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Titan's Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Feb 13, 2008 09:43 PM
from the black-gold-titan-tea dept.
from the black-gold-titan-tea dept.
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."
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Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted 82 comments
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."
[+]
Hydrocarbon Rain Swells Titan's Lakes 110 comments
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."
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Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
Lucky it's not Uranus where these 'hydrocarbons' were found.
Otherwise there would already be a proposal to go out there and drill it.
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
wrong website -1
total: 0
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
<speech style="speaker: George W. Bush; dialect: babbling idiot;">
There is new evidence that Osama bin Laden has been receiving material support from the Titanians. Our will is strong, our resolve unquenchable. We must take swift action to defeat this terrorist threat... from our neighbor to the West... wait... they're to the East now? Well, how did that happen? What do you mean it's night?
You mean to tell me that they can move their forces to the opposite side of the earth twice a day? How can we possibly win this war? We must reinstate the draft. It will take all our nation's strength to... what do you mean we're the ones who are moving? Oh. Never mind that little draft thing. You saw nothing, you heard nothing. Remember that, 'cuz if you don't, you might someday not be anything.
But we must stop these terrorists. If we don't stop them now, then one day, we might be singing Hail Titania or something like that, and we wouldn't want that, would we? If there's one thing we must not do, it is nothing, cuz when y'ain't doin' nothin', anything can happen.
</speech>
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
UN member: Are you high? or incredibly stupid?
Bush: I assure you, I am not high.
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Wrong target (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Invade! (Score:5, Insightful)
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All we need now (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:All we need now (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All we need now (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:All we need now (Score:5, Interesting)
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in related news (Score:4, Funny)
2. GW Bush orders the militarization of NASA
3. "Mission Accomplished" announced before probes with frickin' laser beams get past the orbit of Mars
Call me Uninformed...but (Score:5, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Call me Uninformed...but (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your point of view), almost all the evidence is against abiogenic terrestrial petroleum.
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Re:Call me Uninformed...but (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Extraterrestrial_methane [wikipedia.org]
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Re:crackpot??? (Score:5, Informative)
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Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Big deal (Score:5, Funny)
Does one rub it on to get that effect?
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pointless (Score:5, Funny)
We just misheard (Score:5, Funny)
That's great if you want hydrocarbons (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Related headline in Titan Daily Times: (Score:5, Funny)
I'm surprised nobody's pointed out... (Score:5, Interesting)
This isn't news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:Mars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Mars? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Think of it as a tire (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Informative)
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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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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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Thank you (Score:5, Insightful)
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?"
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Re:Thank you (Score:5, Funny)
Ummm, Earth is the third world. Mars is the fourth.
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Re:so.... (Score:5, Informative)
As for now, the only source of long-chain hydrocarbons, aka what we commonly consider oil (C20+) is earth.
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Re:Fuel for probes (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Re:Don't tell the president (Score:5, Informative)
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 [reclaimdemocracy.org]
What about http://boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/04/11/most_us_firms_paid_no_income_taxes_in_90s/ [boston.com] 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 [csmonitor.com] 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 [ctj.org]
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.
You can get amnesty, but you can't be saying the truth.
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Re:well, ain't that sumethin' (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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