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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 think we chose the wrong planet for a mission. We need to go to Saturn..
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.
Maybe another way to think of it is that earth used to be like Titan and had a vast sea of hydrocarbons too until life evolved to metabolize it and turn it into living things.
It does.
The Cassini-Huygens mission cost more than $3 billion to land a 350 kg probe on titan. If the probe were made out of 100% gasoline, that would cost $30,000,000 per gallon, and that's not even factoring in the cost of a (currently technically infeasible) a return trip.
So you've got at least 7 orders of magnitude of cost reductions to work through before you're competitive with terrestrial fossil fuels.
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.
If we had the technology to haul hydrocarbons from another planet economically, we'd have the technology to do away with hydrocarbons completely. Once you have cheap access to space, a bunch of different energy source open up. Take your pick: solar satellites, He3 from the moon for advanced nuclear reactors, hydrogen from Jupiter's atmosphere, and probably a bunch of others that nobody's thought up yet. Cars will either need to become electric or run on Fischer-Tropes produced gas.
This announcement is interesting scientifically, but has no relevance to energy problems.
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Works for corn.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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?
The rocket that sent the Cassini probe to Saturn was 200 feet tall and filled with hundreds of tons of oxidizer and fuel. Even so, it took almost 10 years of bouncing around the solar system to leech additional energy from Venus, Earth and Jupiter to get a couple of tons of spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.
The return trip would require just as much effort. Going towards the sun is no easier than away from it; that's why the Mercury probe is taking almost a decade to reach its destination.
Even if you could get a huge rocket to Saturn to launch back to earth, unlike earth there's no oxidizer readily available. So you'd have to send hundreds of tons of that from earth, thereby increasing the size of the effort by 30X or more. The rocket you'd have to send from earth to carry all that oxidizer would make the Apollo mission launcher look like a bottle rocket and would need a supertanker's worth of fuel to make the trip. All of this to obtain less than 1 truckload of gasoline from Titan.
You probably are thinking "then we'll just use a more advanced propulsion system to send back the fuel". But if we had that mastery of energy technology, then why in the hell would we need to get piddly fuel oil from outer space in the first place?
The hardest part about sending something heavy to another planet is getting it out of our atmosphere.That's not hard at all. Thousands of V2 rockets had gotten "out of our atmosphere" by 1945. Maybe you should look into getting an MBA, because you sure ain't making it as a rocket scientist.
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.
Star Wars is for the weenies and titanic-sentiment gals amongst us. Those who can't digest a whole rich deep universe of threads like DS9, Quark, etc.
Star Trek universe is much more rich and diverse. Each culture has its own dilemma and issues and there are never right and wrong answers. Federation itself is never always right like when they assasinated the Romulan Ambassador. Similarly, not all bad guys are bad: Quark, Horta, Klingons and even the Borg.
Star Trek universe revolves around two characters: The ones with the Force and ones with the Light Saber. And Babylon 5 pwns them both.
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This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
Your assertion that Iraq was not invaded for its oil because America isn't profiting from it assumes that the orchestrators of the war are/were in some way competent.
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