Yet again, Ars Technica shows that it's the only lay source worth reading on science topics. Thanks for the great article.
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Wait, why does this strike you as a reasonable article? To me it seems like blatant pandering to the audience.
Sure, lay people want there to be life out there in other places. But this inference doesn't actually hold any water as far as I can see. In the Bayesian formalism, the question to ask is: why do you have such a high prior probability to there being life on titan that mere methane emissions are enough to make that the maximum-a-posteriori hypothesis? Isn't it more plausible that there is some other non-life chemical process generating methane? Sure, the article gives a token acknowledgment that "the authors of the latter paper provide a variety of ways to account for the acetylene shortage that don't involve an organism"... but the title of the article is pretty clearly engineered to pander to the prejudices of a scientifically clueless audience.
Indeed. Either there is a relatively simple unknown process going on in the atmosphere of a planet we've never actually been to and have only the slimmest actual knowledge, or there's a fantastically complicated unknown process called "life". For better or for worse, the odds favor the relatively simple unknown process, until more data comes in.
(I say "relatively" because it probably isn't trivial or we'd have a good guess at it. But there's still quite a gulf between "we don't know what it is yet" and "it could only be life".)