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."'"

Comments

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[eldavojohn]

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.

So...

[gt_mattex]

...it's warmer than mid-winter Minnesota then?

Water Ice

[Ford Prefect]

... 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...

Cold you say? Why thats nothing

[arcite]

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.

Re:Cold you say? Why thats nothing

[StupidMBA]

...--uphill and in the dark!

Big deal! You only had to that one way. Try doing that going uphill both ways!

Not a good place to colonize

[EccentricAnomaly]

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.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[b0s0z0ku]

you would melt through the surface (which is 'rocks' made up of water ice).

Two possible solutions:

(1) restrict the inside of the colony to 0C. Not unthinkable - keep in mind that the native peoples of the Arctic used to live in ice houses. Place a nuclear reactor on stilts on top of the ice layer and transmit power to the colony using electricity or even insulated steam piping.

(2) how deep is the ice layer? Melt through and place the colony either in a pit or at the bottom of a columnar artificial lake with an access tunnel to the surface.

-b.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[Rei]

0C isn't enough. There's large amounts of other frozen hydrocarbons in the soil as well.

The Earth analog -- a simpler challenge, but a challenge nonetheless -- is permafrost. If you build a house on the ground in many parts of Alaska, your foundation will crack as you slowly melt the permafrost beneath you. One solution is to build the house on stilts to leave an airspace beneath you. A more extreme option is used by the trans-alaska pipeline, which has heated fluids moving through it. Parts of the pipine are supported by columns that contain ammonia and extend into the permafrost. In the summer, the permafrost loses heat as usual, but in the winter, they get a cycle of ammonia boiling off in the permafrost, rising, cooling on the radiators, and descending to chill the permafrost down. They basically store up their summer heat during the winter.

Oh, and the ice on Titan is extremely deep. Much of the planet, actually.

Re:Not a good place to colonize

[Rei]

I saw a review of proposed methods to explore Titan. They considered balloons (not hot air -- helium. Keeping air hot would use too much energy), blimps, helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, and non-fixed wing aircraft. Power was assumed to be from an RTG (radiothermal generator). Balloons were cheapest, but gave you no control over your route. Blimps were next cheapest and gave you route control, but were still very slow. Helicopters gave you fast movement, and were seen as an attractive propsect. They cannot stay aloft all the time, but simply fly for a few hours, land, and study the surface/communicate with Earth while the RTGs recharge their flight batteries. Fixed-wing aircraft were argued against because they would be subject to the same constraints, but couldn't land safely. Non-fixed wing aircraft were seen as the best, although most expensive, option. They can land safely for recharging like a helicopter, but can move at much higher speeds, thus allowing the probe to cover more ground.

One thing noted for all landings was that they would essentially have to be autonomous. You don't have the luxury of having a human review landing sites because the latency is too long for the vehicle to wait for you to tell it where to go. So, it will involve software that picks terrain features that look "interesting". Humans can tell it which way to go when it leaves next, and modify its priorities for what it views as "interesting", but the actual choice will be up to the craft.

I can't wait to see a mission like this get underway. :)

Resembles Earth? No way!

[khallow]

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.

Heating

[coldtone]

Well If there is one thing humans can do, it's heat up a planet!

Antarctica is a lot warmer

[mi]

But the surface is very cold; it's about minus 178C.

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...

No radiaiton at Saturn

[EccentricAnomaly]

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.

All these worlds are yours...

[thedaven]

Except Europa

Re:All these worlds are yours...

[boldtbanan]

Huh? Sorry, I'm not into Pokemon.

or Arthur C. Clarke apparently.

not gonna work

[blurker]

We need all the tubes we've got to build the internets out of...

Sign me up!

[PingSpike]

-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?

Um....wha?

[argStyopa]

"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.