Cassini Shatters Titan Theories

Dozix007 writes "The Herald reports: Cassini pierced the haze around Titan, Saturn's biggest moon, revealing details that have shattered theories about its composition. It has atmosphere and soil similar to primordial Earth and may contain the building blocks of life. Scientists believed bright patches on its surface seen earlier were pure water ice. But the first infrared images taken by Cassini revealed water ice as dark patches because it is mixed with material that may be organic, raining on to the surface."

Comments

Re:Ethical questions

[barakn]

So you're hoping that there's some magical heat source there, huh? I hate to break it to you, but that's not likely. Titan is composed of lighter elements, and so probably doesn't have much of the radioactive isotopes that have kept the Earth's interior warm for so long. Titan is much smaller than Earth and was born much further away from the Sun, so it has likely lost much of what little heat it had. Titan's revolution period is fairly well locked to the rotation period so tidal bulges will remain relatively stationary. Also, Titan is twice as far from Saturn as Europa is from Jupiter (tidal force is proportional to the inverse cube of the distance), Saturn is half the mass of Jupiter, and Saturn doesn't have any other moons anywhere as large. Thus it doesn't seem likely that there's any tidal heating going on. Feel free to post an alternative heat source. I could always use a good laugh.

money for education is useless

[r00t]

You'd be tossing money down a hole. Schools have
a truly amazing ability to absorb money without
improving education.

If you want to fix your schools, you need to fight
the teacher's union. Improvement-based pay would
help greatly: students that are above-average in
a class should cause the previous year's teacher
to get a bonus. (this being fair to poor areas)
You need to fight the use of computers to babysit
the students. You need to fight the teaching of
junk (Powerpoint usage, gay awareness, French...)
that displaces important stuff (Calculus, Statistics,
Chemistry, Physics, Economics, Business Law...).
You need to grant teachers to right to effectively
discipline their students. (Texas allows spanking)
Reduce the length of a school day so that students
can get more sleep -- again, by eliminating junk.
Reduce classroom noise from air conditioning and
echoes. (hint: hard 90-degree walls are bad)
Get the bullies out of the regular schools by
sending the worst 30% to reform school, starting
right in the 1st grade.

While some of this may require money, note that
simply adding money to the existing system will
not lead to any of this. The laws must change.