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Space Science

Cassini Peers Into Titan's Haze 31

Posted by michael from the reply-hazy-please-try-again dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The BBC reports that the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has peered closer at the moon Titan to reveal two thin, outer layers of haze high in its atmosphere."
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Cassini Peers Into Titan's Haze More

Cassini Peers Into Titan's Haze

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  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @10:03AM (#9868857)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Titan's atmosphere (Score:5, Informative)

      by ajax0187 ( 615355 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @10:32AM (#9869109)
      Any sort of life that would develop on Titan would still be something we'd probably have trouble recognizing as life. IIRC, the role of water is replaced by methane, and so any sort of life that develops on the moon will probably be using that like we use water. Either that, or they'll be something like the tube worms that live next to the methane vents on the sea bottom. But even then, those worms have evolved for extreme pressure and extremely high temperature, the exact opposite of the atmosphere on Titan.

      If there is life, it'll be...weird.

      • Re:Titan's atmosphere (Score:2, Interesting)

        by avgjoe62 ( 558860 )
        If there is life, it'll be...weird

        I think [newsoftheweird.com] we've already proven that [weirdlinks.com] here on Earth...

      • If there is life, it'll be...weird.

        But of course, we should be expecting that for any alien life we may find. I think it would be much, much weirder if we found extraterrestrials who resembled anything terrestrial, especially if they came from such drastically different environments as Titan.

      • Re:Titan's atmosphere (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        If there is life, it'll be... weird


        You say that like life down here is normal...


        I'll wager they aren't the ones reading /. all day!

    • Not to wreck a perfectly good joke, but... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ayaress ( 662020 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @04:23PM (#9872232) Journal
      On the off chance that we actually do share the solar system with another intelligent species, all its base are most likely belong to us. We've already got weapons capable of global devistation if deployed in sufficient numbers(easier on a smaller world like Titan), and so far, we haven't seen or heard them moving around. If they were within a century or two behind us, you'd expect some radio transmissions, or even an artificial satellite or two. If we ever do run into actual Europans, Titans, or Martians, the'll be lucky to be out of the stone age before we finish dressing them up in Nike shirts for TV commercials.

  • Life?? Not as impotant as (Score:5, Interesting)

    by blankinthefill ( 665181 ) <blachanc&gmail,com> on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:05PM (#9869738) Journal
    the actual molecules that they believe may be forming. One of the biggest questions in biology is where the building blocks of life came from. I'm talking complex amino acids, strings of nucleotides, and such. This could very well answer that question, and finally settle the debate between the evolutionists and creationists. (Not that the creationists were ever near right, but one of their main arguments against evolution was the origination of the complex molecules needed to support life.)
    • I think it's funny that every couple months someone posts on slashdot about how X will finally end the debate between the creationists and the evolutionists. This new finding wouldn't settle the debate between evolutionists and creationists any more than Dr. Miller's 1953 experiment (recreating this environmnent in the lab) did.

      Most creationists acknowledge that the low level aspects of our bodies operate according the laws of chemistry. They acknowledge that natural selection is real and happens. And they
    • Like the AC said, it wouldn't solve anything. Henry Morris said if we could find one instance of helpful mutation actually occurring, it would severely impair his entire theory on origin of life, but that we never would find it.

      Anyway, enter a common college lab experiment. In just about any bacteria, if you damage the gene that produces a neccessary enzyme in a population of bacteria, then the population will very often manage to recover and repair the gene, and sometimes it comes out slightly different -

      • After that, the creationists backpedaled and said that such mutations weren't irreducibly complex, and at least one creationists said that we'd have to find proof that a leg could turn into an arm or a leg or wing - a problem which is "irreducibly complex," and THEN evolution would, unfortunately win.

        And the worst thing of these arguments is, that even if there was something that the current theories of evolution can't explain, the so-called "theory of creationism" isn't anywhere near credibility. It'd m

        • No evidence at all, totally incomplete

          Not quite incomplete, but very unrewarding intellectually. The entire Creationist "theory" stands on a set of pillars:

          1. God is God, God can do anything he wants to.
          2. Gods thoughts and actions are so much above ours that we can never even understand them anyway.
          3. Thou shalt not put the Lord thy God to the test. So just take our word for it and stop asking questions.

          Logically, it's a prefectly sound argument (albeit with premises that are not universally accepted)
          • Logically valid argument. Sound means all the premises and conclusions are true or at least generally accepted. Valid means the conclusions follow logically from the premises, but says nothing about the accuracy of the premises or conclusions. Dumb mistake on my part.

          • Yes, well I know that's what they say, but in my opinion that's just not a theory.

            In my view, science since the period of Enlightenment is basically based on saying "Yes I know that book X here says it's this way, but now let's check if that's actually true."

            That "theory" cannot be checked, there's no test that could invalidate it (like "string theory", which is also not a theory yet, just a mass of maths (as far as I know!)).

            And if anything, science is a process of figuring out how things work. Saying "

            • I agree with everything you're saying. My point is that Creationists have built themselves into a fortress that can't be penetrated so long as you play by the rules, but has gaping holes as soon as you look around the corner.

              They can't afford any allowances for evolution. Even when Henry Morris incorporated a blatantly Darwinian model of natural selection into his OWN flood-catastrophe theory, he not only continued to attack evolution on every point, but effectively turned around and called scientists plag

  • Delayed Gratification (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rand310 ( 264407 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @12:09PM (#9869769)
    It is interesting how delayed my [the public's] gratification for research like this is. I remember when they shot this thing up there. And here we have news of it again, but we won't get anything really interesting until December when the probe detatches itself.

    There was talk that there were very special requirements of the probe so as not to contaminate Titan with life from Earth...

    I personally have little doubt that if Titan is made the way they say it is, than it probably has some kind of simple life.

    How will the probe be able to probe for this kind of information? Any particular sites to keep an eye on while this goes down?

  • Purple Haze (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    'Scuse me while I kiss the sky!

    Who would have figured that Hendrix was into astronomy?
  • If there are no noses on Titan, does the methane not stink? (err...does frozen methane stink? No experience there. yet.)

    • Re:Methane? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Jeff Duntemann ( 20005 )
      Methane does not stink; it's completely odorless. Natural gas is in fact methane, but what makes natural gas (as burned in your stove) smelly is a substance named ethyl mercaptan, which is added specifically so that when gas gets out of the stove or the pipes, you can tell before the whole place goes up.

      --73--

      --JD--

      • Re:Methane? (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Ayaress ( 662020 )
        That aside, if there's life on Titan advanced enough to have a sense of smell, it probably wouldn't be able to smell methane if it did have a smell. Just like we don't smell oxygen and nitrogen. Its part of our atmosphere, so we're always exposed to it. If we could smell it, we'd have a constant sensory input interfering with any other smells.

  • Too bad it wasn't a purple haze (Score:3, Funny)

    by Pvt_Waldo ( 459439 ) on Tuesday August 03, 2004 @02:51PM (#9871211)
    Otherwise we'd probably have to rename the moon Hendrix

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