Waves Spotted On Titan

minty3 writes "Planetary scientists believe they have observed waves rippling on one of Titan's seas. The findings, presented on March 17 at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, describes how the Cassini spacecraft captured images of sunlight glinting off the Punga Mare (abstract), suggesting they are not reflective sunlight but waves." The Planetary Society recently posted a nice breakdown of the basics about Titan's lakes: "To flow with liquid, those river valleys must have been filled with methane that came from higher elevations; it had to rain methane on Titan. Rainfall runs off, and then what? It must pool somewhere. What we learned from the Cassini orbiter at Saturn is that there are lakes on Titan. ... Rainfall, river runoff, lakes, evaporation into clouds, rainfall again. Cassini has seen clouds make storms on Titan. We have seen the whole cycle -- it's just like Earth's water cycle, but with a completely different substance [methane], and much, much colder."

Comments

Showed this on Cosmos, Sunday night.

[rmdingler]

There are probably some tardigrade-like creatures living here we would have difficulty recognizing as life.

Seriously, Neil Degrasse Tyson is not unwatchable.

Re:Showed this on Cosmos, Sunday night.

[mythosaz]

Two quick points.

(1) Yeah, the first thing I thought to myself was, "Yeah, I watched Cosmos this week too."

(2) I was initially surprised by the fact there wasn't more outrage over Cosmos tipping over conservative apple carts, but it then occured to me that everyone who would be offended by Cosmos was probably self-selecting to not watch anyway. Probably a lot of preaching to the choir going on on Sunday morning and night now. :(

Re:Showed this on Cosmos, Sunday night.

[geekoid]

It's about the fence sitters, and the kids.

Re:Showed this on Cosmos, Sunday night.

[mythosaz]

I'll take a look, but as long as it's at the level of IMDB squabbles, it's still well, well, below the level of "catastrophic shitstorm" that I suspected after last week.

Re:Showed this on Cosmos, Sunday night.

[delt0r]

I know this is always a popular theme. Life may not be as we know it. However proper analisis makes it less likely than water based carbon life for a number of reasons. Methane as the base solvent however works at lot better that the reaching silicon based life suggestions.

Quite simply you need some form of universal solvent to provide mobility to produced compounds. Water is just so hard to beat for this. Methane is not polar so at the very least "life" would not be able to use hydrophilic/Hydrophobic properties of base building blocks to control structure. Note this is not just used to fold proteins, but also the formation of bi lipid membranes. In fact it is postulated that the first stages of life was the spontaneous formation of such membranes.

Then there is the temperature problem. Liquid methane is cold. Really cold. A lot of reaction are just not going to happen at all at these temperatures. So having a viable metabolism would be challenging.

But carbon based life is certainly a lot more plausible in methane than these silly silicone based life forms everyone likes to suggest. For a start silicon does not form lots of stable compounds with itself and other elements. Unlike carbon. It does not oxides into easily removed/dissolved compounds. There is no effective solvent for most longer chain silicones ..etc.

And the real kicker is that a planet that has silicon will also have carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen etc around as well. Temperatures where complex compounds/chains are stable but interesting reactions also happen tend to be close to where water is a liquid. Also don't forget just how much of the current elements are essential to life. Its often more than people think. http://umbbd.ethz.ch/periodic/

Bottom line is that water is practically magical in its solvent like properties and carbon is a freaking miracle. Its hard to see where they can be beat or anything else can come even remotely close.

But even carbon based life in water has vast scope to be very different to us. Even the hard sci fi gets this totally wrong (alien life will not be food that is for sure. Biocompatibility == 0). It may not be amino acids that are the blocks of whatever passes as proteins. Even if it is it will not be the same ones and almost definitely not 20 like we have. Instead of DNA is could be something quite different (but there will be some information store, we know that). There may not be any RNA like intermediary. In fact if alien life did look a lot like us, ie DNA (even if it was different bases) amino acids with some overlap of our own, it would be quite a strong case of common origin. There is simply no real evidence that there should be convergent evolution to the particular set of DNA/RNA/Amino acids we have here.

And it could be far simpler than even the simplest bacteria (which are bloody complicated). For example you could have something that just has plasmid like loops of "DNA" floating around with no structure, blobs of cell just buds off all the time. And by chance alone some of these buds has enough of the different plasmids to rinse and repeat.

But non carbon based, non water solvent life is definitely not nearly as likely as many people think. Too much sci fi, and not enough numbers. We have a very good understanding of chemistry and even an alternative metabolism hasn't even been suggested outside arm waving and doctor who level science.

Charlie don't surf

[hessian]

A mission to Titan is essential now. Not only is it a moral imperative to explore these seas, but there's probably seafront property we can sell to dot-com billionaires.

Re:Charlie don't surf

[Applehu Akbar]

Nobody's going to go to Titan "for fuel," but an exposed source of hydrocarbons is pure gold for off-Earth development. In our analysis of moon rock and other planetary surfaces so far, hydrogen and carbon have been the most difficult elements to find. When steel mills are built in the Belt, the crews are going to need Titanian hydrocarbons to get the greenhouse crops going.

Re:Charlie don't surf

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you have any conception of the staggering amount of resources we'd need to go there and bring back significant quantities of the stuff? Considering there is absolutely nothing on Titan to support an infrastructure, and it would be in such a hostile environment that the Antarctic in winter at night looks like a sauna?

If we COULD do that, we DON'T HAVE an energy or resource problem! Do you understand that? Or do you think space is like in the movies?

Your grandchildren will know how to shoe a horse, not fly a starship to Pluto, do you also understand that?

Re:Charlie don't surf

[Anonymous Coward]

especially since with a fuel source (like, say, methane) it's relatively easy to heat a local environment

On Titan, oxidizer is fuel, and it is in very short supply. Hypothetical Titanians would look at the Earth atmosphere and dream about tanking our oxygen into their fuel reservoirs. We take oxygen for granted, and call other components of oxidizing reactions: "fuel". Any stronger reactant then "normal" oxygen we call "corrosive" or "violently reacting". Titanians would call those "highly caloric fuel".

Our chemistry is Earth-centric and we classified chemical compounds according to common reactions and concentrations in environment we have here.

Re:Why doesn't it explode

[darkshot117]

Because there's no oxygen to ignite the atmosphere.

Most important question!

[hedgemage]

CAN YOU SURF THESE WAVES?

Different chemistry of life?

[SoftwareArtist]

I wonder what sort of chemistry any organisms living in those lakes would have. The whole concept of hydrophobicity would be reversed. Polar groups would be "methanephilic" and nonpolar ones would be "methanephobic". They could still have cell walls made from lipids, but they'd be flipped around with the polar part on the inside.

Re:Why doesn't it explode

[rmdingler]

You'd actually only need an oxidizer to support life as we pretend to know it.

Nitrogen is a poor one that might exist there and flourine is a bit too rich for life as we know it, but see, we just don't know absolutely everything yet.

Unfortunately...

[asmkm22]

We've pretty much hit the point where future missions to explore places like Titan are decades down the road, since people don't seem to think NASA should be properly funded.

Re:Unfortunately...

[interkin3tic]

Words can't describe how much I hate the people who are fine with spending our grandchildren's money on wars rather than science, but how much funding is "proper?" And what's a reasonable time to be able to start a mission given a reasonable funding? A decade doesn't seem that long. Wiki tells me it took Cassini seven years just to get from here to there.

We are talking about four bright pixels here...

[cyn1c77]

Just to be clear for those who didn't read the article, this entire study is based on four brighter than expected pixels.

Four pixels in the images are brighter than one might expect from reflecting sunlight, Barnes reported at the conference. He concluded that they must represent something particularly rough on the surface — a wave or set of waves.

Re:Why doesn't it explode

[scarboni888]

I'm not Alex but don't worry Alex - I got this!

A "Lack of sufficient free oxygen to react with"? is the reason Titan doesn't explode. That's what it is.