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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..
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"
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--
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....
Yet.
It does.
"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.
Chemical Energy Bonanza: Remote sensors indicate that inner planet "Earth" has hundreds of times more oxygen gas than all known reserves here on Titan.
And where do you think it's going to go? People will be paid with it to put their time into collecting the resources and developing the rocket to go into space. Just because the result of the work is going into space, doesn't mean the money is. The money will stay on earth, in the pockets of eg rocket engineers who will spend it on food 'n housing. So it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
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'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
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 you read that as -- Titanic organ on earth surpass oil reserves!
The hydrocarbons rain from the sky
Titan, the first non-smoking planet. At least on rainy days.
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
The cost of the Apollo program was about $135 billion in today's dollars.
Here's a reference.
That's over 12 years, so about $10 billion a year. That was to the moon. I get the odd feeling that a project of this magnitude will cost more - maybe 10 times as much for something of comparable size? If you're exceedingly lucky? So that's 100 billion dollars a year.
Over 5 years of manned flights, 11 Apollo spaceships made it into orbit and back again. That's about 2 per year. So let's assume the same rate of return with this plan. Oil is $100 a barrel right now, so how much oil would the two ships per year have to carry to break even, running off these assumptions?
Answer = 500 million barrels each. Depending on the type of hydrocarbon, 6 to 9 barrels make a ton. At 8 barrels a ton, that would be 62.5 million TONS to break even. Per flight. Even if we assume the same cost as Apollo, which is completely impossible, that would be 6.25 million tons per flight needed to break even.
As a comparison, Apollo 17 brought home 22 kilograms (about 50 pounds) of lunar material.
So yeah, I think we know who to take seriously here.
I can has sig?
Cassini-Huygens is much more than a 350 kg probe. The main part of the mission is the Cassini spacecraft (weighing over 2 tonnes btw) which has been orbiting Saturn for three and a half years. About half of the cost was actually development, mostly for instruments on Cassini. This doesn't invalidate your argument but I don't want people to think that all we got for $3bn is a lander that worked for 1 hour.
But being carbon compounds, hydrocarbons are, by definition, ORGANIC molecules.
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"Just because it's a different problem doesn't make it any less relevant"
No, just means it's not as simple as first stated. You have to look at things like:
A - Ratio of money spent that ends up in pockets of engineers/etc who will respend as opposed to trapped in massive corporate reserves.
B - How this ratio compares to other things the money could be spent on (eg, how much of the police force's budget go on energy costs that end up in the same place? Okay police are quite important, this is just an example).
C - Whether there's any way of [part] paying for the project out of trapped corporate reserves by [part] commercialising the project.
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
This is basically Offtopic, but harvesting anything from the moon (He3) seems inherintly dangerous given the whole mass/gravity thing, you'd be playing around with the whole tidal system, messing with countless amounts of animals brains(including our own) and navigation "systems"... plus factoring in things like the impact of landing, and taking off...
"Uhh... Sir? We seemed to have caused the moon to break free from Earth orbit"
"No time to worry about that, we have bigger fish to fry! all the sea life is dying"
Im fairly confident that the earth is relatively impervious to our existance (in that it will still rotate, and life will still exist, including our own species) if all we are doing is basically dissorganizing materials in our little bubble... but messing with the moon, kinda scary...
Sure there is the arguement that *however many* tons of debris lands on the earth and moon every day, its sort of a natural distibution based partly on chaos, and partly on gravity... but we always do things in an ordered fashion...with general disregard for what it may effect... carving "CHA" into the moon... Sponsered by Ikea... then wondering why grass refuses to seed anymore...
... that Arthur C. Clarke "discovered" that Titan has vast reserves of hydrocarbon way back in 1976.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
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.
Statistics in context, please. $44.3B is what percent of overall profit/revenue?
And you're comparing that to the BOTTOM half of all income tax payers? I don't know about the US tax laws, but in Australia they have a "Tax free" bracket (if you earn X per year). Meaning that some of the bottom half of all income tax payers are paying absolutley no tax at all.
I'm not trying to say that the oil companies aren't paying tax, it just doesn't make sence to throw numbers around with no reasonable benchmark.
1178161 is prime...
For this amount of cost, we could easily just build solar power satellites and beam it down with Masers.
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?)
Next up -- we'll need to find a planet with enough oxygen to import to earth so we can actually burn the excess imported hydrocarbons.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
And that's not counting the power companies that exist essentially because of government development. Or the farmers who produce grain on the government's dime.
So by "doesn't produce anything", were you just talking about literal production of shrink-wrapped widgets? Because yes, the US Government doesn't mass-produce anything. But the federal government has had a considerable hand in the creation of wealth, in economic terms, for over a century now.
Basically stupid, you mean? If we were to harvest 100,000,000,000 tons of lunar material, we'd affect the lunar mass (and this the whole mass/gravity/tide thing by about 0.0000001%.
And we don't contemplate harvesting that much material from the moon in the next thousand years or so. So come back with something real, not delusional.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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?
Life doesn't create hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons are the basis of life. The interesting part is how short chains turned into long chains, and then into self replicating groupings of long chains, who eventually realize that decomposed long chains from previous iterations will chemically react with oxygen to make cars go.
Aside from that, all hydrocarbons are organic in the chemical sense. Maybe not in the "organic gardening" sense -- but gasoline is just as organic as pesticide free carrots.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I suspect the reason there is so much fuel in one place, is that there is no oxidizer to burn it.
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.
Titan has an atmosphere full of global warming gases. Eg. Methane. But, it's surface temperature is -290F. One can therefore conclude the "science" that "claims" these "gases" increase "global warming" is obviously green hippy bunk.
I know titan is in the outer solar system but that argument is more just green science spin.
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.
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
Well, most people are just joking around, but you seem to be serious, so let me just put this clearly:
When it comes to fuel, any oil on titan is completely worthless. First, the reason why there's so much oil there is because of the lack of oxygen. Without oxygen, you can't use oil for fuel. Secondly, lifting the oil off of this moon will never become economically feasible because oil is so incredibly cheap compared to its weight in this context. As of right now, it wouldn't even be profitable to go there if the surface was covered in gold.
No, don't get your hopes up, no forseeable advances in space craft design will change this, nor will any likely oil price increases. We're hundreds of years away from importing stuff from space, other than for science and novelty.
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.
What about the fact IRS claims that less than 10.1% of total income taxes come from corporations? http://reclaimdemocracy.org/articles_2004/corporate_taxes_lower.html
What about http://boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/04/11/most_us_firms_paid_no_income_taxes_in_90s/ stating GAO report that 61% of US corporations paid no taxes.
What about which states 71 companies paid ZERO state income tax despite announcing to shareholders that they earned $86 billion in profits!
What about the fact according to GAO http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0419/p16s03-cogn.html that corporate taxes have falled to less than 1.4 % of GDP? Over a period from 1996 to 2000 (am not including Bush years), corporations that earned $3.5 Trillion in revenues paid ZERO Federal and State income taxes.
From periods 2001 till 2003, the IRS refunded corporations $63 billions in taxes as subsidies and other refunds. http://www.ctj.org/corpfed04an.pdf
During 2001-2003 Pepco Holdings profit was $725 million while its tax REFUNDS were $432m, meaning a negative income tax rate of 59.6%.
Same years AT&T (our favorite Gestapo spy darling) had a profit of $5628m, and got a refund from IRS of $1389m, meaning a negative tax of 24.7%.
I guess you get the picture.
So, before you go ponying up to your corporate boss or talking up corporate support as a paid shill, you, my dear friend, need to check facts.
You can get amnesty, but you can't be saying the truth.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
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
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!
All through this thread I've been seeing people witter on about the patently ridiculous concept of abiogenic hydrocarbons. All I can think about is people trying to justify to themselves that it's okay to own that gas guzzling vehicle, and that oil will never run out. That, or they're really really stupid religious freaks who hate science. Head in the sand, or what?
There oil - a complex long-chain hydrocarbon, and there's simple, short-chain hydrocarbons. Titan has the latter. There is nothing special, or amazing about this. It's been known for a very long time - since the 70s at least. It has no relation to oil made by biogenic means.
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.
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
The cost of such a feat isn't actually in money, on a macroeconomic level; it never is, since moving money from one person to another results in no net change in the overall supply of money. As you say, money isn't actually consumed through spending. The real cost is the productive capacity -- labor, material, capital -- required to design, produce and launch the rocket. These are the scarce resources which will have to be diverted from other areas toward rocket-production. The supply of goods which compete with the rocket project for factors of production must decrease; prices of such goods will increase, and people will be unable to afford as much as they used to.
If this were the result of voluntary action the result would still be an overall increase in wealth, with the value of the rocket making up for the reduction in other areas; if the project can only be funded involuntarily, however -- e.g. through taxes -- then the consequence must be a net loss, since there are other, higher-valued uses to which those resources would have been put were the funds not forcibly redirected.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Don't be a moron - just look at the data, don't just read someone's drivel about it!
What about the fact IRS claims that less than 10.1% of total income taxes come from corporations?
Well, the return (gross profit) of a corporation is divided into two parts for payment. On average, 80% of the take is paid to employees (you). 20% is paid to corporate shareholders (your grandma). So you would expect there to be a lot more tax paid by the 80% employees rather than the 20% shareholders (only the shareholder's portion is taxed as corporate tax). The fact that there are some obscenely overpaid CEOs [who are not corporate shareholders - in fact you can argue that they are robbing the shareholders] means that the ratio is balanced even further away from the corporation.
stating GAO report that 61% of US corporations paid no taxes.
Well, what about it? Why didn't they pay? Were they non-profits? Were they just not profitable? Very few small corporations are profitable - most are started and die soon after. A good percentage of corporations in 2004 made no money - why should they pay taxes?
What about which states 71 companies paid ZERO state income tax
That doesn't have anything to do with federal income tax, does it? It is very easy to not pay state taxes - all you have to do is convince the state that your business is more important than the tax revenue, and threaten to leave. Of course, I'm sure this report also included companies that were doing business in many states and only paid in the ones where they recorded profits. While this is bad for one state, it is good for another, and I believe that from such competition between states better states are formed.
corporate taxes have falled to less than 1.4 % of GDP
This is a foolish comparison - GDP is related to gross revenue, not gross profit. If I buy a building for $1M, and sell it to you for $1.01M, you want me to pay $100K in taxes on that $10K I earned? Don't be stupid - the average gross margin is about 20%, so gross takes are 20% of GDP. Like I said previously, 80% goes to employee salaries, so we are down to 4% of GDP as corporate profits. I claimed a corporate tax rate of 35% - hey look, 35% of 4% is (drumroll) 1.4% - imagine that, I was right!
the IRS refunded corporations $63 billions
And the IRS refunded individuals $109B - what is your point? That only shows that corporations are forced by the government to overpay more often than ordinary citizens - this does not benefit the corporations...
Pepco Holdings profit was $725 million while its tax REFUNDS were $432m
OK, someone else rebutted this one right through your thick head, so let me just add this: You get a refund because you were forced to pay too much tax earlier - a refund is NEVER a good thing, moron; it means the government forced you to give them a 0% loan at gunpoint.
So maybe you better look into the facts, truther. The world does not run the way you think it does.
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