The dunes represent a massive inventory of organic materials, hundreds of times larger than all the coal, for example on the earth.  

 

You're not likely to be hauling this alien coal home, but the liquid hydrocarbons lapping on Titanian shorelines could be very useful for the return trip. 

 

There's more, let's call it fossil fuel, type energy. Then we actually have known reserves on the earth by factor, perhaps of ten or even a hundred.

 

That's a lot of gas in anyone's language. But something even more valuable might be found among the storehouse of organic molecules, the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

 

How do you go from such simple materials like carbon and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen? To something which asks questions about where it came from, that's a huge leap. And on Titan, there's a real good possibility that some of those really difficult to understand, intermediate stages actually occurred. It hasn't gone a completion as we don't think it has, although there are some people who think that if we go to one of Titan's lakes, we will discover Titanian bacteria that have figured out how to metabolize liquid methane.

 

Well, that's not a liquid that we and life forms on earth like. But maybe a life form on Titan that grew up with liquid methane would be perfectly comfortable there, and we look and shock at the thought that organisms will live in water.

 

'Oh my god. Those things on earth living in water, pity those poor earthlings. We live in liquid methane much more pleasant.'

 

Titan is the ultimate test for life in our solar system. If life exists under these alien conditions, then you might find it anywhere.