Titan Balloon Mission Being Drafted

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."

Terraforming

[dogmatixpsych]

Maybe we could seed the moon to terraform it. Since we don't have the ability yet to do terraforming like in science fiction, we might be able to put various carbon compounds or other substances to change the concentration of atmospheric compounds to make it more amenable for life.

Re:Democratic

[Shakrai]

The only hope that ET will have is if he walks upright and can carry stuff (tools, supplies, materials) in our forced labor camps.

What if he walks upright, has more advanced technology and we taste like chicken?

Re:Democratic

[speroni]

Actually... there are many more millions of chickens and cows around because they are delicious than there would be otherwise.

If chickens and cows weren't useful to use we wouldn't raise them by the millions/billions. The animals that are endangered are the ones that are simply in the way of our farms. We cut down the rain forests filled with unknown species in the name of planting corn.

If we did find another habitable planet one of the first things we would do is work on clearing land for crops to grow.

After that once we get enough grazing land under control.... space cows.

Re:Democratic

[db32]

Now, to a degree I can sympathize, but survival of the fittest! I bet you don't take the same bleeding heart approach towards the myraid of viruses that can wipe out huge swathes of our population with little notice and have done so over the past. Thus far we have survived these onslaughts and either outright destroyed the competing lifeform or contained it. The universe is not some shiney happy place where man, chicken, and cow all hold hands and sing kumbaya while they all starve to death because they are too upset to eat anything that is alive. Nature is a vicious vicious thing. Go look at sea creatures that have had a much longer time to compete in their environment. The deadliest toxins in the world are from sea critters. A jelly fish the size of your fingernail can kill you in a frighteningly short time span. Humans developed technology to fill the evolutionary gap of things like not having necrotic claws, venomous bites, stingers, etc. You either adapt and survive or die. Humans are not immune to this law.

This does not justify treating animals like shit because we eat them. But every time some hippy shit points out that stupid hollywood asshole's movie about farms I want to beat their heads in with a cattle prod. I have been around a great number of farms growing up and NONE of them were like that. I have no doubt that there are shitty commercial farms that do behave that way, but it is most certainly not the norm.

Raising animals to be eaten is not even remotely the same thing as animal cruelty. Even come slaughter time most of those animals are treated more humanely than they would be in the wild. We at least give them a quick death. I seriously doubt that pack of wolves cares much about how long it takes the animal to die or how much it suffers while they start tearing its flesh off.