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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."'"
I titled this article "The Sierras of Titan" as a pun for Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s early sci-fi novel 'The Sirens of Titan." The book means a lot to me so I heavily recommend it but before you mod me offtopic, let me explain why Vonnegut picked Titan, of all the mass in the galaxy.
There have been experiments on the abundant chemicals on Titan done by astronautical & nuclear engineer Robert Zubrin who has been quite influential in the proliferation of humans to other pieces of mass ASAP.
While you may be able to argue that these experiments were too early or had inherent flaws within them, they were done to try to prove that a "chemical revolution" could occur on Titan similar to what we theorize happened on earth early on. I haven't heard many people address the fact that it could have taken billion of years to progress on earth but I am quite interested to see if there is a way to engineer bacteria to break methane down into oxygen or some other gas that we could potentially exploit to make oxygen.
As you may have seen in other media, Titan is often used because of these experiments. It's a bit of a romantic dream but these mountains are just a little more to add to the possibility.
Oh, I also forgot to include a link to the Cassini-Huygens mission which has images, videos, wallpapers and all that jazz of Titan and its mountains.
My work here is dung.
I can only imagine my son kicking the back of my chair for 6 years on the flight there....
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail
...it's warmer than mid-winter Minnesota then?
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
... 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?
Send the Canadians to Colonize. I used to live in Northern Canada and walked to school in -30C weather with a -40C windchill --uphill and in the dark! Titan should be a cake-walk. Just make sure to send lots of beer and women to uhhhh compensate.
The cold isn't the only thing that would-be colonists would be facing, right? Don't the gas giants have some helacious radiation belts? I seem to recall that Titan is sitting right in the middle of one, too. Perhaps a pro can chime in on that. Sure, we could warm up a nice little ice cave and whatnot, but would all that ice also be a worthy shield against the EM nastiness?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Titan is not a good place to colonize because it is cold.... cold, cold, cold. Not only would you have to keep your colony on Xanadu warm from the cold, but you'd have to keep your warmth in or you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice). When Huygens landed it evaporated a cloud of frozen methane just from its measly heat... a whole colony would probably touch off a cryovolcano eruption.
Titan isn't a good place to live, but it is an awesome place to explore. Imagine a hot air balloon flying over these mountains and the lakes and rivers and the giant sand dune seas. Without UV from the sun to degrade the balloon's envelope and with plutonium to heat up the air inside such a balloon could last pretty much forever.... or at least until the plutonium is used up.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
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.Right, there are mountains...ice mountains, not rock. I don't see what this "similarity" does for humans.
Adventures in Shaanxi
I was going to suggest that we simply move Titan closer to the sun...you know...with a rocket or something
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Well If there is one thing humans can do, it's heat up a planet!
Hey, global warming is what we're good at people. Lets attach a big heat tube from the earth to Titan.
It is a lot warmer in Antarctica and the easy-to-reach place has plenty of oxygen and water. If we really are running out of room, the continent should be colonized first...
Heck, if the "Global Warming" fear-mongering is even partially true, the continent will only become better — and it already is much better than any extra-terrestrial body.
That no settlements (as in "villages", not science labs) exist even on this much more habitable place is just a sign, how far off space colonization really is... I think, some South America's country(ies) tried to pay people to live there (just to claim territory, pretty much), but it still failed...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Except Europa
We need all the tubes we've got to build the internets out of...
Whenever someone brings up colonizing another planet, I can't help but wonder "why?" Yes, there is the novelty factor of being able to do it. But how practical is it? What is the objective? Would we do it to preserve the species? From what? An asteriod hitting Earth and turning it into a wasteland? Could Earth possibly be any worse than Titan... or even Mars... in that case?
Think about it. What is the best Earth alternative we could realistically hope to find?
Want to colonize "Earth in Deep Freeze?" Antarctica isn't too far away. If nothing else, it has plenty of water and even oil. And if Global Warming gets as bad as some fear it might, Antarctica might not end up being such a bad place! Or what about colonizing the bottom on the ocean? Certainly that would be easier than traveling half way across the solar system... or farther.
Seems to me that Earth would have to be all but vaporized for it to be much worse than any place you could find in outer space.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
In other news, they're troubleshooting a flaky solar panel up on the space station: Live status
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
-178c temperatures and highly poisonous hydrogen cyanide gas...I'd be surprised if there were any people left on earth once we figure out how to fly them onto to this thing!
Has anyone started sellings plots of Titan moon land yet?
While I find this interesting, it is nothing new to see mountains on planetary objects besides Earth. The thing I find most interesting is the organic compounds that have been found/thought to be on Titan. It makes a very interesting spot to create a waystation in the distand future. Titan, and well as Io and Europia are very interesting moons that we should explore more. But I doubt the American public is very willing to fund more in depth explorations of these places... I can only hope. Although, I wonder what the new probe on its way to Pluto will find.
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
"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."
That's a rather meaningless (or outright WRONG) statement.
Mars: tectonically dead or nearly so. Dust storms but no real analogue to Earthly seas, precipitation, or geological processes. Ability to colonize? Relatively easy.
Titan: mountains, clouds, precipitation, "seas", etc. Ability to colonize? Extremely difficult.
Similarity to Earthly processes is meaningless. There are plenty of Earthly processes that make things HARDER, not easier.
-Styopa
Isn't that a little like saying the bodies in the morgue are better friends than anyone else I know ?
They're friendly, they'll sit there and listen to me for hours, they're just a little cold on the surface.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Either Titan gets moved or you make a local energy source. Terraforming the Moon is probably as easy.
Nahh, simply push that gas giant over the edge so she ignites into a second small star in the solar system.
quite easy, just start flinging crap into it until the mass get's high enough to start up the furnace.
Sheesh, you science types have to make everything so difficult.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
'"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
..The Tetons of Titan!
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
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.