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The Sierras of Titan
eldavojohn writes "Cassini has detected the tallest mountains on Titan, a large moon of Saturn. More importantly, clouds have also been detected in Titan's atmosphere. Why is this news important? Well, as scientists scan the skies for the easiest piece of mass to colonize, things that resemble Earth's geology & atmosphere are going to require the least effort & resources. These mountains mean that Titan may have tectonic plate movement similar in some ways to earth's. From the article, '"You can think of Titan as the Earth in deep freeze," said Dr Rosaly Lopes, Cassini radar team member at the US space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "It has a lot of the geological processes that Earth has. In fact, it is more Earth-like than anywhere else in the Solar System. But the surface is very cold; it's about minus 178C."'"
... But Titan's crust is made out of water ice. If you were to take it out of the deep-freeze and bring it to a comfortable, Earth-like temperature - it would melt.
While surface features may be analogous to those found here on Earth, they're made out of entirely different things...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Why is this news important? Well, as scientists scan the skies for the easiest piece of mass to colonize, things that resemble Earth's geology & atmosphere are going to require the least effort & resources.
Titan's atmosphere and general environment doesn't resemble Earth in the least. Hence, this sentence makes no sense. We've already found the few pieces places that are easiest to terraform, namely Mars, Venus, and perhaps Europa. Anything in orbit around Saturn won't qualify as "easiest", just because of temperature and energy flux from the Sun. You would need to find a long term energy source to heat the moon up to temperatures at which liquid water exists and and to enable photosynthesis . Either Titan gets moved or you make a local energy source. Terraforming the Moon is probably as easy.
Also, implied is confusion between colonization and terraforming. People can settle Titan, but they probably aren't going to make it Earth-like. In which case, any plate techtonics and geological activity may be very undesirable.Saturn's rings effectively neutralize most radiation at Saturn... it's not much of a hazard at all. What little radiation there is wouldn't get through Titan's atmosphere anyway.
The only two planets with substantial radiation belts are Jupiter and Earth (i.e. the Van Allen belts). At Jupiter Io and Europa are in the belts, Callisto is too far out, and Ganymede has its own magnetic field that would protect spacecraft near it from the radiation.
BTW, the sort of radiation in these belts are electrons and energetic ions of regular stuff like Hydrogen and Oxygen. Not neutrons.... which makes it a little easier to protect against.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
'"One could call them Titan's Sierras," the University of Arizona-Tucson researcher [ET explorer Bob Brown] added.'
I get the Vonnegut pun in "The Sierras of Titan". But none of "the" Sierras are even the tallest in the US (or North America). Alaska's Mt McKinley is taller. While Everest (and over 100 others) in the Himalayas are taller than any in the Andes from their somewhat arbitrary base, the equatorial Andes start at the 26mi "high" equatorial bulge.
So Aconcagua, the tallest of the Andes, is the farthest peak jutting into space. Aconcagua rises the highest from the Marianas Trench, the lowest point in the Earth's crust, atop the equatorial bulge. Thus it is the closest to our solar neighbor (at least half the time, during its rotation with the Earth, anyway).
One might better call them "los Andes de Titan", or whatever that translates to in the whistle/crackle language spoken on Titan.
--
make install -not war
Because we want to live in a fantasy world. Look, we've done Western, we've done modern, we've done World War II. Now all we have left is Fantasy or Science Fiction. While we may be far from faster than light travel, or building our own gravity in space ships, we are certainly more likely to live out the Science Fiction life style than Fantasy. We have no elves, trolls, orc, hobbits, or dragons (WHERE ARE ALL THE DRAGONS?!). So colonizing the moon will get us oh so closer to Cat-Women of the Moon.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!
No metals would work, nor even concrete. So what were you suggesting, or hadn't you thought it through?
Let's say carbon steel, with a thermal conductivity of 54 watts per meter-kelvin. Imagine a carbon steel stilt, 10 cm in radius (20 cm diameter), and 5 meters tall. In reality, a stilt would probably be hollow or I-beam shaped (a solid bar 20 cm across is way overkill), so this calculation OVERESTIMATES the conducted power. Assume the temperature difference between the top and bottom of the stilt is 200 kelvins (94 K for surface of Titan, ~300 K for room temperature). Plug it in:
k = P*H/(A*DT) where P is the conducted power, H is the height, DT is the temperature difference, A is cross sectional area of the stilt. Solve for the conducted power:
P = k*A*DT/H. We have values k=54 W/m*K, A=2*Pi*0.1^2 meters, DT=200 kelvins, H=5 meters. What do we get? Conducted power is 135 watts. On this damn stilt only 135 watts will leak out of the bottom. So hey, let's calculate power density using a few other reasonable values.
Assume the stilt is buried 1 meter beneath the surface. So we have a total buried surface area of 1 meter * 2*pi*0.1 meters = 0.63 square meters, or 6300 square centimeters. So the power density is only 135 watts / 6300 cm^2 = ONLY 21.4 milliwatts per square centimeter.
Now, this is all very encouraging already, but hey! Why not do the proper engineering thing and actually INSULATE the stilts at the points where they connect to the living structure. Now the heat transfer to the ground we have to worry about will be FAR, FAR less than even a wimpy 21.4 milliwatts per cm^2.
Oh and hey! We've forgotten about the heat which is lost when it radiates away from the stilt. This calculation doesn't even ATTEMPT to figure that in. And that effect would serve to even FURTHER reduce the thermal power being conducted to the ground.
Basically, you have no idea what the hell you're speculating on.