Sagan used this apparatus to demonstrate that tholins may also be present in comets and also on Titan. A number of years ago, Carol Stoker, a planetary scientist at NASA Ames Laboratory, showed that bacteria could grow on such material. However, Titan is almost certainly not the home of terrestrial life today. The temperature is way too cold. But its organic chemical cycles may constitute a natural laboratory for replaying some of the steps leading to the origin of life.
Titan is in some ways the closest analogue to the Earth's environment before life began.
This is one of the main reasons for sending the Huygens Probe to Titan. The examination of comets, as in ESA's Giotto and Rosetta missions, reveals quite complicated carbon molecules available in cosmic space. Delivery by comets is thought to be one of the major mechanisms for seeding the primordial Earth both with the building blocks of life, but also with water. By identifying the compounds that are synthesized on Titan, the Huygens Probe may go along way to helping to provide answers, or lead to better defined questions, for solving the origin of life on Earth. But scientists got a glimpse of what the moon's surface may look like only a few years ago.