Titan's Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth

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."

Invade!

I hear Halliburton has already won the tender.

Re:Invade!

Nah - Weyland-Yutani has got a lock-in on that one.

Re:Invade!

Lucky it's not Uranus where these 'hydrocarbons' were found.

Otherwise there would already be a proposal to go out there and drill it.

Re:Invade!

great use of the cliche +1
wrong website -1

total: 0

Re:Invade!

Invade?! I suppose the right word would be 'liberate'.

Call me Uninformed...but

Aren't the hydrocarbons on earth (oil, coal, etc) the remains of LIFE? They've always been called 'fossil fuels.' We're burning dinosaurs.

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

Actually hydrocarbons [wikipedia.org] are more than just oil, methane for one. Which is believed to be located in several locations in our solar system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane#Extraterrestrial_methane [wikipedia.org]

Big deal

By the time the cost of technology required to go to Titan falls to a reasonable level, we should have already passed the need to use hydrocarbons as our main source of energy.

Re:Big deal

hydrocarbons are good for lots of things besides fuel, numbnuts

Does one rub it on to get that effect?

pointless

tree huggers will march on the white house demanding the save titan from the evil corporations and their explotation of a defensless moon.

We just misheard

"That's no moon. It's a gas station!"

Related headline in Titan Daily Times:

Chemical Energy Bonanza: Remote sensors indicate that inner planet "Earth" has hundreds of times more oxygen gas than all known reserves here on Titan.

I'm surprised nobody's pointed out...

... that Arthur C. Clarke "discovered" that Titan has vast reserves of hydrocarbon [wikipedia.org] way back in 1976.

Re:All we need now

Yeah, that'd be great! Maybe if we burn the same amount of hydrocarbons getting the tanker out and back as the tanker itself hauls, it can be marketed as a "carbon neutral" energy source!

Re:All we need now

Works for corn.

Re:Mars?

I agree, it seriously pisses me off to see the long term plans being sketched up for a return to Moon, and then out to Mars. The budget that will end up comparably quite small to other US gov't agencies, but huge for NASA. When what I think what would be far more exciting, and with much more of an impact potential, would be to send out a probe to Enceladus [wikipedia.org] and Europa [wikipedia.org]. Both quite potential candidates for having oceans of liquid water beneath due to tidal heating from the extreme gravitational pull of their respective giant planets.

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*

Re:Mars?

As an aside, I think finding extremophiles on Earth doesn't really support the notion that life could occur in extreme environments. All it says is that after life has originated it can adapt to extreme environments - the requirements for abiogenesis are likely to be much more stringent then for post abiogenesis-adaptation.

Re:Mars?

The hard part with taking that view, is that we have yet to pinpoint an exact set of conditions or timeframe when abiogenesis occurred on Earth--if it even happened here at all. It's quite possible that living examples of (terrestrial) extremophiles would be quite comfortable in certain spots on Mars, Europa, maybe even Titan . . . but we've barely gotten a comprehensive idea of the conditions on those worlds *right now*, much less how they might've been billions or even millions of years in the past.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

Hrm... It would be interesting if the cost of harvesting it outweighted the investment to build the infostructure to bring it back to our planet.

Even if bringing back those hydrocarbons to Earth was cost effective. I'm not sure it would be a good Thing.

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?

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

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.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

And your basing that on...?

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.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

Cassini-Huygens is much more than a 350 kg probe. The main part of the mission is the Cassini spacecraft (weighing over 2 tonnes btw) which has been orbiting Saturn for three and a half years. About half of the cost was actually development, mostly for instruments on Cassini. This doesn't invalidate your argument but I don't want people to think that all we got for $3bn is a lander that worked for 1 hour.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

So you've got at least 7 orders of magnitude of cost reductions to work through

No problem... Just make a metric-imperial conversion error, and the problem solves itself. Zing!

Thank you

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?"

Re:so....

Short-chain hydrocarbons are fairly common in the universe, as has been stated above. Short-chain would be ethane, methane, propane. Basically any carbon chain that is lighter than air.

As for now, the only source of long-chain hydrocarbons, aka what we commonly consider oil (C20+) is earth.