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Titan's Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth
jcgam69 writes "Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes."
I hear Halliburton has already won the tender.
"A week in the lab saves an hour in the library"
I think we chose the wrong planet for a mission. We need to go to Saturn..
Nobody tell George W Bush about this or we'll be spending a fortune on a space invasion...
are some vast hydrocarbon-propelled rockets to bring a big load of it back here in 10 years or so.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Oh great, so now theres no reason for Vincent to go there. Stop ruining fiction, reality!
Ice Cream has no bones.
The TV show "Jed Clampett, astronaut," appears.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Let's totally shoot at with roman candles!
Hrm... It would be interesting if the cost of harvesting it outweighted the investment to build the infostructure to bring it back to our planet.
Since he likes playing dress-up maybe W should go on a "fact finding" mission to Titan.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest. --Denis Diderot
1. Titan found to have WMDs
2. GW Bush orders the militarization of NASA
3. "Mission Accomplished" announced before probes with frickin' laser beams get past the orbit of Mars
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
if all our stuff supposedly came from dead dinosaurs, what does this mean?
Aren't the hydrocarbons on earth (oil, coal, etc) the remains of LIFE? They've always been called 'fossil fuels.' We're burning dinosaurs.
So...where did these big extra-terrestrial reserves come from?
(Simple answer would be, "That's not the only way hydro-carbons form" but I've never heard that mentioned before.)
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
And there were cities paved with gold in the Americas.
I'm pretty sure the Titans are jealous of Earth's vast water reserves, which (as they say) "droppeth as the gentle dew from Heaven, Upon the place beneath".
By the time the cost of technology required to go to Titan falls to a reasonable level, we should have already passed the need to use hydrocarbons as our main source of energy.
tree huggers will march on the white house demanding the save titan from the evil corporations and their explotation of a defensless moon.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
A mission out to Titan to collect a load of hydrocarbons would cost far more energy than the load would be worth. We'd be much better off investing in an orbital solar power station.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
You still insist on calling hydro-carbons "fossil-fuels".
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
Yet.
"That's no moon. It's a gas station!"
Oil in space, never saw that coming. I suppose if we do find life on Titan, it will have to be divided into two armed camps, warring over tribal superstitions no educated sentient should believe in.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I was just about to write something about suddenly finding a need to invade Titan because of their despotic leader... but you beat me to the punch!
'Cause, you know, this is an original joke that, eh, we've never seen before around these parts....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
But we don't want hydrocarbons; we want energy. Do you plan to ship oxygen to Titan? Or bring the stuff here and put even more carbon in our atmosphere?
If you're searching the solar system for cheap energy, Mercury is your spot. We should do all our heavy industry, including our supercomputing, in factories buried under the surface or Mercury. Forget sending men to Mars; that's another "Mission Accomplished"-style photo op.
Assuming there is a way to get to the Hydrocarbons, wouldn't burning it on Earth still be idiotic given the effect of the Greenhouse gases it would produce?
If I can do it, its probably not worth doing... probably
If this holds true after more analysis, I think that moon just became are next target. After all, all we really need to establish a real space age is an obvious market opportunity.
This one, if capitalized on, would be one that could only lead to hurting the Earth.
Going a little off-topic sci-fi here, I'd like to see if we could take the excess CO2 from Earth and put it on Mars to develop a thicker atmosphere.
Chemical Energy Bonanza: Remote sensors indicate that inner planet "Earth" has hundreds of times more oxygen gas than all known reserves here on Titan.
I'm not sure what point that has. At the rate we're going we'll have the technology to harvest that energy roughly the same time we....
Ok... we'll have like 9 other solutions before then. I'm sure there are all sorts of energy rich resources out there in our solar backyard. We're not likely to get a reliable way to harvest them prior to finding alternates in our australian (pick your favorite earth bound location here!!) backyard.
Not saying we shouldn't be thinking about it. But it's not exactly anything worth writing home about at this point.
yvan eht nioj
but do they have a leader (and former compliece) to hunt down and hang? And are there any relics from the time that place was the cradle of civilization to rob from the museums and sell at the grey market? It will take at least one "yes" to form a coalition of the willing
605413? Yes, it's a prime.
mmm...the land of choco...er, uh, hydrocarbons... /homer
i've had just about enough of your vassar bashing.
So how long until Exxon start hauling this stuff back here? And how long after that until one of their drunk skippers crashes a billion or so tons of liquid hydrocarbons into Alaska? NB: I find it hilarious that the ad running alongside this article in my browser is from Chevron :-D
"Life's a reach, and then you Gybe..."
E.T = Extra-Terrorist
"Don't let fools fool you. They are the clever ones."
The *REAL* reason for space exploration. Never mind the bragging rights for planting silly flags on the moon, or trying to figure out how the planets were formed, or searching for extraterrestrial signs of life... NO, goddamnit, we need to go to space to save the big auto industry.
On a lighter note, DeBeers has already filed mineral rights claims on all non-gaseous planets. Exxon's space programs is getting ready to launch the 'FuckChavez' space probe, and Saturn is gearing up the ad machine while Nissan's marketing department is trying to get a new space-age logo for their truck line. Russia is preparing to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA's Titan oil fields to protect earth based business interests and CNN is quoting Rudy G as saying "If we had had that on 9/11, the terrorists would never have attacked MY New York."
Seriously, what we need is not more hydrocarbons. We need clean fuel, and renewable clean fuel at that.
There are 500 or more better reasons to be in space and exploring it... feeding your SUV isn't one of them.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
So we take TONS AND TONS of these hydrocarbons back to Earth, where we burn it all! TONS AND TONS of pollution from hydrocarbons from outer space in our atmosphere! And if we deplete Titan, we can find more planets/moons/asteroids to tap, and bring it all back to Earth to burn.
Why, eventually Earth can just be an ocean of muck !
I was reading through all of the crap about how much energy it would take to go and get the hydrocarbons, how our technology isn't quite efficient enough yet, etc, etc, and just hoping that someone on this site would be intelligent enough to realise that, given the problem we already have releasing our own carbon stores into the atmosphere, what kind of absolute stupidity would lead anyone to deliberately import carbon from elsewhere?
I suppose that burning it in orbit and beaming power back to Earth could work, providing we could find a good source of oxygen, but then would that cost less than setting up orbital solar plants?
So in general my reaction to this story is "Wow, Titan's got hydrocarbons - wtf does that have to do terrestrial energy consumption?"
I don't therefore I'm not.
Don't you need life to have organic material in order to have hydrocarbons?
Where's your god now?
They're using their grammar skills there.
If you read that as -- Titanic organ on earth surpass oil reserves!
Oil, well there are tow camps: the fossil fuel camp (typically popular in the west) and the abiotic oil camp that says that oil is just a mineral reaction (typically popular in the east).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The hydrocarbons rain from the sky
Titan, the first non-smoking planet. At least on rainy days.
have got it all backwards... sending space tankers to Titan is so inefficient! We should focus our efforts on exporting all our gas-guzzling vehicles over there instead...
Take another draw on the bong, and maybe you can tell us...
But where am I going to get enough oxygen to burn it all?
It isn't exactly crackpot, especially when applied to hydrocarbons on Titan.
We know that oil can be created without 'dead dinosaurs'. It is rejected because of evidence on Earth that points towards the idea that oil is the byproduct of biomass.
However, if most geologists were told that oil had been discovered on another planet then they would probably assume it was non-organic. We only assume it is organic because of other factors.
So, quit confusing people. It is crackpot to think that oil on Earth is abiogenic. It is perfectly sane and rational to think that hydrocarbons on another planet are the result of abiogenic processes.
There'll be time to strip mine the other planets later.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
The doors opened with a hiss and I approached the towering desk. The obese
figure of Cornellius Wrak, Controller of Primus, didn't acknowledge my
presence - instead, he tapped a few words on the keyboard to his side and
gazed at the monitor. Checking my records, obviously. I was glad I'd paid that
hacker to clear my police file, or they would've made me a permanent resident
of Titan on the spot.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Jetland?" asked Wrak.
"My ship broke down," I said, "And I had to scrap her. Until I come up with
some money, I'm stuck in this pit you call a city. I heard you Controllers are
offering a shipload of credits to anyone who finds out why we've lost contact
with Proscenium. As I see it, I need the money - you need a favor."
Wrak nodded slowly, eyeing me. "We do need a few skilled agents," he said,
"but we're opening the investigation to all interested parties."
"Too bad," I said, "I hate sharing a reward."
Wraks lips curled back into something like a smile. "Whether you share a
reward or not depends upon how fast you can muster a few warm bodies and get
to Proscenium. But let me warn you, Mr. Jetland, not to take this assignment
too lightly. We don't know what dark fate has befallen Proscenium. You should
worry more about coming back alive..."
Veramocor
Ironically, moving all that fuel from Titan to Earth where it could be used would require more fuel than it has. The spent boat shell would then orbit just inside the asteroid belt.
Unless, of course, you were ok with taking shipment in, say, 500 years. By which point, civilization will have either gone extinct, or outlawed burning hydrocarbons entirely.
At least the penguin preserve on pluto is safe...
But being carbon compounds, hydrocarbons are, by definition, ORGANIC molecules.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Mining the moon for sand?
Lame, and worthless. We have it.
Mining the astroids for iron?
Lame. We have it.
Pumping Titan dry?
Oh yeah! Screw you Mideast.
They're mostly 'pre-biotic', methanes and ethanes.
1. deorbit titan until it matches earth's orbit
2. let the atmospheres mix
3. light a match
4. BOOM. game over
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
There's so little Science in the Administration these days Big Oil would be able to get tax relief with a program to bring the oil to earth on the wings of angels. How far away could Saturn be anyway? Why, it's right there on the back lot, right next door to the moon landing set. I saw it on the television.
...everyone on Titan gets a vote.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Just as long as they make sure to use a ship with 6001 hulls.
There's a perfect xkcd for my sig but I'm too lazy to look it up. sudo someone go find it.
we don't send penguins to Titan.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
... that Arthur C. Clarke "discovered" that Titan has vast reserves of hydrocarbon way back in 1976.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
you have a supply of oxygen. Which Titan doesn't. If it did, the hydrocarbons would not exist.
Can these compounds be used as fuel with little or no processing? I can envision a probe burrowing and rolling and sliding around the moon's surface, enjoying an unlimited supply of power by sucking in some fuel whenever it needs it. The extremely cold temperatures don't sound as daunting when unlimited energy is available.
Better known as 318230.
The vast majority of our hydrocarbon usage is for energy. Plastic, fertilizer, chemicals, and so forth are essentially lost in the noise. Furthermore, we can make virtually any hydrocarbon that we want out of coal, which is not running out any time soon despite what the nuttier peak oilers sometimes claim.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
It's a gas station!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Just wait till Global Warming comes in!!!!!
I for one welcome our hydrocarbon guzzling Earthling overlords.
The Idea that the leader of Titan doesn't have weapons of mass destruction, is palpably absurd.
I wish I had mod points. The supposed disparity of taxes paid by the "poor" is a political FUD machine.
Did not RTFA but we already knew through spectroscopy that Titan has lots of methane. You won't get much energy from it though since you will not be able to burn it without oxygen in the atmosphere of Titan.
organics? hands off motherfuckers, i have a citadel there.
We'll need a way to get the oil into orbit. Better get back to work on that space elevator. Inflatable Space Stations which are resistant to micro meteors seem like a really good idea as well. Now might be a good time to buy some Bigelow Aerospace stock, they're going to need a lot of space balloons.
We've know that Titan was drenched in carbon compounds for decades. What next, a headline reading Sun's hydrogen surpasses hydrogen reserves on Earth?
When we get there, we'll find it inhabited by a race of creatures that try to kill anyone that draws a picture of some famous dead alien, beat their wives "for their own good", and wipe their asses with their bare hands. We'll apologize for being morally superior, buy some oil until something scares us badly, invade while feeling somewhat vaguely guilty about the whole thing, and end up wondering how the hell they managed to set up a parallel court system on earth that makes it all ok for them to wander around shouting death to (whoever/whatever) while trying to burn down Paris.
We'll let them have Paris if they promise to take Hugo Chavez home with them. They refuse when Chavez vows to nationalize Jupiter and give it back to the people.
I suspect the reason there is so much fuel in one place, is that there is no oxidizer to burn it.
Note to myself: re-read The Sirens of Titan
Say hello to my little sig.
... OPEC announces its newest member state, the United Emirates of Saturn.
Have gnu, will travel.
Rotating slowly out where the sun is just a brighter than average star there is a ball of methane snow some 200km in diameter.
On the door of the shack there the sign reads "Last Chance for Gas. Next services 10.5 ly."
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Anyone got a really long hose?
-David
I think that the composition of the organic chemicals found on Titan is more interesting than the quantity.
Phase 1: Fly to Titan, refuel, fly back to earth.
Phase 2: Fly to Titan, take on LOTS of fuel, return to earth with enough fuel left over to return to Titan.
Phase 3: Space tanker?? Orbital refueling station?? Orbital drilling platforms??
M0571y H@rml355.
Has anybody else heard of abiogenic hydrocarbons?
One more example that oil probably didn't come from decomposing plants and dead dinosaurs.
I'm really surprised more people don't know about abiogenic oil.
Pop quiz: How much plant/animal matter would it take to make a gallon of oil, using pressure as most people think of how oil is made? Now, how many billions of gallons of oil are there? See the problem?
Don't steal. The government hates competition.
Finally, a place where I can fart all I want and nobody can tell the difference.
Table-ized A.I.
Granted, having hydrocarbons way out on Titan is pretty useless to us on Earth in regards as a fuel source. But they can be useful where they're at as fuel or feedstocks for making polymers in the same way we do here. Most plastics are made in some way from oil, and if we ever get to the point of establishing some sort of station or colony around Saturn, we now know of huge resources available there. If there is a source of oxygen that can be tapped around Saturn (say from ice on the other moons, or even Titan itself), those could be used as convenient fuel sources that can be used locally around Saturn. I'd like to think that if we ever get to having some colonization around Saturn, we'd be done with burning oil here for energy, and use whatever oil that's left for making plastics and other products. Besides, taking hydrocarbons from another moon and bringing them here to burn for energy would be totally uneconomical, as well as adding an off-planet carbon load on our atmosphere.
...went to Titan to mine "Titanite" fuel, a substance I can only assume must be from these hydrocarbon dunes. First season aired in 1974, so perhaps Clarke got the idea from them, hmmm?
If we could somehow get that stuff over here, we could deplete all the oxygen on planet Earth.
What's with /. lately? ...
I'm inclined to create a bunch of sock puppets and meta-mod all these sentimental, right-wing, apple-pie-humping mods to their beloved fiery furnace
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Ignition! ...No, really. Landing seems to be a no-brainer, for the most part, but what about getting off the rock? In a world where it rains petrol, I'd certainly hate to be holding a match.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Prepare yourself, fellow geeks. We shall be the ones responsible for constructing the colonial ships that will take our fellow peers to new planets. This time, instead of extracting gold from our new 'colonies', we're going to be getting oil. Which, if history repeats itself; we're going to end up with a "new" United States located on the planet Titan. :)
127.0.0.1
If that doesn't happen, you can always blame it on "Micro$oft", like everything else.
We're done burning up all the hydrocarbons here, and we haven't turned the planet into a Venutian hell yet, so we're looking for new sources of hydrocarbon???
If you're going to burn anything on earth, you only need a single chemical equation for energy
4H + O2 = 2H2O
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
That's fucking brilliant. I can just see the entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide :
Titan: previously hosting an incredibly intelligent, benign and peaceful native lifeform, the species lost its native habitat and became extinct when the entire planet was siphoned off by local neighbours of planet Terra so their inhabitants could all each complete the full set of plastic Transformer dildoes.
The last living Titan was known to express the now-famous sentiment: "You fuck me over just to fuck yourself over? You fucking pissant!"
Makes you wonder what another species might want to suck off all our water and air for, no ?
It's true that Mars can't hold an atmosphere forever, but it'll do fine for several million years. Humanity would just need to refill it occasionally.
If you can disturb Titan's orbit in a sufficently controlled way you could bring the whole thing back to earth - no tankers required! Just bring it into a very low orbit and suck the oil down through carbon nanotubes.
No sig today...
does this mean the cost of gas will down?
Now the neocons can realize their wet dream of fueling the endless war machine. Except they have to figure out how to get the oil here first...
You've heard of the space elevator .. now behold .. the space pipeline
I hereby propose that a flexible pipeline be built from Titan to Earth. It can be done using carbon nanotubes, we have the technology.
Ok, somewhat.
I just invented the oxygen bomb. OK, it doesn't work on all planets, but that is OK. After all, earth is the peace planet, and we bring peace wherever there are hydrocarbons.
Bert
And just like the immature, dumb-greedy children in a sandbox that we are, this spot in the sandbox will in a not too distant future be the reason for a huge war to come.
As the other poster says, peak isn't about running out.
All the big easy to extract reserves are already deployed and running out. As the big deposits run out, it is more work to get the oil out and the rate at which you can extract is less. More new places to get oil from can be found but it is harder to get at this oil and there are fewer of these places worth getting at (if there's only a few billion barrels, it's not worth the startup cost to exploit).
At some point, you will therefore be unable to extract oil as quickly as you used to be able to. Or it will take longer to refine because there are more disperse locations, so you have to gather it from more places to get the same amount, which takes longer.
Oil extraction and purification have passed their peak.
Peak oil.
There's still more oil out there, but you can't get at it so easily or it's not big enough a reservoir to be commercially viable at the current price. NOTE: if the current price goes up, that's because we can't get enough oil and the price goes up. It may now be commercially viable to extract this smaller reserve, but if it increases supply a lot, then the price of oil will go down again and it will become unviable to extract again.
Sorry to all you few who do not speak Finnish and have no idea who Gösta Sunqvist is... :P
Bot Assisted Blogging
7.3477 × 10^22 kg
So, let's see: 10^11 tons is roughly 10^14 kg (or exactly, if that's metric tons).
So, 1 x 10^14 / 7.35 x 10^22 would be about 1.36 * 10^-9, so your math on the percentage is correct.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It's nice there is lots of resources out there, but sending probes there to haul them here and burn as fuel would have been utter stupidity. Unless you find another planet with huge reserves of oxygen we could bring to Earth to try to keep the balance. Overall, this is great news for building a base in the future and probably processing them on-site into something useful - unless the mysterious people behind this occult monument succeed in reducing human population so far that those left won't need much resources anyway.
There appears to be some confusion regarding people's opinions of the hydrocarbons likely present on Titan. They are not conventional oil, coal, or gas, they are most likely to be methane, the simplest hydrocarbon. Normally a gas, but remember Titan is frigging freezing. Methane can be released by volcanic activity, as well as fermenting biomass. All this talk about Abiogenic petroleum is applicable in that case only. If this all adds up, then odds are that's how its been formed on Titan.
Earth's situation is totally, totally different. And earth used to have a lot more methane in its atmosphere in its early volcanic history...
This sounds strangely familiar.
Scene 5:
BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from earth?
VILLAGER #1: More planets!
It turns out that the other point the anti-peak-oil lobby keep hammering is also correct: There is indeed plenty of oil out there. It's just that the remaining untapped reserves are rather harder to get at than the ones we've already tapped...
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
From an environmental point of view, we should hope it's false because if there is substantially more oil and gas than we think there is, we will sooner or later transform Earth into Venus.
The facts say otherwise.
Over Earth's long history, CO2 levels have fluctuated widely, and the current political fad about mean Earth temperature rising with CO2 levels (as it would in a noddy test tube) is clearly seen as untrue. At the end of the Ordovician Period, the Earth had in excess of 4000 ppm CO2 (over 10 times our current level), and yet it was in the deepest ice age the planet ever experienced, and this lasted millions of years.
The Earth isn't a test tube, it's an extremely complex system with clouds and other mechanisms that give it quite different behaviour. CO2 is a minor agent in Earth processes, not a major one.
Once politicians put their voice to something, you can pretty much guarantee that it's untrue.
MUHAHAHAHA Commence hydrocarbon powered deatomizer.
how long until they elect Hugo Chavez as president?
Life isn't like a box of chocolates. It's more like a jar of jalapenos. What you do today, might burn your ass tomorrow.
Look, I'm not sure I buy into the doom and gloom and the sky is falling we always here from the global environmental change crowd.
But if things are as bad as they say they are, and this atmosphere regenerating technique being bandied about is so easy, why don't we fix our own atmosphere? I mean if it was so easy you'd think they'd at least have an atmospheric processor capable of at least cleaning up the air in and around major cities.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
With all this talk of "carbon neutral" energy conversion processes, this scheme strikes me as the ultimate "carbon positive" process we could come up with. Let's go get hydrocarbons from outside Earth and burn them here!
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Obviously all of those hyrdocarbons were created by dead trees. So, are there any other signs of life on Titan?
Fata viam invenient.
First one there will be a very rich mofo
Exxon has announced plans to begin it's explorations into space.
I foresee a starship and her name is Valdez.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Greatest tag ever.
Anyone else think this is sort of like that game Orion, where you go over to other planets and start mining all the resources you can so you can get yourself out of debt. And expand, and take on any other opponents and play till 3 in the morning....
Budget
- Nasa: $17.6 billion / year
- Iraq: $200 billion / year (plus around $500 billion / year for the standard military budget)
Hydrocarbon ReservesImagine getting to Titan though. The first order of business would be prospecting for pockets of Oxygen in the crust to let you create energy from all of those hydrocarbons...
That's no moon it's a gas station. Classic!
There's long been a theory outside of the western nations (and in fact it's supposedly the prevalent theory outside the west) that hydrocarbons are not a result of decayed animal/plant matter but as a result of processes within the earths core.
While this find isn't proof of such a claim it certainly lends it some degree of credibility.
Under the abiotic theory we still have many hundreds of years of supply left.
Here's looking forward to the oil price crash.... I wish...
Then perhaps it would be better to mention Jupiter's 1.6E27 kg of hydrogen. Compared to those measly hydrocarbons on Titan, Jupiter is like an ocean to a raindrop.
Speaking of Infrastructure, wouldn't it be easier to develope infrastructure in the one environment that is the most common? In Space? Once we have the Infrastructure in place that can deal with the harsh lack of air and shielding and deal with long travel times, all the other places in the solar system are easy, plus we can get closer to other planets (i.e. in orbit around them) without leaving that infrastructure behind!
Basically I wondered as I was reading about Mars: do we actually have to focus on a colony on the ground? Why not focus on a space station in orbit and go from there? If we can stretch the supply lines to that point, then we have an easier way to sit above than planet and plan how to tackle the surface at our leasure AND we can try more than once if it doesn't work.
Just a thought...plus if we can at least far enough to support satillites around the red planet (Yeah we have those now, but if they break, they die), maybe I can finally get a working google Mars!
AB HOC POSSUM VIDERE DOMUM TUUM
Obviously, Titan had vast forests of trees that are now petroleum [chuckle]. I think this proves that oil is a naturally occurring substance on planets and we will never really run out.
There's a huge moon out there, full of Hydrocarbones (oil, natural gas, whatever).
Drill it, spoil it, kill it.
And then, on to the next great thing, maybe wasting a whole planet, like Neptune?
We can't mine Titan or any other intra-solar or interstellar body as long as we're bound by three dimensions. Until we figure out a way to either fold space or create wormholes and use them to establish direct connection between here and other places, we'll be slower than snails (or even glaciers) as far as space travel is concerned.
Call me when you've evolved a Third Stage Navigator or found our StarGate.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Or was that "No smoking"? How're we gonna make a sign that big?
(I know combustion would need oxygen and higher temps, but just go with it, ok? at the least it raises questions about practical issues of extracting fuel. We're hot and we bring o2.)
Also, think of the carbon credits needed to offset burning all of that.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
And use it the way god intended... to power our interstellar space-flight... not our inter-city transit.
See lots of posts about costing too much to bring it back, so maybe just maybe we develop the resource where it is and put a station in orbit around it which can be a nice little waystation on our way to other places.
Sounds like a great place to put a big station. Surely we can figure out a way to crack the hydrocarbons into water as well... just need a source of oxygen, which we have to bring or find anyways, no matter where we go. Next up, finding a big oxygen crystal in space that we can tow into orbit around Titan.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Clark predicted this discovery almost exactly in his book Imperial Earth.
...how far people will drive to find the cheapest gas.
Those eeeeeeevil corporations, satisfying a global demand for energy! How dare they!
I disagree, I think that the problems are merely technical and can be solved within the next couple hundred years, if we make it that long.
Presuming we could create a craft capable of continuous 1g acceleration, relativistic effects would mean that apparent time on board to any star within the nearest known 100 stars (22 light years) would be 6.2 years. To the galactic center, 30,000 light years away, would be about 20 years. If you want to push the acceleration a little, to, say, 1.25 g's, you can make it in about 17 apparent years. Add another 6 months to make it to the other side of the galaxy.
Primary concerns would be shielding and a method of propulsion capable of that acceleration. And, of course, being able to pinpoint suitable sites for colonization before leaving. I personally think that we should be able to locate an earthlike habitable planet in the same few hundred years of space exploration development. If one exists. And I think the idea that one exists within our galaxy to be within the realm of possibility.
Just imagine, if we could bring back and burn more hydrocarbons than we'll ever be able to extract from the earth, we could eliminate all skepticism about global warming. Heck, I may just go trade my minivan for a Hummer!
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
You can't pick up oil from Titan with a flyby.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
These findings sound more like Cheney's wet dream than anything else. I view the findings with skepticism.
why would oil run out? finding on a planet that obviously had no dino's (or other life) would seem to indicate that oil is not dead animals, but a product of the planets internal systems. the russians have believed this for years, but the oil companies can make much more selling oil as a 'diminishing resource' instead of one the earth auto renews.
-.no
oxidize (burn) all of those hydrocarbons?
We'll run out of oxygen in the air long before Titan runs out of hydrocarbons.
Guess what WE need the oxygen.
Using Titan as anything other than a scientific curiosity is not practical. (And NO! You can't use it just until it starts getting hard to breathe.)
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A few scientist suggest that hydrocarbons are produced by non-biological chemical reactions. The organic aspects of hydrocarbons in the earth are the result of microbes eating the stuff. I've even read that a steady supply of underground hydrocarbons could have provided the conditions for the origin of life.
"combined three abiotic (non-living) materials -- water (H2O), limestone (CaCO3), and iron oxide (FeO) -- and crushed the mixture together with the same intense pressure found deep below the earth's surface. This process created methane (CH4)"
http://harvardmagazine.com/2005/03/rocks-into-gas.html
It's... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5!
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that according to the popular theory, there once was a LOT of dinosaurs and plants and such on Titan, that became these hydrocarbons after millions or billions of years of being dead?
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Anyone else think that the "Mission to Mars" will now become "Let's go drill the crap out of Titan"?
Any bets Exxon or some other oil company will start funding a space mission to bring back the "oil"?
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Pipeline!
gotta do it.
No one can get at it except for me!
But I thought the hydrocarbons came from dead plants and dinosaurs. This is proof positive that Titan had 100 times the dinosaur population that the Earth had! Amazing! Or they were 100x bigger (low gravity). Amazing.
While the oil companies are doing very well, most the oil money is going to oil-producing countries, such as Dubai/UAE. The oil companies have to pay market price for the oil they don't produce themselves.
It's one thing to carry out a coup d'état, and quite another to run your conquered country into the ground after you've taken power. Bush & Company will get their due someday... It's hard to see how we'll get there from here, but of this I'm certain.
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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Couldn't one just run photocells in series in a band around the equator? The current loop would generate a magnetic field, and one could use the extra energy for heating. Mind you, building a device on that scale is an elaborate undertaking, but the principle seems simple enough.
If it were somehow possible to import vast quantities of these hydrocarbons from Titan to Earth, burning them would reduce the concentration of O2 in the atmosphere. To prevent that, you would need to import oxidizer as well as fuel.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The U.S. makes every effort to ensure that Iraq receives full market price for its oil. And it is in the U.S.' interest to do so: the U.S. has been contributing billions toward recovering from Saddam's neglect of the infrastructure, but as Iraq's oil revenues increase it will be better able to foot the bill itself.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
...tell me that no one is actually thinking of moving hydrocarbons from Titan to the Earth? That would be INSANE - we have plenty of carbon, thank you, and lots of sunlight right here for the taking.
Let Titan be a resource for those colonies we build out there someday. Like in 50 million years, when the Earth's ocean's boil.
Even if it were possible to import hydrocarbons from Titan, I'm positive one of two things will have happened long before we are able to do such.
One, we will have killed ourselves by then (or something will reduce the population significantly)
or
Two, we will have already figured how to create energy from renewable sources like solar.
Personally, I don't see some Sean Connery "Outland" scenario where we go to other planets and mine elements we can't already make synthetically.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Why bother fetching it back in small rockets when you can propel the entire rock back?
Can we use a lot of tiny propeller rockets installed on Titan to gradually push it off the orbit and toward earth? These rockets only needs to carry oxygen or other oxidizer to burn the hydrocarben on Titan, and this process may happen very slowly, i.e., in several hundreds or thousand years. When it becomes a satellite of earth we can burn it outside of earth atmosphere and send the energy back in the form of microwave/laser.
Additionally, in this long time frame, as Titan is getting nearer to earth, we can continuously improve the propeller technology and more easily install more powerful rockets on Titan, so the process would be an accelerating process, though initially it would be very slow.
No idea how long it would last as I'm not familiar with rocket science, but if this process would take more than 1000 years I guess we could probably have advanced beyond relying on hydrocarbon energy already, then the entire idea does not make any sense anymore, as someone has pointed out.