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

October Surprise! Take the poll!

[ArsenneLupin]

Which rabbit will Bush pull out of his hat in order to score an unlikely victory? Take the poll!

Re:Ethical questions

[Oliver Defacszio]

Oh, that's just so wrong. We are one kind of life that has no right to influence any others. What if the life that would have formed without our intervention had turned out to be better than ours in any number of ways? Believe it or not, humans are not necessarily the benchmark of life overall.

It's this type of thinking that has driven the "westernize everybody" philosophy throughout the last several hundred years. Before Europeans arrived in North America, the Indians had created complex political and social structures that worked as well or better than what was forced upon them by colonists. By "taming the savages" without stopping to actually look at how they interacted with each other and, more importantly, nature, colonists damned the Indians along with themselves to the wasteful, filthy existence that has reduced this beautiful planet to a dirty brown globe.

We, as stupid humans, destroy anything we touch, especially since the idiocy of economic politics has come to outweigh any other pursuit.

I can only hope that whatever might be developing upon Titan does so in time to fight us off.