It Does Not Rain Vodka on Titan
Artist Andy Gracie is expanding the outer reach of his futuristic explorations by attempting to breed a strain of fruit fly that could survive on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The first stage of his work, The Quest for Drosophila Titanus.
Gracie chose the fruit fly because it is one of the most thoroughly researched organisms in biology. Thus, it offers two advantages:
One - so many experiments have utilized this organism that it is possibly the most 'known' of any living creature.
Two - Humans share such a huge percentage of our genome with the fruit fly that these tiny organisms provide clues to human capabilities.
By stating, “the fruit flies become the potential astronauts…, they are our proxies” Gracie reveals the metaphoric content.This metaphor is only meaningful if the process it describes conforms to the rigorous methodology of laboratory science.
Gracie provides an amusing example, “… the rain on Titan is liquid methane but it is really hard to use liquid methane in a homemade lab environment so I used its chemical cousin, vodka, instead. I quite like the humour and metaphor behind using vodka but I’m not going to allow myself to do that next time as there is no point in testing fruit flies’ tolerance to vodka if I am breeding them for an environment where there is no vodka!”
Gracie explains how he recreated the conditions on Titan: “The air pressure on Titan is fifty percent higher than on Earth so I used a bicycle pump and pressure gauge to increase the pressure in the chamber to 21.2 bar. That was probably the most authentic recreation of the conditions. Titan is a frosty -190 degrees but it would have been pointless exposing flies to that temperature as they would all die. Instead the idea is to use freezer elements to take down the temperature a few degrees at a time and try to selectively breed for resistance to low temperatures. The radioactive element from a smoke alarm simulated the radiation found on the moon and a series of UV LEDs represented the harsh UV rays that rain down. There were a couple of constants – Titan has a deep orange sky so I used orange LEDs to recreate the spectral qualities. Low frequency radiowaves also seem to emanate from Titan, so I used audio from Jupiter and Saturn radio emissions to represent this.”