Slashdot Mirror
Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted
eldavojohn writes "After Huygens & Cassini corrected our assumptions about Titan (a moon of Saturn), scientists are now debating about their next mission, and one of the choices is the Titan and Saturn System Mission. What makes Titan a good choice? 'Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze, it is primarily composed of nitrogen — just like Earth's. In fact, Astrobiologists think Titan's atmosphere may be quite similar to how the Earth's was billions of years ago, before life on our planet generated oxygen.' We also discussed its liquid hydrocarbons earlier this year."
I think they might be in need of some Democracy... American style.
I have several candidates in mind for those ...capable... of piloting a balloon through a poisonous atmosphere into a poison sea.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
... that'd be a hell of a long trip in a balloon and it seems that ya really wouldn't even need the balloon part in space, being no air and all. Maybe put some rockets or somethin' on the basket. I guess you could git the balloon out again once entering Titan's atmosphere but ya know, I just don't geddit!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
Maybe we could seed the moon to terraform it. Since we don't have the ability yet to do terraforming like in science fiction, we might be able to put various carbon compounds or other substances to change the concentration of atmospheric compounds to make it more amenable for life.
"...Although the atmosphere of Titan is filled with a smoggy orange hydrocarbon haze..."
Just like L.A. Let's go there.
You can only be young once. But you can always be immature.
Yeah. We all know the Earth is only 6,000 years old
My blog
The only hope that ET will have is if he walks upright and can carry stuff (tools, supplies, materials) in our forced labor camps.
What if he walks upright, has more advanced technology and we taste like chicken?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Does NASA really think that the people of Titan will believe that the UFO flying over their methane fields was really just a weather balloon!?
Get Dennis Kucinich on the job!
Not possible. If we tasted like chicken cannibalism would be more common.
I hate printers.
Actually, we taste like pork.
...
...
...
Or at least so they say
Actually... there are many more millions of chickens and cows around because they are delicious than there would be otherwise.
If chickens and cows weren't useful to use we wouldn't raise them by the millions/billions. The animals that are endangered are the ones that are simply in the way of our farms. We cut down the rain forests filled with unknown species in the name of planting corn.
If we did find another habitable planet one of the first things we would do is work on clearing land for crops to grow.
After that once we get enough grazing land under control.... space cows.
Eschew Obfuscation
Now, to a degree I can sympathize, but survival of the fittest! I bet you don't take the same bleeding heart approach towards the myraid of viruses that can wipe out huge swathes of our population with little notice and have done so over the past. Thus far we have survived these onslaughts and either outright destroyed the competing lifeform or contained it. The universe is not some shiney happy place where man, chicken, and cow all hold hands and sing kumbaya while they all starve to death because they are too upset to eat anything that is alive. Nature is a vicious vicious thing. Go look at sea creatures that have had a much longer time to compete in their environment. The deadliest toxins in the world are from sea critters. A jelly fish the size of your fingernail can kill you in a frighteningly short time span. Humans developed technology to fill the evolutionary gap of things like not having necrotic claws, venomous bites, stingers, etc. You either adapt and survive or die. Humans are not immune to this law.
This does not justify treating animals like shit because we eat them. But every time some hippy shit points out that stupid hollywood asshole's movie about farms I want to beat their heads in with a cattle prod. I have been around a great number of farms growing up and NONE of them were like that. I have no doubt that there are shitty commercial farms that do behave that way, but it is most certainly not the norm.
Raising animals to be eaten is not even remotely the same thing as animal cruelty. Even come slaughter time most of those animals are treated more humanely than they would be in the wild. We at least give them a quick death. I seriously doubt that pack of wolves cares much about how long it takes the animal to die or how much it suffers while they start tearing its flesh off.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
In biologist Peter Ward's book "LIFE AS WE DO NOT KNOW IT" he holds out the possibility that there might be THREE radically different kinds of life on Titan.
One might be related to, or if we're not careful with contamination, might be the same as our DNA based "CHON" (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen) life. They would presumably live on the surface feeding on the hydrocarbons drifting down from the sky; similar to our methanogens or other chemo-trophic bacteria on earth.
Another kind of life might be something a "little" different (but still really unlike anything seen on earth, life that uses AMMONIUM as its working fluid as opposed to our life which uses water. (It would presumably live in the ammonium ocean speculated to beneath the ice) that forms Titan's surface. It's only a "little" different because it would still be basically be CHON life but who knows what its metabolism would run on?
Finally he even mentions the possibility of a SILICON based life (as opposed to our carbon based life). No, unlike the star trek Horta from "Devil in the Dark', it needn't live deep underground. Instead it would life in some of the ethane-methane lakes at the surface (which would be capable of making the silicon soluble and would substitue in for carbon I guess). So all of life's components; fats, sugars, proteins, RNA and DNA would use silicon as a major structural component. Now that's different!
For these admittedly extremely speculative reasons he suggests Titan should be just as high on our priority list of places to visit as Mars. Instead of sending a geologist-paleontologist (as he would to mars) he recommends sending a biochemist to Titan. Anyway if they found even ONE of the three kinds of life there, it would (even if they were just micro-organisms) be an incredible discovery. Of course because of Titan's distance it'll be a long while before we can put a human there, maybe we'll have to wait for A.I.
Any chance we could delay the Titan mission and instead deploy an infrared telescope to study the asteroid belt? This would not only provide us with valuable scientific knowledge, but would also give us a chance to detect earth-bound asteroids with enough time to perhaps do something about them. My understanding is that Congress has specifically asked NASA to prioritize such a mission, but the directive has mostly been ignored.
This is too bad, since there's a non-trivial chance of a serious impact in the next couple of centuries. Nothing we learn about TItan will do us much good if we're dead.
The balloon aspect is indeed cool, especially since the balloon will communicate by radio with a raft floating in one of Titan's methane/ethane lakes, and an orbiter that will solve some of the mysteries Cassini has revealed. The other mission being studied would explore the Galilean satellites, tackling questions raised by the Galileo orbiter beginning more than a decade ago. Given its abundant tidal heating, possible surface oxidation by solar wind particles (think food), liquid water ocean, and possible hydrothermal systems, Jupiter's moon Europa may be a better target in the search for life. Here are the mission descriptions from NASA, with links to the details: http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/europajupitersystemmissionejsm/jupitereuropaorbiter/ http://opfm.jpl.nasa.gov/titansaturnsystemmissiontssm/
Hmmm... knew this Jewish girl with long, dark, curly hair, white skin and large... tracks of land. Tasted more like honey than pork, when you got down to it. A little on the short side though. Is nice when women are tall and curved in all the right places.
I drank what? -- Socrates