No."

"Alien life exists" is an inexcusable snafu. But, frankly, it's not hard to see why we might get ahead of ourselves here: Titan has a lot of potential, in the 'alien life department.

Titan is an incredibly massive rock, for a moon, with lakes of liquid hydrocarbons which, since 2004 it has been theorized, might be able to act like water--as a warm fuzzy place for organic chemistry. Water was essential in transforming Earth into the sea of complex molecules that led to higher lifeforms.

It's very possible living organisms on Titan could be metabolizing hydrogen, ethane, and acetylene.

But, let's actually find out before we say so.