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!

[Zouden]

I hear Halliburton has already won the tender.

Re:

[Duhavid]

You don't get it.

This is all my plan to get the human race into space.

Re:Invade!

[colmore]

Well clearly we now need to spread Freedom and Democracy to the poor oppressed Titians, who will welcome us with roses and be able to finance their own reconstruction.

Re:Invade!

[dgatwood]

<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>

Re:Invade!

[sumdumass]

/south park: when Bush describes the need to bomb heaven.\
UN member: Are you high? or incredibly stupid?
Bush: I assure you, I am not high.

Re:Invade!

[kickdown]

Titians

They are called Titties.

Re:

[cheater512]

Its depressing but only something like this would cause extensive space programs.

Bloody America and their oil fixation.

Re:Invade!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its depressing but only something like this would cause extensive space programs.

Well, and the next stop will be some moon containing all that oxygen we need to burn those friggin' hydrocarbons ...

Re:Invade!

[hkgroove]

Druidia!

Re:Invade!

[ATMD]

Your assertion that Iraq was not invaded for its oil because America isn't profiting from it assumes that the orchestrators of the war are/were in some way competent.

Wrong target

[Chemisor]

Then perhaps it would be better to mention Jupiter's 1.6E27 kg of hydrogen. Compared to those measly hydrocarbons on Titan, Jupiter is like an ocean to a raindrop.

Re:Invade!

[lendude]

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

Re:Invade!

[DigitalWallaby]

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!

[rootofevil]

great use of the cliche +1
wrong website -1

total: 0

Re:Invade!

[linumax]

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

Re:Invade!

[weighn]

Their current natural regime hasn't ever allowed them the opportunity...

hey, its not our fault that God put OUR oil under THEIR sand, oops, I mean in their clouds!

Republican mods can harvest salt from my cods

[weighn]

What's with /. lately? [slashdot.org]
I'm inclined to create a bunch of sock puppets and meta-mod all these sentimental, right-wing, apple-pie-humping mods to their beloved fiery furnace ...

Mars?

[__NR_kill]

I think we chose the wrong planet for a mission. We need to go to Saturn..

Re:Mars?

[Jugalator]

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?

[Cassius Corodes]

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?

[Orange Crush]

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:Mars?

[PieSquared]

I'm confused. Why exactly would you want to send someone to Europa or Titan? There's nothing there at all that needs a human to see it... and NASA still has plenty of budget left over to send rovers with lots of camera to both. No reason why you can't move the human space program to mars and push the robotic portion further into the solar system, to places we haven't ruled out for life, yet.

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.

Re:

[TheLink]

why should we send humans to Mars in the near future?

Wouldn't it be better to spend a smaller amount of money to figure out how to build better space stations?

Without faster than light travel if humans are heading anywhere beyond the moon, they are going to be spending a LOT of time in space.

So we should work on making better space stations than the current _crap_ we have. Dig out some of those "old" designs which spin to create artificial gravity or make much better ones.

I personally don't think Mars will

Re:Mars?

[pcgabe]

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.

Mars will never be terraformed. Ever. Let it go.

Relatively easy? It doesn't have enough mass -> it doesn't have enough gravity -> it can't hold an atmosphere we can use. But we can just keep smashing meteors into, right?

Let's say we had the technology to move planets (because that's the order of difficulty we're talking about). Even if we could move enough matter together, we still can't terraform Mars. Do you know why? MARS HAS NO EFFECTIVE MAGNETOSPHERE!

The core of Mars is cold. It has no active swirling iron core like we enjoy here on Earth. No active core -> No effective magnetosphere. But what do we need that for, anyway?

Quote Wikipedia: [wikipedia.org]

Mars is larger than Mercury and four times farther from the sun, and yet even here it is thought that the solar wind has stripped away up to a third of its original atmosphere, leaving a layer 100 times thinner than the Earth's.

Even if you did get enough mass to hold an atmosphere, and enough atmosphere to be habitable (which would need to be MORE than we have here on Earth, due to the increased distance from the sun), the lack of a strong magnetosphere would allow the solar wind to strip it away again. Oh, and all that deadly radiation.

Mars. Will. NEVER. Be. Terraformed.

Think of it as a tire

[Gorimek]

It's true that Mars can't hold an atmosphere forever, but it'll do fine for several million years. Humanity would just need to refill it occasionally.

Re:

[pcgabe]

[...]we will have the technology to drill down into Mars' core and set off a few old-fashioned nukes to heat up it's core again.

I....I can't tell if you're being serious or not here. I seems like you're serious, but you could just be very, very subtle. Are you playing the post-something-so-ridiculous-everyone-will-know-that-I-MUST-be-joking game? Because if so, I think you're winning.

This isn't the first time I've heard this idea, either. Where do you guys pick up these notions of how things work? I

Re:

[Fëanáro]

These atmosphere-stripping processes work on a timescale several orders of magnitude larger than any reasonable terraforming process.

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.

Re:Mars?

[AKAImBatman]

More like 60%. Nitrogen is another 30%. Not for us directly, but for our food supplies which we will grow in these alien soils. The other 10% is the various misc. materials. (Most of which can be found relatively easily.) Once the Nitrogen and water problems are solved, the biggest issue is how to approach the bootstrapping of a colony. Doing something simple like making glass or steel is nigh impossible without the infrastructure to support it. And can we really afford to be shipping an entire infrastructure for the kind of high-tech materials fabrication that life on an alien planet would require?

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.

All we need now

[treeves]

are some vast hydrocarbon-propelled rockets to bring a big load of it back here in 10 years or so.

Re:All we need now

[Asky314159]

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

[anagama]

Works for corn.

Re:All we need now

[anagama]

No, I'm thinking of corn ethanol, backed by tax dollars to hide the fact that AT BEST, it produces 10% more fuel than is used in the production of it. Reality is probably much lower than the our friendly lobbyists from Iowa would have us believe.

Re:All we need now

[weighn]

... corn ethanol, backed by tax dollars to hide the fact that AT BEST, it produces 10% more fuel than is used in the production of it...

to add to that, growing stuff for fuel pushes up the price of food - in countries where many are already hungry this is not good. As if enough of the 3rd world hadn't already supplanted food crops with tobacco and coffee ...

Re:

[theophilosophilus]

People on Slashdot need to settle down and become more informed about energy alternatives. Theres a lot of posturing going on for peoples "favorite" energy alternative and it is destructive because it inhibits meaningful discussion on effective means to eliminate environmentally destructive technologies. The distinction between those that are thinking logically and those that have came upon an opinion emotionally can be seen by the disdain of the comments.

And you confuse corn with perpetual motion.

Solar energy is perpetual motion?

1) None of the corn used for ethanol production is edible.

False - MOST of t

Re:

[Buzz_Litebeer]

Actually the book Empire (I think thats the name) by Arthur C Clarke actually involved humans from earth mining Titan, the earth would send empty pods at Titan, and the people on Titan (miners) would send the pods back full of fuel.

14 year round trip, but once the "stream" of fuel pods starts coming it becomes a steady source of fuel.

Gattaca

[Adambomb]

Oh great, so now theres no reason for Vincent to go there. Stop ruining fiction, reality!

Next up

[eclectro]

The TV show "Jed Clampett, astronaut," appears.

Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

[xeoron]

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.

Re:

[ROMRIX]

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.

It does.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

[Waffle Iron]

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

[SquirrelsUnite]

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

[Viceroy Potatohead]

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!

Re:

[DavidShor]

Ok, rather fundamentally, lifting the oil out of Titan's atmosphere and shipping it back here would almost certainly require more energy then could be obtained from burning the hydrocarbons.

For this amount of cost, we could easily just build solar power satellites and beam it down with Masers.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

[Waffle Iron]

Why exactly is the return trip "technically infeasible"?

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?

The hardest part about sending something heavy to another planet is getting it out of our atmosphere.

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:

[anagama]

Next up -- we'll need to find a planet with enough oxygen to import to earth so we can actually burn the excess imported hydrocarbons.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

[bcdm]

Wow. Someone took his cranky-and-dumb pills this morning.

The cost of the Apollo program was about $135 billion in today's dollars.

Here's a reference. [wikipedia.org]

That's over 12 years, so about $10 billion a year. That was to the moon. I get the odd feeling that a project of this magnitude will cost more - maybe 10 times as much for something of comparable size? If you're exceedingly lucky? So that's 100 billion dollars a year.

Over 5 years of manned flights, 11 Apollo spaceships made it into orbit and back again. That's about 2 per year. So let's assume the same rate of return with this plan. Oil is $100 a barrel right now, so how much oil would the two ships per year have to carry to break even, running off these assumptions?

Answer = 500 million barrels each. Depending on the type of hydrocarbon, 6 to 9 barrels make a ton. At 8 barrels a ton, that would be 62.5 million TONS to break even. Per flight. Even if we assume the same cost as Apollo, which is completely impossible, that would be 6.25 million tons per flight needed to break even.

As a comparison, Apollo 17 brought home 22 kilograms (about 50 pounds) of lunar material.

So yeah, I think we know who to take seriously here.

Re:Time for Space tankers to start taking flight

[tempestdata]

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

[hardburn]

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

[CrimsonAvenger]

This is basically Offtopic, but harvesting anything from the moon (He3) seems inherintly dangerous given the whole mass/gravity thing, you'd be playing around with the whole tidal system, messing with countless amounts of animals brains(including our own) and navigation "systems"... plus factoring in things like the impact of landing, and taking off.

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.

Re:

[gnick]

harvesting anything from the moon (He3) seems inherintly[sic] dangerous given the whole mass/gravity thing

I seem to remember a book dealing with the subject... Something about the mining the moon... And about a harsh mistress... And some groovy polygamy... If I could remember, I'd recommend it. [wikipedia.org]

in related news

[circletimessquare]

1. Titan found to have WMDs

2. GW Bush orders the militarization of NASA

3. "Mission Accomplished" announced before probes with frickin' laser beams get past the orbit of Mars

Auchhqa!

[mcrbids]

I was just about to write something about suddenly finding a need to invade Titan because of their despotic leader... but you beat me to the punch!

'Cause, you know, this is an original joke that, eh, we've never seen before around these parts....

so....

[JeanBaptiste]

if all our stuff supposedly came from dead dinosaurs, what does this mean?

Re:so....

[schnikies79]

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.

Call me Uninformed...but

[Marc_Hawke]

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:

[Doppler00]

Maybe another way to think of it is that earth used to be like Titan and had a vast sea of hydrocarbons too until life evolved to metabolize it and turn it into living things.

Re:

[Rei]

Scientists have known about organics in space for a long, long time.

The reason why Titan has large amounts of methane is A) there's no oxygen to reduce it to CO2 and H2O; B) there's little sunlight, so photochemistry that can make Titan lose its hydrogen is slow; and C) Titan is "freaking cold", and so ices can outgas for a long time and chemistry occurs slowly.

Re:Call me Uninformed...but

[exultavit]

Take a gander at: abiogenic petroleum origin [wikipedia.org].

Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your point of view), almost all the evidence is against abiogenic terrestrial petroleum.

Re:Call me Uninformed...but

[milsoRgen]

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]

Re:Call me Uninformed...but

[Dun Malg]

Aren't the hydrocarbons on earth (oil, coal, etc) the remains of LIFE?

The biogenic oil theory is from the 18th century--- Mikhail Lomonosov, in 1757 to be exact--- when no one could imagine any other way traces of organic matter could have gotten into something that came from such a deep, hot, inhospitable place. Extremophile life has been confirmed in even more inhospitable places since then. Most of the objections to abiogenic oil theory have been specific objections the various formation theories. The presence of that much "organic" hydrocarbon material on Titan, raises an interesting question: are abiogenic hydrocarbons just plentiful in the universe, or was titan crawling with organic life? Personally, I don't think much of the latter...

Re:crackpot???

[anagama]

Finding hydrocarbons on another planet is not the same as finding long chain hydrocarbons on another planet.

Big deal

[the_humeister]

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

[thrillseeker]

hydrocarbons are good for lots of things besides fuel, numbnuts

Does one rub it on to get that effect?

And...

[Goonie]

The vast majority of our hydrocarbon usage is for energy. Plastic, fertilizer, chemicals, and so forth are essentially lost in the noise. Furthermore, we can make virtually any hydrocarbon that we want out of coal, which is not running out any time soon despite what the nuttier peak oilers sometimes claim.

Re:

[JonathanR]

Peak Oil is not about running out. It's about a geologically-imposed limit on production rate. Our current manner of use will be curbed/modified significantly by the resulting price increases.

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.

The Anti-Peak-Oilers are Right!

[NickFortune]

It turns out that the other point the anti-peak-oil lobby keep hammering is also correct: There is indeed plenty of oil out there. It's just that the remaining untapped reserves are rather harder to get at than the ones we've already tapped...

pointless

[timmarhy]

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

Rather pointless for energy reasons...

[TripMaster Monkey]

A mission out to Titan to collect a load of hydrocarbons would cost far more energy than the load would be worth. We'd be much better off investing in an orbital solar power station.

Re:

[physicsnick]

Same is true about Iraq's oil...

No it's not. The people profiting from Iraqi oil are not the people paying for the war.

You Silly Humans...

[phorest]

You still insist on calling hydro-carbons "fossil-fuels".

Moreover

[martin-boundary]

By an amazing coincidence, Titan doesn't actually have democracy over there...

Yet.

We just misheard

[Chairboy]

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

well, ain't that sumethin'

[jollyreaper]

Oil in space, never saw that coming. I suppose if we do find life on Titan, it will have to be divided into two armed camps, warring over tribal superstitions no educated sentient should believe in.

Re:well, ain't that sumethin'

[jollyreaper]

Real Men watch Star Trek.
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.

And Babylon 5 pwns them both. ;)

That's great if you want hydrocarbons

[Anonymous Coward]

But we don't want hydrocarbons; we want energy. Do you plan to ship oxygen to Titan? Or bring the stuff here and put even more carbon in our atmosphere?

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.

Re:

[meringuoid]

even more so when you consider that the sun is always shining on the day side of mercury

Mercury is not tidally locked. There is no fixed day side; you'd have to have solar cells planetwide, and only 50% would be productive at any one time.

Related headline in Titan Daily Times:

[Waffle Iron]

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

Non-smoking planet

[chord.wav]

The hydrocarbons rain from the sky
Titan, the first non-smoking planet. At least on rainy days.

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

[rah1420]

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

Fuel for probes

[Dan East]

Can these compounds be used as fuel with little or no processing? I can envision a probe burrowing and rolling and sliding around the moon's surface, enjoying an unlimited supply of power by sucking in some fuel whenever it needs it. The extremely cold temperatures don't sound as daunting when unlimited energy is available.

Re:Fuel for probes

[Dunbal]

I can envision a probe burrowing and rolling and sliding around the moon's surface, enjoying an unlimited supply of power by sucking in some fuel whenever it needs it.

      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...

This isn't news

[Swampash]

We've know that Titan was drenched in carbon compounds for decades. What next, a headline reading Sun's hydrogen surpasses hydrogen reserves on Earth?

Where is the oxidizer?

[anwyn]

To get it off Titan you need propulsion. OK, you've got fuel, where is the oxidizer? Without the Oxidizer, no way to move the stuff off Titan.

I suspect the reason there is so much fuel in one place, is that there is no oxidizer to burn it.

Useful for colonization

[Lazarian]

Granted, having hydrocarbons way out on Titan is pretty useless to us on Earth in regards as a fuel source. But they can be useful where they're at as fuel or feedstocks for making polymers in the same way we do here. Most plastics are made in some way from oil, and if we ever get to the point of establishing some sort of station or colony around Saturn, we now know of huge resources available there. If there is a source of oxygen that can be tapped around Saturn (say from ice on the other moons, or even Titan itself), those could be used as convenient fuel sources that can be used locally around Saturn. I'd like to think that if we ever get to having some colonization around Saturn, we'd be done with burning oil here for energy, and use whatever oil that's left for making plastics and other products. Besides, taking hydrocarbons from another moon and bringing them here to burn for energy would be totally uneconomical, as well as adding an off-planet carbon load on our atmosphere.

Re:

[javilon]

Yes, you could use ice as an oxygen source, but you need energy to separate the oxygen from the hydrogen, and you know what? when you burn your fuel you get less energy than what you used to process the ice. In fact, you could just burn the resulting hydrogen as well, taking fuel out of the equation.

Mother of all bombs

[kanweg]

I just invented the oxygen bomb. OK, it doesn't work on all planets, but that is OK. After all, earth is the peace planet, and we bring peace wherever there are hydrocarbons.

Bert

Space Is Too Big

[Gallenod]

We can't mine Titan or any other intra-solar or interstellar body as long as we're bound by three dimensions. Until we figure out a way to either fold space or create wormholes and use them to establish direct connection between here and other places, we'll be slower than snails (or even glaciers) as far as space travel is concerned.

Call me when you've evolved a Third Stage Navigator or found our StarGate.

Re:

[QuantumG]

I know you're joking, but why exactly would that be a bad thing?

Re:

[x2A]

And where do you think it's going to go? People will be paid with it to put their time into collecting the resources and developing the rocket to go into space. Just because the result of the work is going into space, doesn't mean the money is. The money will stay on earth, in the pockets of eg rocket engineers who will spend it on food 'n housing. So it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.

Re:

[JesseMcDonald]

The money will stay on earth, in the pockets of eg rocket engineers who will spend it on food 'n housing. So it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.

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

Re:

[x2A]

"Just because it's a different problem doesn't make it any less relevant"

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

Re:

[Planesdragon]

You do realize the government doesn't produce anything, don't you? They merely take money and spend money.

Sure. If you ignore the actual issuing of currency, or the funding of new ideas, or the develop-for-us industries of aerospace, the internet, etc...

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

Re:Don't tell the president

[freedom_india]

Corporations pay much higher taxes than normal people! Most large corporations pay 35% taxes

Really!!!
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.

Re:

[WhiplashII]

Don't be a moron - just look at the data, don't just read someone's drivel about it!

What about the fact IRS claims that less than 10.1% of total income taxes come from corporations?

Well, the return (gross profit) of a corporation is divided into two parts for payment. On average, 80% of the take is paid to employees (you). 20% is paid to corporate shareholders (your grandma). So you would expect there to be a lot more tax paid by the 80% employees rather than the 20% shareholders (only the shareholder's

Thank you

[Max Littlemore]

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:Thank you

[Max Littlemore]

we can just export our carbon to Mars by paying them or any other 3rd world planet that will take it.

Ummm, Earth is the third world. Mars is the fourth.

Re:

[anagama]

Life doesn't create hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons are the basis of life. The interesting part is how short chains turned into long chains, and then into self replicating groupings of long chains, who eventually realize that decomposed long chains from previous iterations will chemically react with oxygen to make cars go.

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.

Non BIOLOGICAL sources, yes...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

But being carbon compounds, hydrocarbons are, by definition, ORGANIC molecules.

Re:

[Loke the Dog]

Well, most people are just joking around, but you seem to be serious, so let me just put this clearly:

When it comes to fuel, any oil on titan is completely worthless. First, the reason why there's so much oil there is because of the lack of oxygen. Without oxygen, you can't use oil for fuel. Secondly, lifting the oil off of this moon will never become economically feasible because oil is so incredibly cheap compared to its weight in this context. As of right now, it wouldn't even be profitable to go there i

Re:

[bestinshow]

All through this thread I've been seeing people witter on about the patently ridiculous concept of abiogenic hydrocarbons. All I can think about is people trying to justify to themselves that it's okay to own that gas guzzling vehicle, and that oil will never run out. That, or they're really really stupid religious freaks who hate science. Head in the sand, or what?

There oil - a complex long-chain hydrocarbon, and there's simple, short-chain hydrocarbons. Titan has the latter. There is nothing special, or a