Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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--
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.
I agree, it seriously pisses me off to see the long term plans being sketched up for a return to Moon, and then out to Mars. The budget that will end up comparably quite small to other US gov't agencies, but huge for NASA. When what I think what would be far more exciting, and with much more of an impact potential, would be to send out a probe to Enceladus and Europa. Both quite potential candidates for having oceans of liquid water beneath due to tidal heating from the extreme gravitational pull of their respective giant planets.
With how things are moving and how poorly NASA, ESA, and others first prioritized the ISS mission and now this thing to Mars where people will take a stroll and perhaps not find that much more than what the current rovers are finding (although yes, it will make a huge media impact for a week or so, or maybe even a month, before it disappears into the back of peoples' minds), I have low expectations on that I'll even be alive by the time we get to those moons perhaps harboring life, despite we probably having the technology for the job today!
We have identified water ice on the surface of Enceladus, we have strong support of there being active water volcanism there similar to Earth's geysers, we know not much sunlight is needed to pass through the surface to harbor life judging by extremophiles on Earth, and if there is water beneath, there'd be more water there than on Earth! Yet, we try to hunt water on Mars by theories so hard that we're to the brink of seeing what we want to see, and design a gargantuan long term exploration effort to go there. *sigh*
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
I've always drawn solace from the fact that eventually oil will run out and we'll stop pumping smog into the air. Can you imagine if we were not suddenly able to pump hundreds of times that amount into the air before we ran out?? Holy smokes!
On the other hand, it would also be such an awesome thing for investment in science and space travel. If some portion of the extraction process needed human oversight, it would be an awesome thing for manned space travel. The building of the infrastructure, to support the mining of Titan itself would really be a milestone in human history. The point at which man kind ceased to harness the resources of his own planet, and started to harness the resources of his solar system. If infrastructure were built to mine Titan, it would make sense to resuse a large chunk of it to mine the asteroids too. The possibilities boggle the mind.
Would it be worth it though?
- Tempestdata
The hard part with taking that view, is that we have yet to pinpoint an exact set of conditions or timeframe when abiogenesis occurred on Earth--if it even happened here at all. It's quite possible that living examples of (terrestrial) extremophiles would be quite comfortable in certain spots on Mars, Europa, maybe even Titan . . . but we've barely gotten a comprehensive idea of the conditions on those worlds *right now*, much less how they might've been billions or even millions of years in the past.
... that Arthur C. Clarke "discovered" that Titan has vast reserves of hydrocarbon way back in 1976.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.
All those hydrocarbons are completely useless if you don't have an oxidizer. When we combust (here on Earth) we take the atmospheric oxygen for granted despite it being an essential part of the equation. However if there is no oxygen all those hydrocarbons are completely useless to your probe. The limiting factor now becomes how big an oxygen tank you can carry...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm confused. Why exactly would you want to send someone to Europa or Titan? There's nothing there at all that needs a human to see it... and NASA still has plenty of budget left over to send rovers with lots of camera to both. No reason why you can't move the human space program to mars and push the robotic portion further into the solar system, to places we haven't ruled out for life, yet.
Mars (and to a lesser extent the moon) however, do hold the long-term promise of harboring self-sustained *human* life. While it would be an Epic project the likes of which has never been done, with complications we can't even realize yet... it would be relatively easy to terraform mars as compared to a rock further from the sun. Send everything to mars on a long route with solar sails and then use them to build huge mirrors to lengthen the days and increase heat. Start processing the regolith and non-water ice to make an atmosphere, and then start air-braking ice comets in the thickening atmosphere to add heat, hydrogen, oxygen, and water. Introduce some of the antarctic and bio-engineered bacteria.
It might take enormous effort for centuries and it'll certainly take a decade of research into closed biological systems to figure out how to build a biosphere from the ground up, but there's a *reason* to send man to mars. Europa, though? It's an ice ball. About all it has going for it is liquid water and possibly a heated core. It'll be very interesting if we find life there, but the surface is soaked in radiation and too far from the sun to be interesting as a habitat, and if we're going to live underground there's no reason to prefer it over any other large rock.
With a thick atmosphere and a surplus of mirrors we might eventually make one of Saturn's moons habitable, but the lower solar flux just makes it a less desirable position that would require more work then mars. Smaller surface, too.
Does a line appended to your comment give your post meaning in and of itself, or only in relation to those without?
More like 60%. Nitrogen is another 30%. Not for us directly, but for our food supplies which we will grow in these alien soils. The other 10% is the various misc. materials. (Most of which can be found relatively easily.) Once the Nitrogen and water problems are solved, the biggest issue is how to approach the bootstrapping of a colony. Doing something simple like making glass or steel is nigh impossible without the infrastructure to support it. And can we really afford to be shipping an entire infrastructure for the kind of high-tech materials fabrication that life on an alien planet would require?
I hope that the opportunity to visit other planets arrives in my lifetime. It's just a bit sobering when you realize the obstacles that face permanent human presence outside of Earth's biosphere.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Relatively easy? It doesn't have enough mass -> it doesn't have enough gravity -> it can't hold an atmosphere we can use. But we can just keep smashing meteors into, right?
Let's say we had the technology to move planets (because that's the order of difficulty we're talking about). Even if we could move enough matter together, we still can't terraform Mars. Do you know why? MARS HAS NO EFFECTIVE MAGNETOSPHERE!
The core of Mars is cold. It has no active swirling iron core like we enjoy here on Earth. No active core -> No effective magnetosphere. But what do we need that for, anyway?
Quote Wikipedia: Even if you did get enough mass to hold an atmosphere, and enough atmosphere to be habitable (which would need to be MORE than we have here on Earth, due to the increased distance from the sun), the lack of a strong magnetosphere would allow the solar wind to strip it away again. Oh, and all that deadly radiation.
Mars. Will. NEVER. Be. Terraformed.
Don't put advice in your sig.