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Science

Sea of oil seen on Titan/DS1 Asteriod fly-by 138

Posted by Hemos from the it's-quickies-from-space dept.
nsanch writes "The BBC is reporting that there may be an ocean of oil on Titan, the only open sea on a planet (other than Earth) that's in our solar system." And in other news, thanks to Corrado for the pointer over to the Deep Space 1 Mission Log, chuck-full of details from the recent Asteriod Braille fly-by. Amazing how much info you can get at 35,000 Miles per Hour.
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Sea of oil seen on Titan/DS1 Asteriodfly-by More

Sea of oil seen on Titan/DS1 Asteriodfly-by

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  • MORE SPACE NEWS! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Dont forget: Tommorrow the Lunar Prospector crashes on the surface of the Moon!

    Also, another planet was found today circling a distant star.

    www.space.com

  • The link (Score:1)

    by whoop ( 194 )
    This is getting weird, but links people post like you did have been pointing to http://slashdot.org in comments. Did you have an article, or just like pointing us to Slashdot?
  • Some talk radio stations will do these sort of things as well. I just have't ran into them myself on the street when asking questions.

    But's it is funny listening to people fumble over things like, "Who's the President of the United States?" And then they throw in something like asking about whatever is going on with Friends and they can spout that off without skipping a beat.

    What I've always believed is that by default, people are stupid. It takes work to think, learn something new, etc. And most Americans are just too busy (and don't really care about anything but) watching Friends to sit down and analyze what "right mouse button" means. (That was the hardest part of a phone Windows tech support line I worked at, describing to people how to click that button, sheesh.) I'd wager that more people know everything about the final Seinfeld episode than can recall anything about the Challenger accident
  • The fact is no one has used the
    Atlantic Ocean since 1492! Who needs it?

    Don't know where you are, but around here we use the Atlantic Ocean everytime we go to the beach. Where do you think those fish sticks yer eating came from, Lake Erie?
  • The BBC is very fast. They put stuff up in that little Java thing in about 5 mins, and get a story in 10-15 or less. For instance the failed, then sucessful shuttle launch. BBC wrote how it failed right away, while places like CNN took a while to put stuff up.
  • I've seen this a few times and it is just sad(and very funny) that people can't figure out some of the easiest fucking things. They had one they showed a guy a picture of a giraffe and asked him what it was and he said it was a cheetah or something. And another time they asked a bunch of people how many stars are on the flag and a bunch didn't get it.
  • I've never understood why Americans complaign about us Brits having to pay a TV tax to fund the BBC, as your TV is "free", when the only way to get even close to decent TV in the US is to pay even more to get the likes of HBO and UPN =OZ

  • Sounds a bit like Brin's "Heart of the Comet"... Horrible book.

  • As I can recall, Nostradamus has predicted that a life form would be found outside the earth during the year 1999, is this related?
  • Well, universe is expanding, but into *what*?!?
  • Yeah! That'll work. I think we ought to move our Solar System into the crab nebula, too, I heard Real Estate is cheap as dirt over there... Someone get NASA on the phone...

    --
    Dave Brooks (db@amorphous.org)
    http://www.amorphous.org

  • The idea in Isaac Asimov's short story "The Martian Way" is probably more practical (or less impractical) than this. What they did was: fly out to Saturn, pick a ring particle that was about a cubic mile of fresh water ice, attach thrusters, and fly it back, to land on Mars. The background was that there was an established colony on Mars and lots of nasty politics going on between them and Earth, mainly over water.

    This might be easier because it doesn't involve building a tank big enough to contain the HUGE amount of oil that it would take to make the trip worthwhile, or landing on a planet and having to lift the payload off of its surface. And as fresh water gets more valuable here due to pollution and overpopulation, something like that could really come in handy.

    Of course, either way, this stuff is way, way, far out there. On the other hand, if we're going to look that far ahead, an ocean of hydrocarbons would make a nice energy source for a colony out there, at least if there was also a good supply of oxygen.

    David Gould
  • I have always found this logic disturbing. What leads you to believe that life must be found in Earth-like conditions? Perhaps Earth-like life can only be found in Earth-like conditions, but to assert that life in general can only exist above temperature t, in the presence of a certain amount of water, with a particular nitrogen/oxygen ratio, is really unimaginative.

    I don't think that we should rule out sectors of the universe as containing no life on the sole basis that we wouldn't be confortable there.

  • (Despite Europa's distance from the sun, Jupiter emits significant heat at close range which is leftover primordial heat from the solar system formation).

    Not to mention Jupiter's significant tidal effects on its satellites, which contributes energy to them.

  • Does anyone else read the BBC article and think of he old stories of the canals on Mars? I really smile when I read a paragraph like:

    The dark material could be a sea of liquid methane, ethane or other hydrocarbons," Livermore's Bruce Macintosh said. "It's one of the darkest things in the solar system. It could also be solid organic material."
  • The info is correct in this case. The pointing was off enough that as they got closer, the asteroid moved out of the field of view. The ion detection experiment got data so it wasn't a total washout. The other thing to remember is that this was a "getaway special" to validate technology and the fact that they passed so close was a major piece of the validation. The mission wasn't to get a picture but for an autonomous approach/flyby.
  • but I refrained from putting it into the first reply.
  • And of course, the fact that 2001 et all claimed it to be "the one" 8^)

    Seriously, the heat on Europa is also partially due to the deforming effects of being in Jupiter's gravitational well. The surface has tides which generates heat through the friction.
  • That's nothing new for NASA. It's just realistic. Had NASA not thought we were ready to put men on the moon in 1969, they were just going to have men orbit the moon instead. This, by the way, was the exact same plan the USSR was pursuing: land on the moon, but if you can't do that, just orbit the moon before 1970. In other words: save face.

    All of this was written up in a fairly interesting article in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks back, on an article about the USSR space program in the 1960s.

    --Philip
  • All the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are likely quite warm a few miles down due to intense gravitational tidal forces from their host planets.

    Remember that on earth we got bacteria in deep wells that live off hydrocarbons.
  • Nonsense. Planets out in the solar system are moving very slowly compared to the earth.

    All you'd need to do is alter the orbit enough so the peregee is 93,000,000 miles or so and you could reach earth.

    Just figure out when the distance from the sun is 93,000,000 miles, and time it just right so that the Earth is in that same spot at the same time.

    To accomplish this feat, you'd actually have to slow down which would lower your solar orbit. Speeding up would raise your solar orbit or even send you out of the solar system.

  • Trouble is not among Americans but the Massive Meditators. On my work with Mars I have found a pretty good number of Americans to be quite interested not only on the search of li'll green men but also in several scientific fields related to Mars. Also they try to be adventure on fields of theology and philosophy. Well considering some nature of the American Society the last is quite amazing.

    American citizens are quite active people on this field. However this doesn't go for their Mass Media. Their behaviour is even quite amazing here. Some of their channels present such material in a very one-sided way. Something like "how great we are" and basta. Besides it seems that some people on some popular channels suffer of depressive melancoly when writing their material. It is pure boredom and sometimes the top of stupidity.

    Unfortunately the problem does not end here. In fact sometimes are the scietific organizations that create such environment. Their own material seems to be filled more with words like "excited", "amazing", "surprised", "fantastic" with some superficial and dry descriptions of what's really going on.
  • Funny but now in Russia there goes a all country campaign to gather funds for MIR. Just day before yesterday I noted a van with a poster sayin "Let's save MIR!".

    I don't know how successful this thing will be. Well MIR is old but that thing has shown a damn will to survive. It survived its planned 5 years of activity. It survived USSR and all the crisis that followed it. It survived a major crash not long ago. Will it make it this time? Well the Borg, I mean NASA is damn willing to see the thing down under the Ocean. But if it goes Open Source it might well become the next killer app...
  • While the orthodox conclusion is that oil is decomposed creatures, there is a considerably body of opinion to the contrary, which also claims that there's a hell of a lot more of it than we think there is.

    If this story were really about oil on Titan, it would support that view.

    Sadly, as you seem to have missed, the story isn't about oil on Titan; the poster just made an unwarranted assumption.
  • Actually the BBC article was poorly written and researched. I'm not sure which is better, CNN's scrawny disinterested sciece reporting, or the BBC's sensationalism.

    Is either relevant? Anyone with a trained interest in science will go to other sources for their news . ( like from Science Daily's Space & Time News Headlines [sciencedaily.com].) The reporting aimed at the general public is usually tied to someone's pursuit of funding, or its tained by some other finincial / investment interest. True science news is just not relevant to most readers.

  • For anyone with any real interest in Titan, there are plenty of good, primary sources of information on the net.

    First, the Keck observations are on the net at Titan [hawaii.edu], with plenty of info on the adaptive optics technology they used to get a better view than Hubble or Voyager I.

    Next, visit "The Nine Planets" [anu.edu.au] and their page on Saturn [anu.edu.au] or Titan [anu.edu.au] to get a broad view of what is being researched and who is doing it.

    This leads us ot Cassini and the expected observations of Titan. Thanks to the Keck observations, there should be a lot of interest in Cassini's Titan probe. As noted on the Huygens Titan Probe [esa.int] site, on their Why Titan [estec.esa.nl] page, the peculiar nature of Titan, with its plentiful organics and opaque atmosphere, have been well known and of great interest since Voyager.

    But anyone who wanted to know already knew. So why are we makig a slashdot fuss over mass media coverage of anything scientific?

  • Did you ever think it could be a joke?

    "/. is now the home of the dead minds."
  • Uhh. Just thinking.
    They say that it's so cold there. I s'pose there can be no life where it's minus 180 degrees C.
    But then I thought; "Maybe if we moved it closer to the sun?"
    So, if we blew som A-bombs on the other side of it, it would move to the sun and there would be life?

    Just my .02.

    We learned more from a 3 minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.
  • While I'm not sure I would belive these statistics if they were taken in a large metro area... I would believe it of the people who lived in the area I grew up in... I doubt that many of them could figure out where Ohio was on an unmarked map... let alone someplace they've never been.

    Heh, there was once a discussion there... and people argued over when the revolutionary war was fought and who fought in it!
  • Perhaps, however if anyone has ever seen and believes those quizes that appear on the Tonight Show w/ Jay Leno, well, needless to say we have A LOT of dumb people in this country. They always go to college graduations and what not too!

  • ...when almost 40 percent of Americans are unable to identify the Atlantic Ocean on a blank map..

    This is very hard to believe. I don't know anyone that ignorant. If this statistic came from a poll or something, I wonder if they took into account that some people, when asked a very obvious question, will intentionally respond incorrectly as a "joke". I know that if a pollster showed me a map and asked me to point out the Atlantic Ocean, I would point right at Tibet, and I'de be proud to be recognized as a true red-blooded American smartass.



    ---
    Have a sloppy night.
  • "Windows leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to LINUX."

    You're right.
  • Hmm, and last time I checked Europa was a moon of Jupiter. (Not that anyone here wouldn't know about that, I mean all of ous hve read 2010, right?)

    /emj
  • No, it's not Abian. I regret to inform you that Alexander Abian died just last week. I looked, briefly, for an obit on the web, but couldn't find one. While many knew him only as "that crackpot who wanted to blow up the moon", it should be noted that he was also a well-liked professor of mathematics.

    Since I couldn't find an online obit, here's a link to Abian's web page [iastate.edu].
  • The Discovery Channel News Friday nights, and the Discovery Channel in general. I never watch network TV anymore. I've given up on it and anyone that participates in it.

    TDC is owned by ABC however. Hmmm.

  • My understanding is that there is a great deal of tectonic activity on titan due to tidal forces exerted by Saturn... the result is a great deal of heat. The investigation of thermal vents on earth has led to the discovery of life in extremely high temperature conditions (and some scientists now suspect these conditions may have been the origination of life on earth), leading to the hypothesis that similar conditions might exist on Titan. Hence, there may in fact be life on Titan.
  • You could 'mine' it , and it would be quite economical indeed.
    Remember, it's a long way back to Earth to refuel your spacecraft, getting a little local hydrogen in a liquid form (ie hydrocarbon) would reduce the cost of a long term mission immensely. Even for a robotic mission, you could do the Mars Direct plan of sending the Rocket Fuel plant first, then when it is fully loaded, send your payload with a one-way fuel load to reduce mission costs/ increase payload. Using autonomous probes that could refuel in the system would allow for multi-year missions with much larger spacecraft.

    Some SF here... Send a mission out to get a big chunk of H2O ice and pack it off to Mars using local fuel source. (Trivia:what's the story name?)
  • One interesting thing to note that links both of the NASA articles is that apparently the BBC has a faster refresh as well. Consider this story [bbc.co.uk] that was just released, which tells us that, while passing a asteroid at 3.5e4 miles per hour is good, apparently you can't collect amazing amounts of data if your camera is pointed in the wrong direction.

    The BBC beat the science log. Interesting, though it sounds like a very tired science log writer - with reason! But its too bad we didn't get all that we could. Oh well, we'll have to try again another time :)
  • I get UPN for free, with an antenne. It's channel 27. And do you not concider C-Span, PBS, The Discovery Channel, and The Learning Channel good tv? I think they're much better than HBO, the network which commonly airs porno after 11pm and last year had a movie called "Breast Men". Do they do that on the BBC? Do you get BBC porno?
  • Given the same orbit as the earth, the angle of rotation would make more of a difference in the weather than the distance from the sun.


    It's all about the angle of incoming solar radiation, baybe..

  • Also done in Red Mars.
    There was a mission along these lines in MechWarrior2 (given, not to Mars...)

    Probably many more terraforming-type books have the same basic idea.

    BitPoet
  • Argh! You beat me to it!

  • You know, most of the images released for the public have been coloured with false colours to enhance the image. Like the horsehead nebula for example, or the red spot on Jupiter, which, IIRC, is not really red but rather brownish.
    I use lynx today so I didn't bother downloading the images; I don't know what they look like in this article.
  • Uhm. Lets look at this list:

    PBS: Partly government funded. Yep, you pay for *some* of it.
    C-Span, TDS, TLC: Unless you're extroadinarily fortunate, you can't get these broadcast. You have to buy cable/satellite service/etc. So you're paying for t.
  • Are they going to name the first interplanetary oil tanker Nostromo?

    George
  • Nah, there's probably not enough oxygen.

    I think it's a great way to dispose of all the cold war nukes, keep firing them off at Titan until it moves closer to Earth. They should even give it an elliptical orbit, so you have a year a hot weather and a year of cold weather, it would rule.

    George
  • >If anyone wants to visit an enviroment with oily
    >pools, methane rain and clouds of amonia, just
    >swing by my apartment. I haven't cleaned my
    >bathroom in ages.

    Bah, that's nothing. You should see the food they were serving in the cafeteria here. I think they called it "French Onion Soup," but we all knew better.
  • Bah! Ya right.

    I can see it now.. $500 a gallon for gas at your local pump.. Refined from the best oil in the solar system.

    I don't think so...
  • Wow! If there is a "sea" there that is composed of somesort of hydrocarbon, perhaps there is a chance for life. Maybe this possible organic material could be sort of like the primortial ooze that was on the earth once, if your like me and believe in evolution. Although, it said that the planet was roughly minus 180 degrees Celsius, life probably wouldn't be able to start without the kickstart of enough heat energy. The idea of looking at material that may have been what started life on our planet would be absolutely amazing!

  • Do any of y'all know why the tanker was named Nostromo?

    The Conrad novel of the same title is one of my favorite books, and I don't really see any parallels.

    -awc
  • I hear that, in light of the recent failures, they're modifying all of the knobs on the space shuttle to go to eleven, rather than ten.

    "It's for that extra boost," remarked one NASA official.

    -awc
  • "Space technology will probably never become so cheap that it will be a cost savings to transport it from ANOTHER planet as opposed to Saudi Arabia. "

    I dunno...sometime OPEC can get a little full of itself. A trade war could push planetary oil prices up past interstellar rates.

    Of course, I find it terribly amusing that we are even discussing "interstellar oil prices."

    -awc
  • Right right. What I really wanted to know was why the ship in Alien was named the Nostromo.

    -awc
  • I heard this morning on an unreliable but funny radio talk show that in fact they got no pictures of the asteroid. Apparently the camera was pointed in the wrong direction. Again, usually the news from this show is correct, but has been wrong just often enough for me to have doubts. Although something like this wouldn't surprise me coming from NASA. Anyone have memories of the Hubble Space PaperWeight?
  • I don't think there is going to be a commercial interest in retrieving oil anytime soon. The cost of transporting oil (which is really quite cheap by volume) makes it a ludicrous proposal. Space technology will probably never become so cheap that it will be a cost savings to transport it from ANOTHER planet as opposed to Saudi Arabia. Maybe it will be useful as a heat source when we started expanding past the planet Earth.

    Spyky
  • There's an article about the missed photo here
  • This has the most significant of implications for our society.

    Too bad I don't know what they are. :) IMUHO (uber -humble), the coolest thing about the article was the artistic interpretation of the probe landing on Titan. The rest of it... well, the rest of it can be summed up in, "Cool, there's oil on Titan."

    I guess I just wanted something more entertaining. Like, "There's an open sea on Titan, and the Navy can't find any traces of JFK jr's plane in it anywhere."

    But maybe I'm just as morbid as a nihilistic mule.

  • We by no means know everything dealing with lifeforms so how can we assume that it must come in a form that we know of?
  • You are supposed to feel Braille, not look at it. Turning a blind eye was a good start, though.
  • I agree, if one is going to report a significant claim such as organic life deposits in the form of a vast ocean on a distant moon, one should research the definition of moon, oil,ocean before stating that on a freezing MOON, not planet,millions of miles from the Sun, that an ocean, (could be solid dark mass, or methane like hydrocarbons) of oil (composed of organic deposits, generating by compacted remains of life) is available to us... Life on the "new planet" of titan? I figure no...
    but that could be just me, one of the learned population... Go BBC!
  • We've pretty much sucked the life out of this planet...why not start on a distant moon? I hope that this moon isn't being looked at as a possible power source in the future, when we can actually get to it...
  • Yeah why don't we nuke Titan? Sounds like a good idea....except one thing....they reported that there is Methane on that moon...hence all there would be is one big explosion!
    They'd be some huge fireworks...
  • No..itz not...
  • Transporting the oil would be the easy part. Just drop it and it falls down the gravity well towards Earth. Aiming might be difficult though.
  • The gravitational interactions would be something to worry about. Moving it closer might just make it a moon of Jupiter instead of Saturn, or an outright collision. If you avoided that, there might still be insufficient solar flux, so you'd have to get it through the asteroid belt, which brings another host of problems.
  • Er, Isn't NASA a government owned company or agency? If so, how can a company "invest" money it in?
  • I'd love to get in on this new Exxon/Titan spin off IPO. But I'm sure that "those bastards" at E-titan won't let me in on the IPO.

    Listen-I've been using and generating hydrocarbons since before I was born. I have every right to be able to get in on this opportunity of the century.

    ---
    just my .02
  • Since oil is decomposed creatures does thi imply that there was once life on Titan?
  • Ooops, silly question by me. Should have read the article properly. I'm sure my A-Level chemistry should have told me that :)
  • So if they can prove %100 there is oil, it is going to get commerical really quick, I heard yesterday eXon invested $100 Mil into NASA, for get where the news article is. BTW it has the coolest pic, check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/405000/images/_40685 9_keck150.jpg It is from the news site and looks like something from star wars.

  • Methane and ethane are not "oil" (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All oils are hydrocarbons, however, not all hydrocarbons are oils. This fact is lost on the media who were quick to happily substitute one for the other and log another notch on their sensationalism gun.

    Most earth oil deposits are formed from decomposed plant and other biologocal matter. Taking the wrong assumption that HCs == oil and that oil came from life leads one to a totally bogus conclusion.

    Titan is an interesting collection of chemicals, but is of zero intrest for possible life. You'd be better off looking for microbes on Mars near the poles or in the more plausible slushy ice water oceans on Europa. (Despite Europa's distance from the sun, Jupiter emits significant heat at close range which is leftover primordial heat from the solar system formation).
  • So THAT'S what NASA did with all it's old Pentium computers! I'd wondered about that.
  • Not quite. The American mass media want sex and violence on this planet. The BBC prefers it on other planets (or America).
  • Only if there was sufficient oxygen for the reaction to take place.

    Hmmmm... If you -sprayed- oxygen at Titan, you could turn it into a giant rocket.

  • Yeah, and Alfred E Einstein couldn't even remember his own phone number, yet he was no sloucher! (Not at all.)

    Just cause people can't find an ocean on a blank map (like, is that a map on a blank piece of paper or what?), doesn't mean it matters. The fact is no one has used the Atlantic Ocean since 1492! Who needs it?

    Besides, we just found a new ocean on Titan, so who can be expected to keep track of these things when they keep changing all the time anyway?
  • Does anyone else find it interesting and almost slightly irritating that the BBC does a hell of a better job reporting NASA events and stories better than American journalists? It seems that Americans no longer find this type of thing important, which is a pity. No wonder NASA keeps getting their budget cut.
  • Okay. Get past the title "Oily ocean found on distant moon", and that not-very-compelling image of a probe landing on titan (seen much better on Digital Blashphemy, thanks), and what does the article _really_ say?

    Basically, we found that kidney has a dark kidney-shaped feature, and a giant duck that might be rock and ice. The dark kidney-shaped feature might be some kind of liquid hydrocarbon, or maybe some kind of organic solid, or maybe just black rocks. The scientists quoted didn't draw any definate conclusions, and the real breakthrough was just getting a "quantitative map" of the surface.

    I find this to be interesting on its own, without the premature declaration that there's a huge sea of oil on Titan.

    What I also find interesting is that the pictures from the ground-based telescopes were clearer than those of the Hubble.

  • TANKER HIT BY METEROITE

    Tranquility Base (IP) The interplanetary oil taker
    Nostromo, on a routine run from Titan to the Hexagon
    Corporation Earth ports was struck by a large meteroite
    at 013588 hours yesterday, leaving the craft crippled
    and leaking an estimated 130,000 gallons per hour into
    the L5 space preserve quadrilateral. "This is the worst
    intra-luna disaster we have ever seen" said Lgarth Mrubbl3,
    spokesbeing for the Committee for the Preservation of Clean
    Space (CPCS). "We have repeatedly recommended the use
    of cleaner, more powerful nuclear fuels, but nooooo! We
    have to truck it in from foreign colonies". Hexagon Corporation
    officials, in what is widely reguarded as merely a public
    relations move, have already dispatched an emergency
    crew to deal with the disaster, but industry insiders
    beleive that their ability to suck up large blobs of the
    floating Titan #4 Crude are extremely limited, and expect
    vast clouds of the sticky substance to orbit the Earth and
    disrupt space travel for years until it is finally dispersed
    by the solar wind.

  • Or at least a whole bunch of highly radioactive oil that NOBODY would be able to use for hundreds of thousands of years. What a way to keep the 'other guy' from getting at it.
  • Stories like that are great. They should aspire to be onion-type stuff.

    Who actually reads segfault? I went there a few times, but the quality is a bit lacking. Here on slashdot, there is a method of getting a lot of people to read the cream, if only enough moderators like it.

    Observe that this story was sent to level 5 and will therefore be seen by many.
  • Yup. NASA has subscribed to the theory "If at first you don't succeed, lower your expectations." Now they plan a high-stakes mission and then sit back and say "If it fails, what can we accomplish anyway? OK, THAT'S what we'll say our goal is." I was flabbergasted when it hit me that once you cut through all the PR, the stated goal of the Mars Explorer project was "Shoot a package at Mars and hit it." We did that and more in the 70s. Of course, the project was a resounding success, but if the little Mars Rover had died on impact, they still could have said "The project succeeded because the package landed!"
  • It was too expensive to operate in that capacity. Remember how often those transports were in refit? It was said that Mars experienced economic depressions every time one of them went in for service.

    It would just be a disaster. We'd have to start a colony on Titan, and police it with Battleroids, and then all hell would break loose when the next wandering spacefaring, slave-trading race popped in for a look.

    Better to just leave it alone.

    MJP
  • Here's one paper on the origin of oil [cornell.edu]. Basically, that hydrocarbons deposits are not biological, and biological traces are from bacteria.
  • Uh, there was a probe? I have to go back and re-read that because I only read about the Keck reflector in Hawaii being used.

    Oh, ok.. Cassini will drop a probe when it gets there in 2004. That's in the last paragraph. Its a little misleading then that the top of the article shows an artists' impression of a probe making you think that they confirmed 'oil' on the surface when, in reality, they *think* some dark spots on an earth-observatory image might be hydrocarbon seas.

    Sheesh. I'm dissapointed. Guess I'll have to scrap my idea for an interplanetary pipeline to bring crude oil to Earth. Had a name picked out for the company and everything, "Titanic Intra-solar Transportation Systems (TITS)". :-D

  • Sometime back a few years, 1976 as I recall, there was a National Geographic discussing the possibility of life on Jupiter. It makes perfect sense, when you think about it, as a planet of that size would have a thick layer capable of supporting life.

    One of the probes (Voyager 2?) we sent out apparently returned information to the effect that the giant red eye of Jupiter was in fact largely composed of amino acids. If there are amino acids, then there is the possibility for more complex forms of existence.

    Personally, I believe that life originated in the incubation-like atmosphere of comets, and that microbacteria in the comets made it to earth. (Some terran straph/strep bacteria is currently on the moon, surviving, as I recall from one of the NASA reports, but I can't remember which.) It is likely then, that any place in this solar system where life could survive, it has, and will. That's what life does best. (Up to the point where it reaches something like us. :) )

    If someone would like to know what issue of Nat. Geo. was, I'm sure I could dig it out and let you know.
    (email bmh@canada.com)

  • LOL!

    (I was looking for a MEEPT!!!!! :) )
  • (like, is that a map on a blank piece of paper or what?)

    Well, I think "unlabeled map" might have been a more appropriate and descriptive term .. what I meant was a map with no names on it. As far as the source of the statistic, I really don't remember. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not; it's funny either way (or sad, depending on your point of view.) :-)
  • It seems that Americans no longer find this type of thing important, which is a pity.

    Yes, it is. But when almost 40 percent of Americans are unable to identify the Atlantic Ocean on a blank map, it sort of stands to reason that they wouldn't be interested in an ocean on a faraway celestial body.
  • Well, yes... I can't say that I have much respect for CNN, especially with their report on a recent Linux expo and I quote "with the recent debut of linux..." Actually quite sad that they have very little knowledge of what actually matters. :) Quite a nice gag with a large FreeBSD sign carried across the background, but that's quite besides the point. (still makes me laugh though)

    That aside, it's of little importance who does the reporting... hell that's what the internet is for. If you don't like the reporting one place, go to another. I imagine that it will only be a short while before the media as a whole understands that much of middle-class america will be comprised of tech related fields and at that point, maybe things will change. Sadly a cheese advert here states it quite bluntly:

    - people thought the moon was cheese
    - went there and found out it wasn't
    - we haven't been back since

    It seems that there just isn't enough justification for the funds that NASA requires to do more that long term research. Yes, this is because of a lack of public intrest, or it might be better stated as a lack of public conviction.

    Truthfully there are more reliable and interesting sources available than CNN anyway. C-span for instance.

    "that bloke's a nutta"

  • There's no set rule stating that life has to evolve in Earth-like conditions. However, the rate of chemical reactions is directly dependant on temperature. The actual formula for figuring out the rates is a bit complicated (unless you memorized the powers of "e"), but the simple rule of thumb is that the rate doubles for each increase of 10 degress Celcius.

    This means that in a cold environment (for example, Titan), chemical reactions would take place extremely slowly. On the other hand, in a hot environment (Mercury, Venus, a campfire), reactions take place quickly. See also: combustion.

    Also, in order to be able to move about and interact with it's environment, you need some combination of phases (solid, liquid, and gas). Too cold, and you end up with a living ice cube that can't do anything besides sit there. Too hot, and your life form evaporates and diffuses through the air.

    Now, with that said, there isn't any good reason to presume that life has to be exactly like us. They could use ammonia instead of water, silicon instead of carbon, etc. (Actually, the results aren't exactly the same, but it's still possible)

    I think I paid way too much attention in biology and chemisty last year... -ElJefe

  • Hey there! I got an idea! Let's make an OpenSource sattelite project and send it into space! Wouldn't it be cool if our satellite would actually reach intelligent life "out there" first and they crack our ship open to find a stuffed Tux doll? ;)

    "The Beav"

  • Interesting Titan info (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 30, 1999 @06:06AM (#1774806)
    http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/nine planets/titan.html [upenn.edu]

    --ac
  • It's one of the darkest things in the solar system.

    Sounds like a sea of gooified Spinal Tap album jackets to me.

  • No, not oil... (Score:3)

    by Belgarath ( 9474 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @06:40AM (#1774808)
    They describe oceans of hydrocarbons, but remember, hydrocarbons != oil! What we're talking about is liquid ethane or methane... and besides, even if this was oil (which it's not), the suggestion that we could "mine" this stuff is absolutely preposterous. The cost of a return, robotic mission to a Titan would be enormous, not to mention the fact that we've never built a space vehicle capable of shipping enough stuff from Titan to make it economically viable.

    BTW, the BBC article never used the words "oil" in their article, AFAIK... I have no idea how that was assumed...

  • If anyone wants to visit an enviroment with oily pools, methane rain and clouds of amonia, just swing by my apartment. I haven't cleaned my bathroom in ages.
    --Shoeboy

  • Re:Saudi Arabia Annexes Titan (Score:3)

    by Shoeboy ( 16224 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @08:04AM (#1774810) Homepage
    Man, you have got to start submitting these to segfault or something. These fake new stories are consistently high quality. It's a shame we have to surf the comments in order to see these.
    --Shoeboy

  • Sing along. . . (Score:4)

    by TheIneffable ( 56926 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @06:45AM (#1774811)
    I'd like to be
    under the sea
    In a Saturn's rings beneath the waves
    We'd dance and shout,
    and sing refrains
    until explosive decompression got our brains.

  • Re:Does existance of oil imply life? (Score:5)

    by coreman ( 8656 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @05:32AM (#1774812) Homepage
    No, it implies that they said hydrocarbons (like methane) and the press went and said, what's a simple word for hydrocarbons that the illiterate readership and relate to... hmmmm... OIL!

  • Saudi Arabia Annexes Titan (Score:5)

    by cje ( 33931 ) on Friday July 30, 1999 @06:46AM (#1774813) Homepage
    SAUDI ARABIA ANNEXES TITAN
    "Mine, Mine, All Mine," Vows Gleeful King

    DHARAN, SAUDI ARABIA (AP) - In a bold and unprecedented move, an Earth-based nation has laid claim to an entire celestial body. When the BBC reported that astronomers had located a potential "ocean of oil" on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, the government of Saudi Arabia quickly mobilized and annexed the satellite using a highly questionable procedure. Saudi Arabia is an extremely oil-rich country, and most analysts believe that the move by the Saudis serves only to increase their oil reserves.

    The United States' reaction to the annexation was swift and negative. "We would advise Saudi Arabia to carefully reconsider their decision," said State Department spokeman James Rubin. "The Chinese attempted to annex the Jovian satellite Europa in 2010: Odyssey Two, and you saw what happened to them. This move is reckless, and may have far-reaching unintended consequences." Similar statements were released by Russia, France, Tahiti, and Swaziland. As of yet, no country has indicated that they will officially recognize Titan as Saudi soil.

    The reaction from Titan was equally fervent. "Under no circumstances," stated official satellite spokesbeing Gkklotrff Bdssuirghed, "will the citizens of Titan accept any intrusion by the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We have never done anything to you silly Earth-bound two-legged bastards; all we ask is that you pay us the reciprocal courtesy in return." The official Titan News Agency reported that the Titan military was in a state of "high alert."

    The Saudi government, however, is downplaying the interplanetary outrage. "What we have done, we have done under the auspices of international law. If the United States, or Swaziland, or whatever, wished to annex Titan, it could have done so long ago," said a government spokeperson. "Waahh, waahh, waahh. You're just jealous because we did it first."

    In the meantime, however, Saudi Arabia is preparing its massive space program for an expedition to the distant moon. While the government is closely protecting the identity of the five astronauts that will make the trip in the top-of-the-line Saudi Shazam al-Rocket spacecraft, the Associated Press was able to speak by telephone to one of them. "I'm very pleased to be going," said the astronaut, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I am confident that Allah will protect us and keep us safe on our way to Titan. Hopefully, when we get there, we'll find 'Allaht' of oil," the astronaut joked.

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