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Radio Wave on Saturn's Moon Hints at Hidden Ocean
SleepyHappyDoc writes "The European Space Agency has announced that a mysterious radio wave may indicate the existence of a hidden ocean underneath the surface of Titan. The Cassini-Huygens spaceprobe, which entered Titan's atmosphere over two years ago, collected evidence and information which has led to this potential discovery. This technology may lead to entirely new ways of finding out information about other planets."
...Beach Boys tunes
Table-ized A.I.
"Bugs Bunny to Earth..Bugs Bunny to Earth...." "GET ME OUTTA HEEEEEEEEERE!!"
Yeah, my karma sucks....but so do the mods.
People have suspected this before, since the core is hot, and there is frozen methane on the surface, isn't it obvious there should be a liquids in the middle layer?
Question is, is there underground life? If so what the heck does it look like and what does it do?
I hope the Huygens probe hasn't contaminated the environment my spreading earth bacteria.
I thought Titan was a MOON (or a "satellite")
We've got a thing that's called: Radar Love
We've got a wave in the air...
Radar Love...
(With apologies to the esteemed Golden Earring, and to the moderators whose fingers may be sprained modding down yet another inane, content-free comment.)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
And there's no point in reading TFA in order to try to remove any of the mystery. Frequency? Duration? Periodicity/repeatability? Any characteristics whatsoever? Not a single useful property is mentioned in the article. In fact, apparently it's not even certain that it's not an artifact.
Actually, the whole thing is a rather weird: not only do they not give any details whatsoever, but I find it difficult to countenance that a scientist would talk about a "radio wave" rather than a "signal" or "emission" in this context. Speaking from my background as a co-investigator on the Planetary Radio Astronomy experiment on Voyager, the word "wave" is usually reserved for theoretical treatments in published papers.
Anyway, I guess we just have to wait for the upcoming issue of "Planetary and Space Science" to see what the article is really talking about.
Ok. We have many extra-solar planets. We've got water on mars. We've got an ocean on titan. We've got massive amounts of funding on SETI. We had that SETI at home running for years... Despite that now-pretty-much-debunked mars metorite... When is that we will find believable proof of extraterra life? I'm convinced life has to be out there. When we will find it? I doubt we will find it anytime soon. We aren't spending enough money and we aren't capable of leaving this island world of ours. Intelligent life that we can communicate with or interact with in a meaningful? Highly unlikely. The universe is just too damn big and the chances of intelligence development too small. We may have found an ocean on titan: I really wish the task of finding extraterresterial life wasn't so minimal.
>On Earth, radio waves occur naturally during lightning strikes, which cause electrons in the atmosphere to oscillate and release the waves. These radio waves bounce back and forth between the Earth's surface and its ionosphere, the high-up region of the atmosphere filled with electrically-charged particles.
I do this myself on earth a lot. It's lot of fun to experiment.
In the past month, I was able to bounce a radio wave of approximately 20 meters to 40 meters in length from California to Hawaii, Mexico, Australia, the Bering Sea, Pacific Islands, Vladivostok, Khabarosk (Russia 20km from Chinese border, where they had the chemical spill a couple of years ago), and South Africa.
Some of this was with off-on keying of an RF carrier, and some with digital-signal processing software running on Linux (both extremely weak signal modes originally designed for bouncing signals off the Moon, and more conversational modes.)
"The results would also be unusual because Titan's dusty surface makes a poor reflector of radio waves"
A potential problem, especially if they were scanning the lower frequencies, is the probable contamination by Saturn's scattered light
[ No prescription needed ]
No, not *that* genesis (but I made you look, didn't I). The answer to the question, "why haven't we found life yet" really lies in the fact that what actually gets life going is still quite a mystery. As you know, scientists can simulate the conditions of early Earth and they can produce amino acids, but they can't produce DNA or simple cellular life.
My point is, we may still be missing something important and fundamental. That's what makes science so interesting. There is always something else to discover.
In Dawkins' book, The Blind Watchmaker, he makes reference to the work of another biologist whose name escapes me at the moment. But that guy's theory is that silicate crystals in soft clay are the necessary to get early life going. The theory goes like this: imagine a river with clay at the bottom. The clay forms microscopic crystals, which sometimes catch and constrain amino acids and other building blocks, like stuff getting stuck in the strainer in your sink.
As the crystals grow, they sometimes "empty the strainer" basically spitting out these now larger strands of amino acids. The strands and structures flow further down the river and inevitably get stuck in another crystal. There they grow larger and eventually get spit out. The process repeats all the way down the river.
At the mouth of the river, you've got billions of different pre-biotic experiments washing out into the sea. Just by chance, one of those experiments is able to reproduce itself. Life is unstoppable at that point.
So what I'm getting at is this: we keep finding *some* of the building blocks, but we aren't finding them arranged the correct way. A static sea (maybe even with hydrothermal vents) on Titan or Europa or Mars may be able to support current Earth life, but it may not be able to spark that all-important genesis event.
On the other hand, early Mars may have been perfect for this.
I'm thinking black monolith.
Please, check out Titan all you want. Just don't freaking land on Europa.