Interstellar Life?

Like any good SciFi nerd, I've often fantasized about life on other worlds. Some of the coolest moments in my reading history have come by about with Clarke's optimistic musings about life, be it aquatic life on Europa (a moon of Jupiter) in 2010, or jellyfish within Jupiter itself (in the fantastic novella "A Meeting with Medusa"). On the darker side, there's the incomparable Solaris by Stanislaw Lem. (Please don't think of the George Clooney movie. I beg of you.)

Anyways, recently I've read some murmurings of interesting chemical reactions on Titan that might show potential for life, but Stephen Andrew nips that tale in the bud. Money quote:

Exobiologists rightly point out that this new data is tentative at best, and planetary scientists note Titan is not earth in more ways than one. Not only is the surface locked in at almost 300 below zero Fahrenheit, Saturn's gorgeous rings of icy rubble and its battered moons imply Titan resides in a spectacularly violent planetary satellite system of marauding comets and space rocks. Even under ideal conditions, assuming the biotic precursors are there, a world that gets regularly pummeled by debris ranging from dozens of yards to dozens of miles in size might not be stable enough for complex biochemical processes to progress to anything we might recognize as living.

In short, the odds of life existing in our solar system are extremely low, and even if such life did exist, it would surely be in a form that we wouldn't recognize. But that doesn't mean that the fanboy within me won't continue to get excited whenever I read about interesting discoveries in space.