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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"
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
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....
"That's no moon. It's a gas station!"
Yeah, that'd be great! Maybe if we burn the same amount of hydrocarbons getting the tanker out and back as the tanker itself hauls, it can be marketed as a "carbon neutral" energy source!
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.
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*
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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.
As an aside, I think finding extremophiles on Earth doesn't really support the notion that life could occur in extreme environments. All it says is that after life has originated it can adapt to extreme environments - the requirements for abiogenesis are likely to be much more stringent then for post abiogenesis-adaptation.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
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
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.
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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.
Short-chain hydrocarbons are fairly common in the universe, as has been stated above. Short-chain would be ethane, methane, propane. Basically any carbon chain that is lighter than air.
As for now, the only source of long-chain hydrocarbons, aka what we commonly consider oil (C20+) is earth.
Gone!
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.
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Works for corn.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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...
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Finding hydrocarbons on another planet is not the same as finding long chain hydrocarbons on another planet.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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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?
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?
No, I'm thinking of corn ethanol, backed by tax dollars to hide the fact that AT BEST, it produces 10% more fuel than is used in the production of it. Reality is probably much lower than the our friendly lobbyists from Iowa would have us believe.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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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.