Liquid Lakes On Saturn's Moon Confirmed 188
Riding with Robots writes "Scientists have been using the robotic spacecraft Cassini to explore what looked to be large lakes of hydrocarbons on the surface of Saturn's planet-sized moon Titan. But they couldn't be entirely sure that the features were actually liquid lakes, and not simply very smooth, solid material. Now, new findings seem to confirm that the observations really do show extensive seas of liquid ethane and other hydrocarbons. In fact, Titan seems to have an entire 'water' cycle of ethane evaporation, rain and rivers."
Saturn == LA? (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds just like LA.
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It is ringed by a dark beach, where the black lake merges with the bright shoreline.
Sounds more like Jersey if you ask me.
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Sounds more like Beijing. Maybe they can hold the next Olympics there.
Low Gravity and Viscous Liquids (Score:2)
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Heretic! Everyone knows that ethane boils at 212 degrees Ethanheit, just as it freezes at 32 degrees E. 100 E is just a hot day in Titan-Texas.
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32-212 is equally nonsensical to everybody, except maybe an octopus.
I think that the Germans [wikipedia.org] would have something to say about that :)
IIRC, Farenheit used the word "degrees" and thus wasn't worried about a 10-based system. The boiling point of water wasn't known yet, so he used some points that he knew to be constant. Icy salt water (well, ammonium cloride) was known to remain constant, so he used that for zero. Icy pure water was known to remain constant, so he used that for 32. The human body was known to be constant, so he used that for 96. Why he didn't use 0, 1, and 3
i.e. it is nonsensical (Score:2)
I think one theory is that he originally picked 12 - a number that humans seem to like.
So nobody is certain exactly where he pulled some of the numbers from to define his scale? Sounds pretty much like the definition of nonsensical to me!
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No, he was actually a very smart and methodical man. The whole CONCEPT of a temperature scale was fairly new, and he simultaneously improved on previous work and used some of the only known constant temperature sources of the time. Newton and Celsius were both able to build upon this later on for their water-based scales (which is equally arbitrary, by the way).
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>I think that the Germans [wikipedia.org] would have something to say about that :)
Thanks for reminding me to hide my thumbs.
But independently of that I never heard much about Fahrenheit when I was young. Instead my grandfather had a thermometer with Celsius and Reaumur scale on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9aumur_scale [wikipedia.org]
This is probably because France was all the rage over here before the US became the new kid on the block. How you guys got stuck with Fahrenheit is beyond me though.
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I think that it is as mundane as... we inherited it from the British. Like other units of measure, there is no compelling reason for your average consumer to change... why the heck should my mom - a real estate professional - need to suddenly order milk in 4-liter bottles instead of gallon bottles? The scientific and engineering communities pretty much switched over ages ago.
Re:12 (Score:2)
12 - a number that humans seem to like
No. Humans hate it. But they hate non-integer numbers more. So 12 is damn useful. You can divide it by 2, 3, 4 and 6!
60 is useful for the same reason. You can divide it by 2, 3, 4, 5(giving you 12), 6, 10, 12, 15 and 30!
Compare that with 10, which you can only divide by 2 and 5.
If you only want to deal with integers, 12 and 60 are very practical bases.
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Let's just hope that somebody is lighter than the viscous liquid he plans to surf on or the rescue mission will be somewhat problematic.
what about venus ? (Score:2)
"This makes Titan the only body in our solar system beyond Earth known to have liquid on its surface."
i thought venus had molten metal rivers on it's surface. or is it just an uncorfimed hypotesis ?
anyone more knowledged tham me could please step forward ?
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No, Venus's surface is a desert. It'd be hard to get a river of metal anyway: only a few metals are liquid on its surface and not even the extremely abundant ones like iron.
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only a few metals are liquid on its surface and not even the extremely abundant ones like iron.
Does that mean there are pools of liquid metal, even if there aren't rivers?
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No, there just aren't many metals that I can think of that would both melt and be found in any real abundance. Also, I've certainly never heard of any evidence of such things from my Venus-studying colleagues, although I admit that I don't attend their meetings.
Sulphuric Acid Rain (Score:2)
No, Venus's surface is a desert.
In that it doesn't have any water. However it does rain pure liquid sulphuric acid from time to time
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Actually that makes sense... the heavier metals and minerals that the solid planets (ones having a surface, as opposed to the gas ones) have a lot of would generally tend to be liquids at higher temperatures. (It's not necessarily a rule; mercury is heavy but is liquid at relatively low temperatures for example. For most of the elements it's generally true though.) You wouldn't really expect the farther-out rocky planets to have much of anything in liquid form since they're so cold.
Amazing! (Score:5, Interesting)
Please tell me that all these rovers on Mars were just there to train for the real thing on Titan.
No seriously, picture how awesome it would be to explore Titan with rovers. This place is probably the one place in the Solar system that has the most in common with our planet! The fact that it still has rivers and liquid lakes makes it so much more interesting than Mars, plus it has a thick atmosphere (5 times our atmosphere on the surface) we could probably send a UAV there or a blimp.
Re:Amazing! (Score:5, Interesting)
OK here's my idea of a fancy mission to Titan. Firstly, an orbiter around Titan, with a nice camera and the appropriate filters to see through the atmosphere like Cassini has, but also so radar thing to map the whole thing , even under its liquid lakes, and gather lots of informations about what must be Titan's unusual geology, and that would serve as a relay between Earth and the various machines on Titan. Then a lander, not necessarily a rover but that could be a plus, mainly designed to study the local geology and weather. Then a robot to explore the lakes, their chemistry, eventual currents, their depth.
And the fanciest part of all, a UAV-carrying blimp. It would float in Titan's thick atmosphere, low enough to be able to carry heavy weights (remember, on Titan a pressure of 1 Earth atmosphere is pretty high above the ground) and cover a lot of ground, provided there's some wind on Titan. It would obviously study the atmosphere, clouds, winds, chemicals composition, temperature etc extensively, but it would also be greatly placed to study the ground from very close. I said UAV-carrying, what would be more fancy than a blimp that would launch tiny UAVs that would fly around taking lots of pictures and measurements to then return to the blimp?
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Cool idea, but the UAV-carrying aspect of the blimp is an expensive disappointment waiting to happen...imagine how disappointing it would be when one or more of the UAVs crashes, and when you try to fly an autonomous UAV around an alien planet, it will happen, and probably in short order. Also in a thick atmosphere, while the aircraft would need smaller lifting surfaces / lift bags they'd also need to be big and heavy so they won't be blown around like a styrofoam take-out box if there's any wind at all, wh
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Well maybe the UAV part isn't worth it considered how complicated it would be rather than just a blimp, but on the other hand it doesn't seem that bad. It seems that near the surface winds are weak (around 0.5 m/s, or 1.8 km/h), so it doesn't matter so much if the UAVs get blown around like storyfoam in that case. It seems however that high altitude winds can reach up to 270 mph, which could be used by the blimp to travel large distances.
I think the main problem is really how to make a UAV/blimp fly in an a
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Yeah, considering that they have a hard time getting free fall to work right the first time (both Mars and the Moon have a few man-made craters, *wink*), it would be a real trick to build flying machines (either gasbag or wing contraptions) that worked in a very different (and not even fully understood) atmosphere...
Actually, joking aside, that would be a really interesting job. Since they don't know what the atmosphere is like they'd probably have to give it a pretty decent margin of error and then use som
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First of all we know Titan's atmosphere way well enough for that (look it up, we're far from completely ignorant about it unlike what you make it out to be), thanks to sending a probe there. And it wouldn't necessarily be hard, it's not because the atmosphere is different that it'd make it hard, it's just a few things about the atmosphere that may make it harder or easier, but there's nothing inherently hard about it.
Also, I think it might be easier to inflate a blimp during a parachute-slowed decent than t
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I wasn't implying we were completely ignorant of the atmosphere, and a probe that free-fell isn't going to tell us everything there is to be learned about flying in it. There could be stuff the probe didn't pick up, such as weather or variances from what the probe actually encountered. I'm not saying it can't be done, just that it'd be a nice trick.
Blimps have to have a pretty precisely calculated mass-per-volume relative to the atmosphere. I don't know exactly how much we know about the atmosphere, but the
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Map under the lakes of Titan? We can't even do that with EARTH's oceans yet.
Get a clue, fool [wikimedia.org]
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This place is probably the one place in the Solar system that has the most in common with our planet!
How do you figure that? It may have liquid on the surface but it isn't water, the temperature makes a Canadian winter seem hot and any oxygen would be explosive.
The surface of Mars or the clouds of Venus are much more similar to Earth, despite the lack of water. In fact it is likely that some types of terrestrial bacteria could survive on Mars. I don't think the same could be said of Titan.
I agree it would be really interesting to explore Titan and study the effects of the liquid ethane on the surface
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It's the only body other than Earth that has running liquids, lakes, shorelines, rivers, water erosion, and an atmosphere about as dense as Earth's (besides giant planets the other bodies either have ridiculously tenuous atmosphere, weak atmospheres like Mars, only Titan and Venus compare but Venus has a surface pressure of 95 bars, Titan only 1.46).
Besides Titan's atmosphere is 98.4% nitrogen, as the Earth's is 78% nitrogen, and only 1.6% of it is methane, which makes me wonder if it would even react with
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It's the only body other than Earth that has running liquids, lakes, shorelines, rivers...
So it looks superficially like Earth but is actually nothing like it. As I said it will be very interesting to explore and study because it does have liquid but it will only look like Earth. It would be like saying that a real apple has more in common with a wax replica than it does with a pear because the two look the same.
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The triple point is not as important as the fact that water expands as it freezes (generally) due to the configuration of the crystals formed. By doing so, it becomes more buoyant, and floats, causing lakes to freeze from the top down. This insulates the lake body from the weather and generally insures that the lake bottom remains warmer than freezing. Ethane and methane would freeze from the bottom up, causing problems to no end for things that would want to live there.
Tidal Lock (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anyone know if Titan is in tidal lock with Saturn? Anyone know if there exists a list of which moons are in tidal lock and which aren't?
Re:Tidal Lock (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tidal Lock (Score:5, Informative)
All of the medium to large satellites (Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, and Titan, Hyperion, Iapetus, and Phoebe), except Hyperion, which has a chaotic spin, and I think Phoebe, which is irregular as heck anyway. All the captured, irregular moons cannot be counted on to spin locked to the planet. The inner small moons (Pan, Daphnis, Atlas, Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, and Epimetheus) are tidally locked according to the data.
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Where did you get this list? I'd like to be able to do more research on this, and I'd like a starting point.
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Memory (and, ultimately, from talking to the people who do the measurements of spin-states), but the inner moons I mentioned are part of my research, so I'm especially keen on knowing what they're doing.
Presentation by Carolyn Porco (Cassini) @ TED. (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/carolyn_porco_flies_us_to_saturn.html [ted.com]
Sorry to bust your dreams... (Score:5, Interesting)
Before anyone comes up with the idea to mine the hydrocarbonates on Titan to overcome the oil and energy crisis on Earth, hold your breath!
The energy necessary to accelerate the mined hydrocarbonates enough to transfer them to Earth is higher than the actual energy equivalent you get by burning the hydrocarbonates. That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).
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The energy necessary to accelerate the mined hydrocarbonates enough to transfer them to Earth is higher than the actual energy equivalent you get by burning the hydrocarbonates.
What about transferring oxygen from Earth to Titan?
Think about it! On Titan, cars don't need fuel injection, they need oxygen injection.
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But how much energy would it take to get it into space where we could use it there?
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I think you would only need to accelerate out of the gravity well of Titan (plus a little more to boost from Titan's orbital speed to Saturn's escape velocity). The rest of the trip is downhill to a parking orbit around the Earth or Moon.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it would work.
Big old sausages full of Titan's Finest, with a few oxygen tanks strapped on, some low power rocket engines, and a good guidance system. Biggest energy drain of the whole trip would be the LEDs that light up the ship's name:
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You're going to have to do something to conserve all that angular momentum. As you coast down the sun's gravity well, you're picking up speed, placing you into a higher orbit, so nothing is accomplished. You have to burn fuel to slow down if you're going to get anywhere.
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There's a quick way to slow down that doesn't involve burning fuel. It's called 'crashing'. All you need to do is find something large, heavy, solid and uninhabited, somewhere conveniently near Earth, and plough straight on into it. A lump of rock in the range of, oh, seventy-four quintillion tons should be enough
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Bullshit.
Sliding from a higher orbit (Saturn) to a lower one (Earth) involves an exchange of potential energy for kinetic energy. With appropriate timing and direction of the intial burn (to escape Titan-Saturn gravity wells), our fictional Condoleezza Rice fat sausage ship would only need to make a couple of minor course corrections: it would mostly be free fall. Granted, it would be a long coast, but we've got proven technology for unmanned long term space travel. And we've also got experience in shippi
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Yea, that would be almost as stupid as spending more money to invade a country and secure their entire oil supply than that oil supply is actually worth.
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That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).
Except it doesn't work like that at all. You don't accelerate, otherwise you'll never go down to Earth's orbit, you decelerate to go down, and by doing so you gain speed.
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That's because you would have to accelerate the Titan-oil from 9.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Saturn) to 29.7 km/sec (orbital speed of Earth).
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No. Not even than. It's a physical barrier, not an economical one. You burn more Earth-oil to haul Titan-oil to Earth than the amount of Titan-oil you actually haul.
If you have to consume 9 barrel of oil to get 1 barrel of oil, then only a hedgefond or another perverse financial instrument will draw a profit from it. But in the end you just lose 8 barrel of oil.
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Why would we burn Earth oil to get Titan oil? We go there, we set up the required refineries, we transform the oil locally, and we use it to extract more of itself. Sure, we'll waste 90% of the oil there on extraction and transmission, but in the end, you still get a trickle of oil coming from Titan, which is more than it currently provides, which makes it oil-positive. You have the initial investment cost of getting equipment there, but that's what you should weigh it against -- not in proportion to itself
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More importantly, Since when do spacecraft BURN Hydrocarbons to provide propulsion?
I was under the impression that the primary stages of most space-capable rockets were Liquid Hydrogen-Oxygen fueled, with a solid fuel as a secondary booster stage, and then more liquid Hy/Ox fuel for space-based boosting and maneuvers.
Since when did we start putting V8's in our rockets?
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Exactly right. It's the old "slow down to speed up" rule in orbital mechanics. Slow down so that you can no longer maintain your orbit, and you fall inwards, gaining speed as you go.
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Seems counterintuitive to me. An object traveling from Titan to Earth would be falling into the Sun's gravity well. Some energy would be required to get the object out of the neighborhood of Saturn but the bulk of the acceleration to 29.7 km/s could occur naturally by falling, no?
No, but don't feel bad, it's a common misconception.
Turns out traveling towards the sun is hard. In fact, it's just as hard as traveling away from the sun. And you should be thankful for that, after all you wouldn't want the Earth to "fall" into the Sun.
Basically, all the objects in the solar system are in some type of orbit with respect to the sun. Getting closer or farther from the Sun (or from the Earth), means changing your orbit speed, and therefore your orbit. It takes the exact same energy to mov
Need Coffee / Glasses... (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone else read the headline as:
Liquid Snake On Saturn's Moon Confirmed
Oh my god! A new MGS Game!
A little chilly, I'd say (Score:2)
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And for people whose minds think in a different temperature system:
-86.6 degree Celsius = -123.88 degree Fahrenheit
Luckily, with a spark and some oxygen the liquid ethane will burn gloriously to keep you warm.
Unluckily, you'll still eventually die.
cowabunga and such (Score:3, Funny)
sgt: Ok, men, wax your boards and hit the surf.
pvt: Hey, do you think it's safe?
sgt: Don't worry, Geeblort don't surf!
So where did these hydrocarbons come from? (Score:2, Interesting)
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The hydrocarbons are pretty simple relative to organically-produced ones. You get the more complicated ones on Titan by photo-chemical reactions in the atmosphere. (UV from the Sun breaks bonds which recombine in new and exciting ways.)
Re:So where did these hydrocarbons come from? (Score:5, Funny)
> I thought we've always had beaten into our heads that hydrocarbons, and oil and gas in particular were the result of decaying biomass from dinosaurs. So, where did these hydrocarbons come from? Was Titan an outpost for some spacefaring dino species, that got wiped out in a strange intergalactic plague? Or is there a much more sane, reasonable answer that I just haven't seen yet?
Q: Ethane on Titan comes from:
A. The decayed, compressed remains of Titanic Dinosaurs.
A: Xenu dropped his dinosauroid enemies into volcanos on Titan.
B: The devil planted it there to trick us
C: Solar radiation hits Methane (CH4), splitting it into (CH3+H), which quickly recombines into Ethane (C2H6)
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> : Solar radiation hits Methane (CH4), splitting it into (CH3+H),
> which quickly recombines into Ethane (C2H6)
OK smartypants, so where did the methane come from?
Or is it turtles all the way down?
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I never said (C) was the right answer. Personally, I suspect this is the correct answer [wearscience.com]
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Methane is a natural and expected part of the moons (and planets) in the outer solar system. You'll note that Uranus and Neptune have large methane contents and even Saturn has a noticeable methane haze in its upper atmosphere.
(You don't see a lot of methane on Earth because we have an oxygen-rich atmosphere and methane has a lifetime in the atmosphere of around a decade.)
In other news (Score:2)
A consortium of Exxon/Shell/BP/Haliburton have formed the Hydrocarbon Orbital Recovery - Exterra Partners, know as HORE Partners, to being planning for recover of the Titan resources.
What are the chances of life? (Score:2)
The whole "USA invade SATuRn for OiL" thing gets tiring after a while. What are the real chances of a form of life on Titan?
According to TFA the lakes seem to be a mixture of ethane, methane and other hydrocarbons. From what I've read, he general consensus is that life requires a liquid solvent that can dissolve a vast amount of materials, such as water or ammonia. It seems that ammonia ices and water ices have been ruled out on the surface, leaving only the frozen and non frozen areas of hydrocarbons.
Given
Chemistry (Score:3, Interesting)
All the articles mention ethane being the product of methane "broken" by sunlight, it is actually methane CH4 having it's H knocked away by a sunlight reaction to make a methyl CH3 radical and joining with another CH3 to make ethane C2H6. I guess you can call that "broken" into ethane.
Given that the above reaction has a byproduct of H*, I guess there is an open question if it can somehow combine with the Nitrogen. For example, if you have some natural process of natural Nitrogen fixation (breaking the tri
Obligatory (Score:2)
On soviet Titan, the planet orbits you.
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Stretch space hoes? Weird oceans? Sounds like THHGTTG already.
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There's our chance to lower the gas price and test if the Global warming is a myth. Import it from Saturn.
What? Are you saying you want to try to burn ethane gas instead of gasoline? I guess you could, though I wouldn't want to be anywhere near ethane storage if a leak was suspected - mixtures of 3% ethane in atmospheric air can be explosive.
And of course that's ignoring how much energy and money would be expended to try to bring it to earth from Saturn.
On another tought, how about a refuelling station there for space exploration ?
Are you planning to burn the ethane? If so, then you would still need to bring oxygen with you, as there might not be any of it there. Unless you want to
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I guess you could, though I wouldn't want to be anywhere near ethane storage if a leak was suspected - mixtures of 3% ethane in atmospheric air can be explosive.
Ethane is part of natural gas, and was burned along with the methane for a long time. Now they take it out because it is valuable, not because it is hazardous. A leak would just vent, since it's lighter than air. Propane scares the hell out of me, especially when I see it inside.
Re:goody (Score:4, Insightful)
Other than burning hydrocarbons, what would you do with them?
TFA says that theres methane, ethane and other light hydrocarbons. You can make CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs and that kind of fun stuff with methane and ethane, but to make polymers you need ethylene or other hydrocarbons with double or triple bonds.
It probably wouldn't be feasible to transport hydrocarbons from Titan back to Earth for consumption here, the energy costs alone would be astronomical; that and the whole climate change and tendancy to move away from hydrocarbons... The only thing I can see this being "useful" for is if we wanted a "refueling station" in space where we could just load up a spaceship with what is essentially natural gas. The only problem would be finding oxygen to combust it with...
I see what you did there... (Score:4, Funny)
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The only thing I can see this being "useful" for is if we wanted a "refueling station" in space where we could just load up a spaceship with what is essentially natural gas. The only problem would be finding oxygen to combust it with...
... hellooo... cloud mining Saturn. The obvious discovered!
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The only problem would be finding oxygen to combust it with...
Send a giga-shitload of solar panels there, fore into the liquid water layer [wikipedia.org], do electrolysis, and there you go!
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Actaully, if there is such an abundance of the stuff we use for power why would it be that impossible?
Launch rocket from Earth with transport probe.
Transport probe houses parts for a return rocket and parts for a "shipping container".
Once it arrives, it fuels the return rocket and loads the shipping container.
Launch rocket from destination towards Earth.
As it nears Earth, launch a receiving rocket which aids in safe descent of the shipping container.
As long as the shipping container is collapsible (somethin
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Why land? Just hook up a pipeline to the space elevator. :-)
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You can make CFCs, HCFCs, HFCs and that kind of fun stuff with methane and ethane, but to make polymers you need ethylene or other hydrocarbons with double or triple bonds.
Where do you think we get ethylene on Earth? It's produced by putting ethane in a steam cracker.
Official Official Thread! (Score:2)
This is the official official thread. All other threads should post under this one if they want to be official. Please post here to avoid contaminating the jokes with non-funny comments.
Thank you and good day sirs!
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The first manned mission to Titan ended tragically today as one of the astronauts stepped out onto the surface and lit up a cigarette.
You'd need oxygen for that.
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Wow, that didn't last long.
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Not all oxidation requires Oxygen. Reference the Na Cl reaction as just one trivial example. However the production of flames rather than kabooms requires something to moderate the reaction. It would be interesting to find what reactions could take place at Titan's STP.
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Not all oxidation requires Oxygen. Reference the Na Cl reaction as just one trivial example. However the production of flames rather than kabooms requires something to moderate the reaction. It would be interesting to find what reactions could take place at Titan's STP.
It would be rather good if fossil oxidiser could be found on Titan. Perhaps there are deep beds of frozen Nitrous Oxide under the surface just waiting to be dug up and put to use in a new fossil fuel industry.
Re:Cheesy Joke Thread, and life on Saturn (Score:5, Funny)
Not "invade". Sheesh, keep to the script why dontcha?!
Act 1: Locate & Destroy Secret Inter-planetary WMDs
Act 2: Er, forget that, we never said that, we meant; Liberate oppressed Saturnians
Act 3: Confuse Saturn For Something Jupiter Did - Meh, they're all gas-giants aren't they?
Act 4: Ooh, fancy that, you have oil? That we did not know.
Act 5: Damn Ungrateful Tentacle-heads
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Act 6: ???
Act 7: Profit!
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Not much. This isn't oil on Titan, it's simpler compounds. And the chemistry that works on Titan almost certainly doesn't work on the Earth outside the lab since the temperatures are extremely different.
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Doofus. Read the freaking article that you linked. Right there in the page, it shows abiogenic reactions that can produce methane, ethane, and ethylene (short chain hydrocarbons like the ones found on Titan). However, similar methods to create long chain stuff (like the components of terrestrial crude oil) are thermodynamically infeasible.
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Don' free teh Titans. Perseus is dead.
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I find it rather comical that anyone is giving serious consideration to mining Titan for hydrocarbons for use on Earth. Most of the time I've seen such discussions the use has been for things like fuel for trips outside the solar system.
We're really reaching a point here on Earth where we need to do a better job considering the entire systems we're connected with: the carbon cycle, the water cycle, proper maintenance of soil, sustainability, etc.
Although some may wish to argue global warming issues, really
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True but the amount of fuels that would be burned in order to get there to examine more fuels defeats the purpose doesn't it?
Don't they teach chemistry in American high schools? In French high schools they teach you that you need something like oxygen to burn fuel.
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Check Netcraft if you're not convinced.