Slashdot Mirror
Sea of oil seen on Titan/DS1 Asteriod fly-by
nsanch writes "The BBC is reporting that there may be an ocean of oil on Titan, the only open sea on a planet (other than Earth) that's in our solar system." And in other news, thanks to Corrado for the pointer over to the Deep Space 1 Mission Log, chuck-full of details from the recent Asteriod Braille fly-by. Amazing how much info you can get at 35,000 Miles per Hour.
Do NASA got the name from Star Trek? :) Sure, there may be a lot of Star Trek fans in NASA, but wouldn't using a Star Trek-based name on products require trademark licence? Maybe that's why NASA project are so expensive? :(
I hate the media!
Whatever polling group that finds 40/100 people who can't ID the Atlantic ocean is using flawed techniques.
Did they ask anybody over the age of 3?
There's a hard SF book called "Titan" (I think by Greg Bear) where people find lakes of glop and frozen land masses on Titan, and meanwhile NASA is being systematically dismantled by reducing its funding. Kinda spooky...
So when does the Starship Marathon (You know, the one that functioned as a mining vessel between Mars and Earth) make its first trip to Titan? Last I heard, after Tyco and Durantal took it over, the Phoroph relinquished control. Therefore, all the Bobs must be running it?
Visit www.bungie.com if your confused.
I have never believed this statistic. Lets see some facts...
I think your best bet is to wait several billion years for the sun to turn into a red giant. After it consumes the earth, maybe it will "thaw" titan a bit, and any former inhabitants of earth can seed titan with oxygen producing bacteria... Then, light the whole planet on fire and it will burn for a while generating enough CO2 to support a healthy greenhouse effect, and other life forms...
At risk of beating this to death...
/. headline! Whoops!
Oily simply means having the consistancy and/or characteristics of oil. Oil is oily. All that's oily is not oil.
Besides, the word was used in the headline, not the article. The only place the word "oil" was used was in the
AC
that would be badass!
>>So, if we blew som A-bombs on the other side of it, it would move to the sun>>
/. is becoming as bad as most Usenet groups. If I have to constantly filter out all the people who comment without even reading the article, or make stupid suggestions /. as a news service is worthless to me.
When I see people make these kinds of ludicrous comments I start to fear
Titan's mass is 1.35e23 kg. The force generated by every nuclear weapon ever created would barely alter its orbit around Saturn let alone allow it to break free. Welcome to the universe, where you and your race are small and insignificant.
Hexagon Corporation wouldn't be a subsidiary of Global Tetrahedron, would it?
;)
Well, as a matter of fact transporting oil from outer planets to Earth would not be easy. You would have to kill a very large part of the orbital velocity of the hypothetical oil tanker to get it all the way down to Earths orbit. It would probably be a lot easier to send it out of solar system (less velocity difference).
There is no magical 'gravity well' that sucks everything in if it does not have enough speed.
Was your post a joke or should this serious mistake be blamed on the school system of your country?-)
Titan has near-earth mass.
Any idea how many nuclear weapons have been detonated here without budging us an inch in our orbit? And we aren't orbiting a nearby superbody...
40 percent of Americans are unable to identify the Atlantic Ocean on a blank map
:)
I know that I'd have to draw the continents on first..
Daniel
The American mass media want sex and violence to drive up ratings. The rest of the world media still have some morals and care somewhat about cool new science and discoveries.
Titan a planet? Wasn't it orbiting Saturn? Anyway, there is oil on it? Impressive, most impressive. Perhaps some of us will even live to see private space exploration.
--ac
Alexander Abian? Is that you?
well, what do you expect if almost all tv reporter graduate with 'communication' major...
...big deal)
the only science they do is how not to get eletrostatic when combing tv anchor's hair.
(okay they have freshmen chemistry
None of oil reservoir simulation engineers I work with believe that oil was formed by rotting dinosaurs. There are different competing schools of thought on where oil came from, but none are conclusive. As one theoretical physics PhD/engineer succinctly put it: "the shear volume of current oil reserve estimates make that very it difficult to believe".
The Nostramo was the name of Ripley's ship in Alien.
Asteroid Fly-by A Bust - (LA CANADA FLINTRIDGE) -- Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab are disappointed over the failure of a space probe's picture-taking efforts. "Deep Space One" was supposed to take close-up pictures of an asteroid named "Braille." But when the time came, the craft turned a blind eye. The camera was miss-aimed and lost sight of Braille while within 15 miles of the asteroid.
heheh ;) Great!
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
Did I say Jupiter? (backpedals furiously)
Umm, Saturn. Yeah, that's the one.
Or it would be if I was talking about Titan and not Europa.
Oh, someone moderate me down, please. I'm having a bad day here.
And burns up in the atmosphere, not to mention dispersing... whoops! :)
Oops, I meant to say that I agree with you!
He heh. Should have read what your wrote first.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Alexander Abian? Who, me?
No, I'm Linus. Linus G Larsson, that is.
Not the one they call "Thorvalds". I doubt he exist.
:wq!
I thinking with sun getting as big as it will, i'm thinking that the Super giants, Jupiter and Saturn will happen to combust and combine to become another sun... Just a thought......
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Cool!! We slashdotted JPL!
:wq
Dont forget: Tommorrow the Lunar Prospector crashes on the surface of the Moon!
Also, another planet was found today circling a distant star.
www.space.com
This is getting weird, but links people post like you did have been pointing to http://slashdot.org in comments. Did you have an article, or just like pointing us to Slashdot?
Some talk radio stations will do these sort of things as well. I just have't ran into them myself on the street when asking questions.
But's it is funny listening to people fumble over things like, "Who's the President of the United States?" And then they throw in something like asking about whatever is going on with Friends and they can spout that off without skipping a beat.
What I've always believed is that by default, people are stupid. It takes work to think, learn something new, etc. And most Americans are just too busy (and don't really care about anything but) watching Friends to sit down and analyze what "right mouse button" means. (That was the hardest part of a phone Windows tech support line I worked at, describing to people how to click that button, sheesh.) I'd wager that more people know everything about the final Seinfeld episode than can recall anything about the Challenger accident
The fact is no one has used the
Atlantic Ocean since 1492! Who needs it?
Don't know where you are, but around here we use the Atlantic Ocean everytime we go to the beach. Where do you think those fish sticks yer eating came from, Lake Erie?
The BBC is very fast. They put stuff up in that little Java thing in about 5 mins, and get a story in 10-15 or less. For instance the failed, then sucessful shuttle launch. BBC wrote how it failed right away, while places like CNN took a while to put stuff up.
I've seen this a few times and it is just sad(and very funny) that people can't figure out some of the easiest fucking things. They had one they showed a guy a picture of a giraffe and asked him what it was and he said it was a cheetah or something. And another time they asked a bunch of people how many stars are on the flag and a bunch didn't get it.
Sounds a bit like Brin's "Heart of the Comet"... Horrible book.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
As I can recall, Nostradamus has predicted that a life form would be found outside the earth during the year 1999, is this related?
No sig. Go away.
Well, universe is expanding, but into *what*?!?
No sig. Go away.
Yeah! That'll work. I think we ought to move our Solar System into the crab nebula, too, I heard Real Estate is cheap as dirt over there... Someone get NASA on the phone...
--
Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
http://www.amorphous.org
The idea in Isaac Asimov's short story "The Martian Way" is probably more practical (or less impractical) than this. What they did was: fly out to Saturn, pick a ring particle that was about a cubic mile of fresh water ice, attach thrusters, and fly it back, to land on Mars. The background was that there was an established colony on Mars and lots of nasty politics going on between them and Earth, mainly over water.
This might be easier because it doesn't involve building a tank big enough to contain the HUGE amount of oil that it would take to make the trip worthwhile, or landing on a planet and having to lift the payload off of its surface. And as fresh water gets more valuable here due to pollution and overpopulation, something like that could really come in handy.
Of course, either way, this stuff is way, way, far out there. On the other hand, if we're going to look that far ahead, an ocean of hydrocarbons would make a nice energy source for a colony out there, at least if there was also a good supply of oxygen.
David Gould
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
I don't think that we should rule out sectors of the universe as containing no life on the sole basis that we wouldn't be confortable there.
Not to mention Jupiter's significant tidal effects on its satellites, which contributes energy to them.
Does anyone else read the BBC article and think of he old stories of the canals on Mars? I really smile when I read a paragraph like:
The dark material could be a sea of liquid methane, ethane or other hydrocarbons," Livermore's Bruce Macintosh said. "It's one of the darkest things in the solar system. It could also be solid organic material."
The info is correct in this case. The pointing was off enough that as they got closer, the asteroid moved out of the field of view. The ion detection experiment got data so it wasn't a total washout. The other thing to remember is that this was a "getaway special" to validate technology and the fact that they passed so close was a major piece of the validation. The mission wasn't to get a picture but for an autonomous approach/flyby.
but I refrained from putting it into the first reply.
And of course, the fact that 2001 et all claimed it to be "the one" 8^)
Seriously, the heat on Europa is also partially due to the deforming effects of being in Jupiter's gravitational well. The surface has tides which generates heat through the friction.
That's nothing new for NASA. It's just realistic. Had NASA not thought we were ready to put men on the moon in 1969, they were just going to have men orbit the moon instead. This, by the way, was the exact same plan the USSR was pursuing: land on the moon, but if you can't do that, just orbit the moon before 1970. In other words: save face.
All of this was written up in a fairly interesting article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back, on an article about the USSR space program in the 1960s.
--Philip
"It's amazing how our industry is strewn with beautiful, dead technology and bitter engineers." --M. Huyck
All the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are likely quite warm a few miles down due to intense gravitational tidal forces from their host planets.
Remember that on earth we got bacteria in deep wells that live off hydrocarbons.
Nonsense. Planets out in the solar system are moving very slowly compared to the earth.
All you'd need to do is alter the orbit enough so the peregee is 93,000,000 miles or so and you could reach earth.
Just figure out when the distance from the sun is 93,000,000 miles, and time it just right so that the Earth is in that same spot at the same time.
To accomplish this feat, you'd actually have to slow down which would lower your solar orbit. Speeding up would raise your solar orbit or even send you out of the solar system.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Trouble is not among Americans but the Massive Meditators. On my work with Mars I have found a pretty good number of Americans to be quite interested not only on the search of li'll green men but also in several scientific fields related to Mars. Also they try to be adventure on fields of theology and philosophy. Well considering some nature of the American Society the last is quite amazing.
American citizens are quite active people on this field. However this doesn't go for their Mass Media. Their behaviour is even quite amazing here. Some of their channels present such material in a very one-sided way. Something like "how great we are" and basta. Besides it seems that some people on some popular channels suffer of depressive melancoly when writing their material. It is pure boredom and sometimes the top of stupidity.
Unfortunately the problem does not end here. In fact sometimes are the scietific organizations that create such environment. Their own material seems to be filled more with words like "excited", "amazing", "surprised", "fantastic" with some superficial and dry descriptions of what's really going on.
Funny but now in Russia there goes a all country campaign to gather funds for MIR. Just day before yesterday I noted a van with a poster sayin "Let's save MIR!".
I don't know how successful this thing will be. Well MIR is old but that thing has shown a damn will to survive. It survived its planned 5 years of activity. It survived USSR and all the crisis that followed it. It survived a major crash not long ago. Will it make it this time? Well the Borg, I mean NASA is damn willing to see the thing down under the Ocean. But if it goes Open Source it might well become the next killer app...
While the orthodox conclusion is that oil is decomposed creatures, there is a considerably body of opinion to the contrary, which also claims that there's a hell of a lot more of it than we think there is.
If this story were really about oil on Titan, it would support that view.
Sadly, as you seem to have missed, the story isn't about oil on Titan; the poster just made an unwarranted assumption.
Is either relevant? Anyone with a trained interest in science will go to other sources for their news . ( like from Science Daily's Space & Time News Headlines.) The reporting aimed at the general public is usually tied to someone's pursuit of funding, or its tained by some other finincial / investment interest. True science news is just not relevant to most readers.
First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan, with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.
Next, visit "The Nine Planets" and their page on Saturn or Titan to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.
This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe site, on their Why Titan page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.
But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?
Uhh. Just thinking.
.02.
They say that it's so cold there. I s'pose there can be no life where it's minus 180 degrees C.
But then I thought; "Maybe if we moved it closer to the sun?"
So, if we blew som A-bombs on the other side of it, it would move to the sun and there would be life?
Just my
We learned more from a 3 minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.
:wq!
While I'm not sure I would belive these statistics if they were taken in a large metro area... I would believe it of the people who lived in the area I grew up in... I doubt that many of them could figure out where Ohio was on an unmarked map... let alone someplace they've never been.
Heh, there was once a discussion there... and people argued over when the revolutionary war was fought and who fought in it!
Get a life, not a lifestyle. - Hikem Bey
Perhaps, however if anyone has ever seen and believes those quizes that appear on the Tonight Show w/ Jay Leno, well, needless to say we have A LOT of dumb people in this country. They always go to college graduations and what not too!
Q.
This is very hard to believe. I don't know anyone that ignorant. If this statistic came from a poll or something, I wonder if they took into account that some people, when asked a very obvious question, will intentionally respond incorrectly as a "joke". I know that if a pollster showed me a map and asked me to point out the Atlantic Ocean, I would point right at Tibet, and I'de be proud to be recognized as a true red-blooded American smartass.
---
Have a sloppy night.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"Windows leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to LINUX."
You're right.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Hmm, and last time I checked Europa was a moon of Jupiter. (Not that anyone here wouldn't know about that, I mean all of ous hve read 2010, right?)
/emj
No, it's not Abian. I regret to inform you that Alexander Abian died just last week. I looked, briefly, for an obit on the web, but couldn't find one. While many knew him only as "that crackpot who wanted to blow up the moon", it should be noted that he was also a well-liked professor of mathematics.
Since I couldn't find an online obit, here's a link to Abian's web page.
The Discovery Channel News Friday nights, and the Discovery Channel in general. I never watch network TV anymore. I've given up on it and anyone that participates in it.
TDC is owned by ABC however. Hmmm.
The party's over
You could 'mine' it , and it would be quite economical indeed.
Remember, it's a long way back to Earth to refuel your spacecraft, getting a little local hydrogen in a liquid form (ie hydrocarbon) would reduce the cost of a long term mission immensely. Even for a robotic mission, you could do the Mars Direct plan of sending the Rocket Fuel plant first, then when it is fully loaded, send your payload with a one-way fuel load to reduce mission costs/ increase payload. Using autonomous probes that could refuel in the system would allow for multi-year missions with much larger spacecraft.
Some SF here... Send a mission out to get a big chunk of H2O ice and pack it off to Mars using local fuel source. (Trivia:what's the story name?)
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
One interesting thing to note that links both of the NASA articles is that apparently the BBC has a faster refresh as well. Consider this story that was just released, which tells us that, while passing a asteroid at 3.5e4 miles per hour is good, apparently you can't collect amazing amounts of data if your camera is pointed in the wrong direction.
:)
The BBC beat the science log. Interesting, though it sounds like a very tired science log writer - with reason! But its too bad we didn't get all that we could. Oh well, we'll have to try again another time
I get UPN for free, with an antenne. It's channel 27. And do you not concider C-Span, PBS, The Discovery Channel, and The Learning Channel good tv? I think they're much better than HBO, the network which commonly airs porno after 11pm and last year had a movie called "Breast Men". Do they do that on the BBC? Do you get BBC porno?
Given the same orbit as the earth, the angle of rotation would make more of a difference in the weather than the distance from the sun.
It's all about the angle of incoming solar radiation, baybe..
Three words:
:)
Don't tell OPEC.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Also done in Red Mars.
There was a mission along these lines in MechWarrior2 (given, not to Mars...)
Probably many more terraforming-type books have the same basic idea.
BitPoet
You know, most of the images released for the public have been coloured with false colours to enhance the image. Like the horsehead nebula for example, or the red spot on Jupiter, which, IIRC, is not really red but rather brownish.
I use lynx today so I didn't bother downloading the images; I don't know what they look like in this article.
--- Premature complacency is the evil of all roots
Uhm. Lets look at this list:
PBS: Partly government funded. Yep, you pay for *some* of it.
C-Span, TDS, TLC: Unless you're extroadinarily fortunate, you can't get these broadcast. You have to buy cable/satellite service/etc. So you're paying for t.
Are they going to name the first interplanetary oil tanker Nostromo?
George
Nah, there's probably not enough oxygen.
I think it's a great way to dispose of all the cold war nukes, keep firing them off at Titan until it moves closer to Earth. They should even give it an elliptical orbit, so you have a year a hot weather and a year of cold weather, it would rule.
George
>If anyone wants to visit an enviroment with oily
>pools, methane rain and clouds of amonia, just
>swing by my apartment. I haven't cleaned my
>bathroom in ages.
Bah, that's nothing. You should see the food they were serving in the cafeteria here. I think they called it "French Onion Soup," but we all knew better.
Bah! Ya right.
I can see it now.. $500 a gallon for gas at your local pump.. Refined from the best oil in the solar system.
I don't think so...
Wow! If there is a "sea" there that is composed of somesort of hydrocarbon, perhaps there is a chance for life. Maybe this possible organic material could be sort of like the primortial ooze that was on the earth once, if your like me and believe in evolution. Although, it said that the planet was roughly minus 180 degrees Celsius, life probably wouldn't be able to start without the kickstart of enough heat energy. The idea of looking at material that may have been what started life on our planet would be absolutely amazing!
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
"Space technology will probably never become so cheap that it will be a cost savings to transport it from ANOTHER planet as opposed to Saudi Arabia. "
I dunno...sometime OPEC can get a little full of itself. A trade war could push planetary oil prices up past interstellar rates.
Of course, I find it terribly amusing that we are even discussing "interstellar oil prices."
-awc
I heard this morning on an unreliable but funny radio talk show that in fact they got no pictures of the asteroid. Apparently the camera was pointed in the wrong direction. Again, usually the news from this show is correct, but has been wrong just often enough for me to have doubts. Although something like this wouldn't surprise me coming from NASA. Anyone have memories of the Hubble Space PaperWeight?
I don't think there is going to be a commercial interest in retrieving oil anytime soon. The cost of transporting oil (which is really quite cheap by volume) makes it a ludicrous proposal. Space technology will probably never become so cheap that it will be a cost savings to transport it from ANOTHER planet as opposed to Saudi Arabia. Maybe it will be useful as a heat source when we started expanding past the planet Earth.
Spyky
Too bad I don't know what they are. :) IMUHO (uber -humble), the coolest thing about the article was the artistic interpretation of the probe landing on Titan. The rest of it... well, the rest of it can be summed up in, "Cool, there's oil on Titan."
I guess I just wanted something more entertaining. Like, "There's an open sea on Titan, and the Navy can't find any traces of JFK jr's plane in it anywhere."
But maybe I'm just as morbid as a nihilistic mule.
We by no means know everything dealing with lifeforms so how can we assume that it must come in a form that we know of?
I agree, if one is going to report a significant claim such as organic life deposits in the form of a vast ocean on a distant moon, one should research the definition of moon, oil,ocean before stating that on a freezing MOON, not planet,millions of miles from the Sun, that an ocean, (could be solid dark mass, or methane like hydrocarbons) of oil (composed of organic deposits, generating by compacted remains of life) is available to us... Life on the "new planet" of titan? I figure no...
but that could be just me, one of the learned population... Go BBC!
We've pretty much sucked the life out of this planet...why not start on a distant moon? I hope that this moon isn't being looked at as a possible power source in the future, when we can actually get to it...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Yeah why don't we nuke Titan? Sounds like a good idea....except one thing....they reported that there is Methane on that moon...hence all there would be is one big explosion!
They'd be some huge fireworks...
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Transporting the oil would be the easy part. Just drop it and it falls down the gravity well towards Earth. Aiming might be difficult though.
To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield.
Er, Isn't NASA a government owned company or agency? If so, how can a company "invest" money it in?
I'd love to get in on this new Exxon/Titan spin off IPO. But I'm sure that "those bastards" at E-titan won't let me in on the IPO.
.02
Listen-I've been using and generating hydrocarbons since before I was born. I have every right to be able to get in on this opportunity of the century.
---
just my
Interested in the Colorado Lottery or Powerball games?
check out http://colotto.com
Since oil is decomposed creatures does thi imply that there was once life on Titan?
No matter what it looks like, there isn't a
So if they can prove %100 there is oil, it is going to get commerical really quick, I heard yesterday eXon invested $100 Mil into NASA, for get where the news article is. BTW it has the coolest pic, check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/405000/images/_40685 9_keck150.jpg It is from the news site and looks like something from star wars.
Hey, I've heard that in a few million years or so, Titan might develop life [i.e. microscopic life]. However, there is that little point about the temperature being -180 C. But, from what it seems, in the future, Titan could be another natural resource depleted by humans. We're almost running on empty on Earth, what's wrong with going after Titan's oil reservoir? [a bit of satire overcame me]
Rajiv Varma
...A giant rocket blasting through space at a mind-shattering .00002 m/s- and that would take a helluva lot of oxygen.
void post { post_random_comment("slashdot.org"); karma--; }
All oils are hydrocarbons, however, not all hydrocarbons are oils. This fact is lost on the media who were quick to happily substitute one for the other and log another notch on their sensationalism gun.
Most earth oil deposits are formed from decomposed plant and other biologocal matter. Taking the wrong assumption that HCs == oil and that oil came from life leads one to a totally bogus conclusion.
Titan is an interesting collection of chemicals, but is of zero intrest for possible life. You'd be better off looking for microbes on Mars near the poles or in the more plausible slushy ice water oceans on Europa. (Despite Europa's distance from the sun, Jupiter emits significant heat at close range which is leftover primordial heat from the solar system formation).
Not quite. The American mass media want sex and violence on this planet. The BBC prefers it on other planets (or America).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yeah, and Alfred E Einstein couldn't even remember his own phone number, yet he was no sloucher! (Not at all.)
Just cause people can't find an ocean on a blank map (like, is that a map on a blank piece of paper or what?), doesn't mean it matters. The fact is no one has used the Atlantic Ocean since 1492! Who needs it?
Besides, we just found a new ocean on Titan, so who can be expected to keep track of these things when they keep changing all the time anyway?
Does anyone else find it interesting and almost slightly irritating that the BBC does a hell of a better job reporting NASA events and stories better than American journalists? It seems that Americans no longer find this type of thing important, which is a pity. No wonder NASA keeps getting their budget cut.
Okay. Get past the title "Oily ocean found on distant moon", and that not-very-compelling image of a probe landing on titan (seen much better on Digital Blashphemy, thanks), and what does the article _really_ say?
Basically, we found that kidney has a dark kidney-shaped feature, and a giant duck that might be rock and ice. The dark kidney-shaped feature might be some kind of liquid hydrocarbon, or maybe some kind of organic solid, or maybe just black rocks. The scientists quoted didn't draw any definate conclusions, and the real breakthrough was just getting a "quantitative map" of the surface.
I find this to be interesting on its own, without the premature declaration that there's a huge sea of oil on Titan.
What I also find interesting is that the pictures from the ground-based telescopes were clearer than those of the Hubble.
The enemies of Democracy are
TANKER HIT BY METEROITE
Tranquility Base (IP) The interplanetary oil taker
Nostromo, on a routine run from Titan to the Hexagon
Corporation Earth ports was struck by a large meteroite
at 013588 hours yesterday, leaving the craft crippled
and leaking an estimated 130,000 gallons per hour into
the L5 space preserve quadrilateral. "This is the worst
intra-luna disaster we have ever seen" said Lgarth Mrubbl3,
spokesbeing for the Committee for the Preservation of Clean
Space (CPCS). "We have repeatedly recommended the use
of cleaner, more powerful nuclear fuels, but nooooo! We
have to truck it in from foreign colonies". Hexagon Corporation
officials, in what is widely reguarded as merely a public
relations move, have already dispatched an emergency
crew to deal with the disaster, but industry insiders
beleive that their ability to suck up large blobs of the
floating Titan #4 Crude are extremely limited, and expect
vast clouds of the sticky substance to orbit the Earth and
disrupt space travel for years until it is finally dispersed
by the solar wind.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Stories like that are great. They should aspire to be onion-type stuff.
Who actually reads segfault? I went there a few times, but the quality is a bit lacking. Here on slashdot, there is a method of getting a lot of people to read the cream, if only enough moderators like it.
Observe that this story was sent to level 5 and will therefore be seen by many.
Vidi, Vici, Veni
LOL!
:) )
(I was looking for a MEEPT!!!!!
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
Hey there! I got an idea! Let's make an OpenSource sattelite project and send it into space! Wouldn't it be cool if our satellite would actually reach intelligent life "out there" first and they crack our ship open to find a stuffed Tux doll? ;)
"The Beav"
I try to be fu
http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/nine planets/titan.html
--ac
BTW, the BBC article never used the words "oil" in their article, AFAIK... I have no idea how that was assumed...
If anyone wants to visit an enviroment with oily pools, methane rain and clouds of amonia, just swing by my apartment. I haven't cleaned my bathroom in ages.
--Shoeboy
Man, you have got to start submitting these to segfault or something. These fake new stories are consistently high quality. It's a shame we have to surf the comments in order to see these.
--Shoeboy
I'd like to be
under the sea
In a Saturn's rings beneath the waves
We'd dance and shout,
and sing refrains
until explosive decompression got our brains.
SAUDI ARABIA ANNEXES TITAN
"Mine, Mine, All Mine," Vows Gleeful King
DHARAN, SAUDI ARABIA (AP) - In a bold and unprecedented move, an Earth-based nation has laid claim to an entire celestial body. When the BBC reported that astronomers had located a potential "ocean of oil" on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the government of Saudi Arabia quickly mobilized and annexed the satellite using a highly questionable procedure. Saudi Arabia is an extremely oil-rich country, and most analysts believe that the move by the Saudis serves only to increase their oil reserves.
The United States' reaction to the annexation was swift and negative. "We would advise Saudi Arabia to carefully reconsider their decision," said State Department spokeman James Rubin. "The Chinese attempted to annex the Jovian satellite Europa in 2010: Odyssey Two, and you saw what happened to them. This move is reckless, and may have far-reaching unintended consequences." Similar statements were released by Russia, France, Tahiti, and Swaziland. As of yet, no country has indicated that they will officially recognize Titan as Saudi soil.
The reaction from Titan was equally fervent. "Under no circumstances," stated official satellite spokesbeing Gkklotrff Bdssuirghed, "will the citizens of Titan accept any intrusion by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have never done anything to you silly Earth-bound two-legged bastards; all we ask is that you pay us the reciprocal courtesy in return." The official Titan News Agency reported that the Titan military was in a state of "high alert."
The Saudi government, however, is downplaying the interplanetary outrage. "What we have done, we have done under the auspices of international law. If the United States, or Swaziland, or whatever, wished to annex Titan, it could have done so long ago," said a government spokeperson. "Waahh, waahh, waahh. You're just jealous because we did it first."
In the meantime, however, Saudi Arabia is preparing its massive space program for an expedition to the distant moon. While the government is closely protecting the identity of the five astronauts that will make the trip in the top-of-the-line Saudi Shazam al-Rocket spacecraft, the Associated Press was able to speak by telephone to one of them. "I'm very pleased to be going," said the astronaut, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I am confident that Allah will protect us and keep us safe on our way to Titan. Hopefully, when we get there, we'll find 'Allaht' of oil," the astronaut joked.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground