The newspaper describes Titan, recently explored by the Saturn probe Huygens, as a place “amazingly like our own planet, Earth”. Such a bold statement immediately draws us in. (a disclaimer expands: “like the earth was 4 billion years ago that is…” A long time. The next statement predicts earthlike lakes and rivers. (filled with liquid methane chilled to -293 degrees). The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and poison gas. Hardly earthlike at all.

The actual message: The science community is excited because this is the first planetoid that we’ve explored that is not a dead lifeless rock (such as our own moon) but a dynamic evolving developing place.

But, in order to get ordinary folk stimulated into thinking, the NASA PR machine has to speculate about extraterrestrial beings or make comparisons to things that we are familiar and can interpret: lakes and streams, places to campout or go fishing maybe.