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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."
Fortunately for most of us, the clock on our desktops are the only way we're keeping track of time. (It's always dark in the basement you know)
IMHO, Planetary time (or moon time, etc) is the least of our concerns when considering a habitable planet.
I realize it's probably a joke, but we've got frozen methane hydrate, underwater, here on Earth. There was one quote that said that if the moon had gold bricks for the taking it would still be a major loss to collect them. At Titan? Forget it.
Something about that comment being modded "insightful" vs "funny" scares me.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Instead of curing us with prayer, doctors kill our precious children by refusing to prescribe antibiotics.
Speaking as a doctor I would appreciate if you could provide proof of this claim (other than the ramblings of a lunatic). Considering the continuing increased life expectancy of humans in the developed world, and the decreased infant mortality rates prevalent over the past and this century, I'd say that medical science has a fair grasp of what it's doing. Although it's hard to pair statistics to an individual person, as tools for determining trends in populations they are pretty darned useful and truthful.
Your comment is a perfect example of why YOU are not allowed to prescribe antibiotics.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
No its not. In all places except the equator the length of sunlight changes slightly every day. The arctic and antarctic circles describe the latitudes at which the sun actually doesn't set one day per year.
If you go north of the arctic circle (or south of the antarctic circle) the effect gets greater and greater. This doesn't make them uninhabitable areas but it does mean that you can have weeks without a sunset (or a sunrise in the winter). A good example is Tromsø in north Norway. Its a fairly significant place, with a population of 60,000+ and a university. Yet they get a month of sunshine (and the same of darkness) every year - see http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/tromso.html. And Tromsø isn't even all that far north.
Hell, even where i am (a couple of hundred km short of the arctic circle) it doesn't really get dark during the summer. The sun "sets", but it only just dips below the horizon and so the twilight is extremely bright. Indeed, it can be brighter at 1am on a clear night than at midday with heavy clouds.