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