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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.
...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
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.
Well If there is one thing humans can do, it's heat up a planet!
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...
"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
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.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?