Slashdot Mirror
Titan's Tropical Weather
Hugh Pickens writes "Climate researchers Ray Pierrehumbert and Jonathan Mitchell at the University of Chicago say that Titan, the only moon in the solar system large enough to support an atmosphere, has many of the same weather features as Earth, but with completely different substances that work at temperatures that plunge down to minus 170 degrees Celsius. Pierrehumbert and Mitchell call Titan's climate 'tropical,' a climate that is warm to hot and wet year-round, because on Titan methane assumes the role of water and exists in enough abundance to condense into rain and form puddles on the surface. Titan's tropical nature means that scientists can observe the behavior of its clouds using theories they've developed to understand Earth's tropics. For example, Titan's atmosphere produces an updraft where surface winds converge to lift evaporated methane up to cooler temperatures and lower pressures, where much of it condenses and forms clouds, 'a well-known feature on Earth called an ITCZ, the inter-tropical convergence zone,' Mitchell says."
Har har, but no, it wouldn't. Methane is odorless. That's why gas companies have to include additives with natural gas, so leaks can be detected.
The Gish Bar Times - Blog covering Jupiter's moon Io
Starting with the definition of Life as a process, I wonder if on Titan are the chemicals that exist there capable of encoding information such as the chemicals in DNA here on Earth? Life as we know it works with water and carbon as it's base substrates but these are not the only substrates a process that encodes structures that reproduce is limited to.
Shh.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Stephen_Baxter)
enjoy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Valuable enough to offset the cost of transporting it from Titan? I really can't think of any substance that's that expensive. Well, maybe inkjet ink.