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Hydrocarbon Rain Swells Titan's Lakes
Rob Carr writes "According to the Cassini team, 'Recent images of Titan from NASA's Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.' The northern lakes are now larger following a period in which hydrocarbon clouds covered their skies. (The research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.) This change adds to the evidence these areas are indeed hydrocarbon lakes. But this discovery raises several more questions: where is the methane in the atmosphere coming from, and how long can this complex hydrocarbon cycle on Titan go on? The new evidence emphasizes the need for another mission to Titan."
inb4 people suggesting that we transport hydrocarbons from Titan to use as fuels on earth.
...to wage war over. It'll happen.
...is fossil oxygen in liquid form reachable by drilling.
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Uranus.
I had already read that in Stephen Baxter's novel "Titan" - That guy is always so right! :)
The question of how much liquid is on the surface is an important one because methane is a strong greenhouse gas on Titan as well as on Earth, but there is much more of it on Titan. If all the observed liquid on Titan is methane, it would only last a few million years, because as methane escapes into Titan's atmosphere, it breaks down and escapes into space.
If the methane were to run out, Titan could become much colder. Scientists believe that methane might be supplied to the atmosphere by venting from the interior in cryovolcanic eruptions. If so, the amount of methane, and the temperature on Titan, may have fluctuated dramatically in Titan's past.
It will probably be the element that enables FTL.
Imagination?
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The official reason for the Crusades may have been religion, but it's amazing how many crusading knights ended up as major land owners in the Holy Land. The Pacific section of WW II was all about resources, as Japan's Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere should make clear. Asia ruled by Asians instead of Europeans was just a veneer to cover over the way the Japanese were grabbing control of the iron, coal and oil their economy needed, and the rice to feed their people.
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The question of where all of Titan's hydrocarbons come from might cause the theory of abiogenic petroleum to be revisited. Much to the chagrin of the peak oil proponents.
Have gnu, will travel.
I wouldn't say wars are driven by a need for resources so much as a desire for them by those in power. Power/control could be considered a resource for those driven by desire for more of it.
Those brutally nasty wars based on warped and twisted religious/political/ethnic ideology funneled massive profits into the hands of supporters, be they from looting during the Crusades or manufacturing contracts during contemporary times. A war for resources is not so much about helping a population in general as about enriching those in power. I can't think offhand of a war that has occurred where that was not true.
All those wars you cited ended up enriching the antagonist victors (the very definition of "a war for resources"), and would have enriched those antagonists who lost had they instead emerged victorious.
So not only do we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced from burning our own hydrocarbons, but then we fill our atmosphere with the CO2 produced by burning an entire other planet's worth of hydrocarbons. Brilliant!
I suppose we could build sequestration plants on Titan and pump all the exhaust back up there though.
I'm wondering how you land all that methane back on earth.
It may be a liquid on Titan, but as you get it back closer to earth and let the sun start to warm the skin of the spaceship, it's going to start turning into gas and take up a lot more volume.
But let's assume you figure out a way to keep it liquid. How do you get it back down to earth? A space shuttle sized spacecraft is only going to be able to bring back a tanker truckload or so. You'll use much more energy than that just to relaunch some spacecraft to go get more.
It's a terrible idea anyway, but also impractical.
At least we would never have to worry about being invaded. A flamethrower would be the ultimate weapon against them in our atmosphere.
I think you have it upside down, resouces are the PRIME reason regardless of any percieved 'need'. When you talk about enforcing "ideology" you are talking about political/religious control of a particular territory and consequently all the resouces within it.
Wars are never just between the two sides in the headlines, there are all sorts of factions at all sorts of levels. The underlying motivation for war comes from our shared territorial instincts. I'm sure priests, politicians and crusaders would disagree but IMHO religion and politics is just the sales pitch.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
The reason that Titan is of such great interest (aside form the fact that Cassini-Huygens is giving us reams of data that we could never see from Earth), is that its chemistry is considered comparable to Earth in the pre-biotic eras. Our current hydro-nitrox environment evolved slowly due to abiotic and biotic chemistry starting with something that may be similar to what Titan now has. Somewhere in the distant past, biotic chemistry had to start in something that had high methane or other hydrocarbons. Even now, earth has extremophile niche organisms, some of which might well survive conditions comparable to Titan, to a degree.
But, there are crucial differences. Biotic chemistry and the formation and evolution of life depend on complex molecules interacting in a solution. The ionic or soluble molecules, with nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur, as well as C-H, which define life as we understand it, need water as the solvent. On Titan, it may exist at some thermal boundary far below the surface, but not at the top (the same reason that Jupiter's Europa, which does have water and ionic solutions in oceans near the surface is of such great interest as to the possibility of life).
Titan is probably too cold to permit evolution. Atmospheric ionizations, lightening, deep geothermal chemistry, and so on may indeed have generated some biotic precursors - complex organics, amino acids, carbohydrates, or nucleic acids - but the chances of them being able to interact the gazillions of times needed to randomly find stable and regenerative molecules is unlikely at its ambient temperatures.
However, the possibility that, at the right temperatures and thermodynamics, that these molecules could assemble and evolve in a methane solvent, is not beyond theoretical possibility, as long as enough nitrogen, oxygen, other atoms, (water), and energy are there to evolve the complexity of the molecules. This is what is presumed to have happened on earth.
It is possible that current Titanic atmospheric chemistry is converting CH4 into larger hydrocarbons and other molecules, which would sequester the methane, making it "disappear". Since these molecules would be denser than methane, they might be below the observable surface, and we would not know about them. It is possible though that far enough below, where warmer, that the chemistry has become very complex, possibly pre-biotic, or perhaps even biotic. Of course, that is the point of this original article, that the hydrocarbons are there in mass quantities, so some sort of long term chemistry is going on.
It would be interesting to take Titan's chemistry, as we have learned about it from Cassini-Huygens, put it in a laboratory bioreactor, adds some "lightening", heat, and so forth, and see what happens. In an old original Outer Limits episode from the 60's, they did just that, and some spooky creature evolved - how prescient!
Of course, there are quite a few problems with that analysis:
Then again, what would be the information molecule? DNA is a polymer with subunits that can encode information. There aren't a lot of methane-soluble polymers that would make for good information storage.
Then again, maybe I'm not thinking outside the box and something radically different would be used.
Life on Titan is unlikely, but I think we'd be making a big mistake assuming it's impossible.
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