Titan's Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth 555
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."
Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
Big deal (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Call me Uninformed...but (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight (Score:3, Insightful)
It does.
Re:Invade! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is all my plan to get the human race into space.
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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?"
Re:Mars? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Finally * all the gasoline I could ever want * (Score:2, Insightful)
crackpot??? (Score:2, Insightful)
We know that oil can be created without 'dead dinosaurs'. It is rejected because of evidence on Earth that points towards the idea that oil is the byproduct of biomass.
However, if most geologists were told that oil had been discovered on another planet then they would probably assume it was non-organic. We only assume it is organic because of other factors.
So, quit confusing people. It is crackpot to think that oil on Earth is abiogenic. It is perfectly sane and rational to think that hydrocarbons on another planet are the result of abiogenic processes.
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:3, Insightful)
No, just means it's not as simple as first stated. You have to look at things like:
A - Ratio of money spent that ends up in pockets of engineers/etc who will respend as opposed to trapped in massive corporate reserves.
B - How this ratio compares to other things the money could be spent on (eg, how much of the police force's budget go on energy costs that end up in the same place? Okay police are quite important, this is just an example).
C - Whether there's any way of [part] paying for the project out of trapped corporate reserves by [part] commercialising the project.
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:2, Insightful)
What utter BS! Corporations pay much higher taxes than normal people! Most large corporations pay 35% taxes. In fact, the three largest oil companies paid $44.3B [taxfoundation.org] in taxes in 2005. In comparison, the bottom half of all income tax payers combined was only $28.7B [taxfoundation.org] in 2005!
The US you live in is payed for by corporations and rich guys. And you wonder why they end up with all the power?
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:2, Insightful)
And you're comparing that to the BOTTOM half of all income tax payers? I don't know about the US tax laws, but in Australia they have a "Tax free" bracket (if you earn X per year). Meaning that some of the bottom half of all income tax payers are paying absolutley no tax at all.
I'm not trying to say that the oil companies aren't paying tax, it just doesn't make sence to throw numbers around with no reasonable benchmark.
Re:All we need now (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's not counting the power companies that exist essentially because of government development. Or the farmers who produce grain on the government's dime.
So by "doesn't produce anything", were you just talking about literal production of shrink-wrapped widgets? Because yes, the US Government doesn't mass-produce anything. But the federal government has had a considerable hand in the creation of wealth, in economic terms, for over a century now.
This isn't news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:how did organic material get on titan? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aside from that, all hydrocarbons are organic in the chemical sense. Maybe not in the "organic gardening" sense -- but gasoline is just as organic as pesticide free carrots.
Re:pointless (Score:1, Insightful)
consider the following:
either i'm wrong and tree huggers ARE serious environmentalists, in which case they are totally useless and wasting their life if the arctic is indeed free of ice by 2013, having failed completely to convince the world that this impending disaster is real....
take your pick, because it's one of the two.
Where is the oxidizer? (Score:3, Insightful)
I suspect the reason there is so much fuel in one place, is that there is no oxidizer to burn it.
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.
Re:pointless (Score:2, Insightful)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071026095001.htm [sciencedaily.com]
p.s. You need to see a therapist about your personality disorder.
Re:And... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, coal can be used to substitute, but the infrastructure to do this chemical trickery is not in place, and will not sufficiently supplement the dwindling oil production. Additinoally itw will suck up enormous amounts of captial.
Re:Invade! (Score:2, Insightful)
Some prefer to tap it.
Think of it as a tire (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mars? (Score:3, Insightful)
If we find a practical way to generate a habitable environment on mars, one that does not take longer than a few million years, then we also can replenish the atmosphere much faster than it leaves.
Confusion over liquid hydrocarbons (Score:1, Insightful)
Earth's situation is totally, totally different. And earth used to have a lot more methane in its atmosphere in its early volcanic history...
The Anti-Peak-Oilers are Right! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Wrong target (Score:5, Insightful)
Space Is Too Big (Score:3, Insightful)
Call me when you've evolved a Third Stage Navigator or found our StarGate.
Re:Don't tell the president (Score:3, Insightful)
The cost of such a feat isn't actually in money, on a macroeconomic level; it never is, since moving money from one person to another results in no net change in the overall supply of money. As you say, money isn't actually consumed through spending. The real cost is the productive capacity -- labor, material, capital -- required to design, produce and launch the rocket. These are the scarce resources which will have to be diverted from other areas toward rocket-production. The supply of goods which compete with the rocket project for factors of production must decrease; prices of such goods will increase, and people will be unable to afford as much as they used to.
If this were the result of voluntary action the result would still be an overall increase in wealth, with the value of the rocket making up for the reduction in other areas; if the project can only be funded involuntarily, however -- e.g. through taxes -- then the consequence must be a net loss, since there are other, higher-valued uses to which those resources would have been put were the funds not forcibly redirected.
Re:Invade! (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you seen the oil companies profits lately? They are setting records for most net income in successive quarters for any company *ever*.
While the oil companies aren't profiting from selling Iraqi oil, they most certainly are profiting from the run up in prices caused by the chaos that masquerades as Iraq. And we won't talk about how much money Haliburton has made just being in Iraq or supplying the troops.
Re:Invade! (Score:5, Insightful)