Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: diamondgeezer on January 14, 2005, 01:32:04 pm
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Am I the only one here interested in the events on Titan (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4175099.stm)?
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Diamond Geezer watched Gattaca but thinks his time would have been better spent looking at porn
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Nope. :)
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I'm waiting for the photos to surface!
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me to..just can't wait to see them
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Originally posted by IceFire
I'm waiting for the photos to surface!
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Interesting choice of words. Surface? :D
I'm interested in this too,. :)
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Originally posted by c914
me to..just can't wait to see them
me too^^
only one was shown so far :( (of clouds in the atmosphere b/w)
..i hope today will come some more ....
http://www.nasa.gov/55644main_NASATV_Windows.asx
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*waits for results*
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Wait no more!
http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/multimedia/images/image-details.cfm?imageID=1298
Nifty.
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cool stuff
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Looks solid. Interesting.
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I'm a little disturbed by some of these photos from Titan:
(http://membres.lycos.fr/starmars/new/mystere11.jpg)
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Tres cool. And who would've thought...a NASA success!
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Originally posted by Corsair
Tres cool. And who would've thought...a NASA success!
It wasn't NASA, it was the European Space Agency who did this one :)
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Joint mission. It took the best minds on two continents to get this one right.
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I need new glasses... I thought it said Hygiene>Your space probe... :nervous:
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Ofcourse I have to boast a bit how Huygens is the one who discovered Titan. And he was Dutch. :D Naturally. :p
I find titan very interesting, btw. It's the only planet in the system that can support life like Earth does. The current conditions are said to be close to when life began on Earth. Pretty damned amazing and interesting if you ask me.
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Originally posted by Flipside
I need new glasses... I thought it said Hygiene>Your space probe... :nervous:
For what it's worth, what it actually says doesn't make much sense either.
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Originally posted by Tiara
It's the only planet in the system that can support life like Earth does. The current conditions are said to be close to when life began on Earth.
Except the oceans are liquid nitrogen and atmosphere is methane, oh yeah and the surface temperature is about -250 degrees C.
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Originally posted by Gai Daigoji
It wasn't NASA, it was the European Space Agency who did this one :)
Well, it wouldn't have been successful had NASA done it by itself of course...
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And what about those landers on Mars that are still going strong after a year?
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Originally posted by Liberator
Except the oceans are liquid nitrogen and atmosphere is methane, oh yeah and the surface temperature is about -250 degrees C.
Ermmm, I'm thinking you don't know much about how life starts on a plane.
4.2 billion years ago, when Earth came in to existence, the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was LESS then 1%. That's not very typical to say the least if you look to modern time Earth. But the initil lifeforms (single-celled organisms) didn't live on the same terms as we do.
Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane gases, when heated with water and charged with electricity for 24 hours changed much of the carbon into organic compounds like sugars, amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines. Similar chemical reactions can occur on Tital as well.
I didn't say it was a carbon copy (no pun intended :p) of Earth, I said it was very close to the conditions on Earth. Yes, some variables are different, but not in such a way that it would disallow the formation of living cells and eventually more complex organisms.
Ofcourse, we'll all be dead by the time this stuff all happens but it will give us a great insight on how life on Earth came into existence.
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-150° C prevent any formation of life no matter how close all the other conditiond are to early Earth.
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Prevents formation of life you can think of. :rolleyes:
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The temperature is so low that it slows down most chemical processes to a crawl and prevents others completely. Thus the formation of any life is incredibly unlikely.
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However, if we had the technology, we could import the methane for use in our motorcars. However, if we could do that, would could build cloudscoops around Jupiter and import hydrogen from there at a far cheaper rate.
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Originally posted by Lynx
The temperature is so low that it slows down most chemical processes to a crawl and prevents others completely. Thus the formation of any life is incredibly unlikely.
Dude, do you not know how the sun grows in intensity? In a few billion years it'll be just as hot there as it is here on Earth.
Also, it's minus 178 degrees Celsius there. Not -250... :rolleyes: And that's SURFACE temperature. Not to mention the planet is half water ice. :p
Ow and another nice fact for you to know; there are also trace amounts of at least a dozen organic compounds (like ethane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide). Boo-f'ing-ya! :D
As for Lynx, the very fact that there is a large thick smog like atmosphere proves that chemical reactions DO take place and in an even colder place then the surface too (the formation of the organic compound I posted above prove exactly the same).
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A safe landing... a surprise considering NASA's recent track record:
(http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/105738main_Crop0-H1-300-215.jpg)
Looks like it landed on land. However some of those descent images show what looks like a liquid ocean and rivers.
Of course it's liquid methane... :P
(http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/105736main_Crop448-H2.jpg)
It would be awesome if there was life on Titan. It'd have to be a pretty different form of life though...
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Originally posted by Lynx
-150° C....
-178° it is only at the polar areas.
I didn't say that every chemical reaction is inhibited by the temperature, but only a few basic ones are relatively fast. There are other biological processes that work too, but they take days to weeks compared to fractions of seconds on earth. And the low temperatures inhibit in fact one of the most important processes for example it'd be too cold for even a basic cell membrane to build itself like they are suspected to have been in the first earth organisms. As for the biological compounds found there they are so basic, they are still lightyears from any form of simple life, part of them can be found on comets, too.
As for the sun getting bigger as it get's older, it'll never get enough to do any significant changes to Titan, it'll rise a few °C at best, mostly compareable to Jupiters moons which still are damn cold.
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Life is much more likely on Europa. If there is life anywhere else in the system, it will likely be there.
That said, Titan is very cool. As in sweet, not temperature.
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Originally posted by Lynx
-178° it is only at the polar areas.
I didn't say that every chemical reaction is inhibited by the temperature, but only a few basic ones are relatively fast. There are other biological processes that work too, but they take days to weeks compared to fractions of seconds on earth. And the low temperatures inhibit in fact one of the most important processes for example it'd be too cold for even a basic cell membrane to build itself like they are suspected to have been in the first earth organisms. As for the biological compounds found there they are so basic, they are still lightyears from any form of simple life, part of them can be found on comets, too.
As for the sun getting bigger as it get's older, it'll never get enough to do any significant changes to Titan, it'll rise a few °C at best, mostly compareable to Jupiters moons which still are damn cold.
It may be the case however that if there is any sort of thermal activity or the like that life has formed in small, hidden, hard to reach places. Europa too...but Titan I imagine is a distinct possibility.
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For all we know, life is most likely to be in the lower atmosphere of Jupiter.........
This is neat stuff, anyways; is Huygens still transmitting? I thought I heard its batteries only lasted a few hours?
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Originally posted by Liberator
However, if we had the technology, we could import the methane for use in our motorcars. However, if we could do that, would could build cloudscoops around Jupiter and import hydrogen from there at a far cheaper rate.
Actually, Titan would probably be cheaper. Jupiter's gravity would be a huge problem for getting anything into and out of orbit, not to mention keeping it from being pulled into the atmosphere and torn to shreds by the storms.
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You don't really need to import methane, plenty of organisms can procude it.
However, harvesting gas giants and moons for reaction mass for stations, probes, ships, etc. will be a definate necessity in the future.
Heh... water barons :p
Anyways, from what it sounds like Huygen's mission is a very short one and will end or ended when Cassini goes down the horizon. It's next orbit of Titan is a few weeks from now, Huygen's battery will be long dead. That is unless the Titanians decide to upgrade it with "nukuler" weapons to blow Earth up before Bush invades Titan for the hydrocarbons :p
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They send a 50 million dollar probe into space with enough power to run for a few hours? And you talk about how wasteful my government is?
I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source? Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched. The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car. The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.
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Originally posted by Liberator
They send a 50 million dollar probe into space with enough power to run for a few hours? And you talk about how wasteful my government is?
I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source? Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched. The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car. The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.
Try and remember when this thing was launched.
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Originally posted by diamondgeezer
Huygens > Your space probe
ummm no. i'm sorry, but my space probe >*
(http://freespace.volitionwatch.com/techfs/jeremy/scn.jpg)
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Originally posted by Liberator
I wonder why they didn't use a radiological power source? Not nuclear, radiological, like all the deep space probes we've ever launched. The damn things were still providing power 10-15 years after they launched and they're safe enough you could put on in your car. The key, I guess, is amount, most radiological cells can only do a few hundred watts an hour.
Typical response.
...and typical lack of understanding of the velocities of the objects involved, how radio behaves, etc.
Huygens was designed to operate for as long as Cassini would be in range, and designed to do a whole lot of work in that short timeframe.
It will be *weeks* before Cassini does another close sweep to receive radio signals from Huygens for a few hours.
The velocities involved means that there's doppeler effects, which were underestimated and led to the deployment date being changed. These effects mean that the window of opportunity to receive data is even narrower than originally thought.
Pretty much, Huygen's powerplant is the way it is because the mission designers knew that receiving further data from the probe would be very iffy.
They were in a similar situation as the folks designing the Mariner landers.
Now, if Cassini was a mission that actually orbited Titan and not the whole Saturnian system then it'd be able to receive the data that a long term lander would have.
People seem to have a hard time grasping the distances involved, how slow the speed of light actually is, the adjustments needed, etc. to get something like this to work right. Especially in a situation such as a high speed orbit around a gas giant with a few passes and trying to get data from a lander on a fixed spot.
However, I'm sure Liberator complained that the probe launched from Galileo into Jupiter was a waste because it was designed to measure the atmosphere and find the crush depth. It's obviously a waste of money if it doesn't last 12 years. Just like Huygens was designed for atmospheric tests and some perliminary looks at the surface to confirm readings taken from the flybys. Keep in mind, this probe was designed for a lot of worst-case scenarios of what Titan would be like. It wasn't custom-tailored for further exploration like the current crop of Mars landers.
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Obviously, nothing. The difference was that Saturn is almost twice as far as Jupiter is and the odds of getting another lander in as interesting a place Titan in a reasonable amount of time is virtually nonexistant.
They should've designed the bloody thing to transmit directly to Earth and been done with it. You design a thing to do it's job alone, by itself, or you don't design it at all. The relay to Cassini should have been a backup.
Also, the probe that went into Jupiter was a lot simpler than Huygens since it was single purpose and very small. Huygens was a large part of the Cassini mission.
Basically, I hate this minimalist bull****e design ethos that dominates space agencies these days. If you're not going to send a man, you MUST build a robot to act as his proxy. This means that it must be able to perform ALL the experiments a man would if he was there and report back ALL the data that a man would collect from said experiments. And above all, you don't send a damn probe with a dozen sensors 25 AU away with enough power to operate for 4 damn hours, it's a waste.
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Nor do you sink all your money in to your first mission to a location. Think about the increased sophistication in the Lunar, Venusian and Martian landings. You simply can't just gamble half your budget - what if Huygens had survived three seconds? We'd know not to bother sending another one, without obscene ammounts of waste.
Now, who's for sending a rover with orbiter? Power source will be an arse, but **** it, I like rovers :D
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Diamond Geezer could beat ZylonBane in a fight
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I think the world should invest its resources into building a moon base, instead of sending probes to planets we won´t visit for decades. Build the moon base, invest in new propulsion systems. By the time we finally have the means for a manned mission to the planets, we would have better technology to counter the elements in those planets, and have probes that could perform hundreds more tasks that the current probes cannot. And best of all, we would have a launch base in space that would save billions in fuel alone. Moon gravity is way more leanient with rocket launches than Earth, you see.
Invest the little money we have into the Moon first, and send probes to the planets like 30 years from now, when we have better technology and a better place to launch them from.
Just my 2.5 cents...
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Originally posted by Liberator
They send a 50 million dollar probe into space with enough power to run for a few hours? And you talk about how wasteful my government is?
You just can't let it go, eh? Every time... :sigh:
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Lib. The problem is money. Space Agencies can't spend money on probes like they want to because most of the voters back home think it's a waste of money and would rather have a penny off of their income tax instead (Not a penny on the pound. A single penny!)
Until voters are ready to back more adventurous schemes we're stuck with the penny pinching stuff that all the space agencies have been doing lately.
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First colour piccy:
(http://www.esa.int/images/Picture7_L.jpg)
Mmm, looks like a real charmer
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Diamond Geezer doesn't trust horses
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Originally posted by Tiara
Ermmm, I'm thinking you don't know much about how life starts on a plane.
The rest of your post indicates that you don't either.
DG - is that an original colour photo, or one that's been recoloured? It looks very monotone - like someone's run it through colourize for colour photos in the paper.
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It's......
orange.
I always imagined Titan as being more blue.
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[conspiracy]Looks kinda like Mars.[/conspiracy]
:nervous:
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(http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/105738main_Crop0-H1-300-215.jpg)
(http://www.esa.int/images/Picture7_L.jpg)
Looks very familiar, but there may be an explanation...
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
The rest of your post indicates that you don't either.
I'm not going to write a paper on it, but unless you actually want to disprove what I posted (which is actually the most wide-spread theory on the subject) don't post stuff like that and don't give any reasoning.
(ofcourse what i posted is like a summarized version of a summary :p)
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it's been colorised, I've seen a b&w immage exactly like that and if you open it in a image editor you'll find it has one hue, as you would find in a five second colorise job.
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Originally posted by Unknown Target
It's......
orange.
I always imagined Titan as being more blue.
*gasp*
You didn't play Battlezone (PC)?
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and there is not going to be anything you could describe as earthlike life on titan, and I doubt the viability of the planet as a research into earth's early history.
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Originally posted by Bobboau
and there is not going to be anything you could describe as earthlike life on titan, and I doubt the viability of the planet as a research into earth's early history.
So, you doubt scientists now, eh? :p Well, it was on the news here that they said that scientists would have a field day becuase of this.
Meh... whatever. :p
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The orange pic I posted is the first colour shot released - the black and white one is the raw image which is why they look identical. The colour is an artifcial recreation of the real thing. Kind of like thedifference between the actual colour red and the word "red". Assuming the scientists have done their jobs poroperly, it would seem that Titan is a rather dull shade of orangey-brown. Not suprising, given that the atmosphere is composed almost entirely of fart ;7
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The story on CNN says that the true color is a pale orange...
DARMSTADT, Germany (AP) -- Saturn's moon Titan looks orange -- at least that's what the first refined photo from the Huygens space probe shows.
The pale orange surface is covered by a thin haze of methane and what appears to be a methane sea complete with islands and a mist-shrouded coastline
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/space/01/15/titan.images.ap/index.html
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Originally posted by Tiara
Ofcourse I have to boast a bit how Huygens is the one who discovered Titan. And he was Dutch. :D Naturally. :p
I find titan very interesting, btw. It's the only planet in the system that can support life like Earth does. The current conditions are said to be close to when life began on Earth. Pretty damned amazing and interesting if you ask me.
- It's a moon, not a planet. Admittedly, this isn't related to the biogenesis stuff, but proper terminology is important.
- Conditions there are nothing like early earth. It is smaller, much colder and it lacks a magnetic field, all fundamentally important characteristics for the formation of life and sustaining it.
Originally posted by Tiara
Dude, do you not know how the sun grows in intensity? In a few billion years it'll be just as hot there as it is here on Earth.
Also, it's minus 178 degrees Celsius there. Not -250... :rolleyes: And that's SURFACE temperature. Not to mention the planet is half water ice. :p
Ow and another nice fact for you to know; there are also trace amounts of at least a dozen organic compounds (like ethane, hydrogen cyanide, carbon dioxide). Boo-f'ing-ya! :D
As for Lynx, the very fact that there is a large thick smog like atmosphere proves that chemical reactions DO take place and in an even colder place then the surface too (the formation of the organic compound I posted above prove exactly the same).
- The temperature difference is minimal in context. It's still cold enough to freeze water constantly, making life all but impossible (Liquid water is one of, if not the single, most important feature for biogenesis as we know it.
- All of the organic compounds you mention are extremely simple and prove only the presence of carbon. Important for the formation of life yes, but not indicative, nor even neccesarily suggestive that life will/could form there. There's evidence for amino acids (much more complex organic compunds) in nebulae - carbon compounds don't mean an awful lot, nor are they as hard to find/form as was believed 50 years ago. These ones are most likely formed through the ionization of organic compounds (no magnetic field, so solar radiation gets in and skims the upper atmosphere a lot easier).
Originally posted by Tiara
Ermmm, I'm thinking you don't know much about how life starts on a plane.
4.2 billion years ago, when Earth came in to existence, the total amount of oxygen in the atmosphere was LESS then 1%. That's not very typical to say the least if you look to modern time Earth. But the initil lifeforms (single-celled organisms) didn't live on the same terms as we do.
Hydrogen, carbon dioxide, ammonia and methane gases, when heated with water and charged with electricity for 24 hours changed much of the carbon into organic compounds like sugars, amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines. Similar chemical reactions can occur on Tital as well.
I didn't say it was a carbon copy (no pun intended :p) of Earth, I said it was very close to the conditions on Earth. Yes, some variables are different, but not in such a way that it would disallow the formation of living cells and eventually more complex organisms.
Ofcourse, we'll all be dead by the time this stuff all happens but it will give us a great insight on how life on Earth came into existence.
- Low early earth oxygen levels were essential for the formation of life. In fact, large amounts of O2 would have acted against the formation of the delicate, complex chemical compounds of early life. You're right that the initial single celled organisms lived on different terms (these were anaerobic bacteria, ie. metabolised without oxygen) but wrong that they were the first life. The first life predated the first cell.
- Those experiments all took place at room temperature. Try them again under titan like conditions and see what happens.
As far as I can tell all you've done is thrown together a bunch of well known theories and tried to apply them to Titan without any background knowledge of the subject. I'm not saying it's impossible for life to have formed there, though not for any of the reasons you've posted, but it's orders of magnitude less likely than the formation on earth.
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Originally posted by Black Wolf
The temperature difference is minimal in context. It's still cold enough to freeze water constantly, making life all but impossible (Liquid water is one of, if not the single, most important feature for biogenesis as we know it.[/color]
That's what you'll hear from any astrobiologist but tell a xenoscientist that and you're looking at several hours worth of lecturing about alternatives.
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For the n-th time, it's too cold for almost any chemical reaction to react at a reasonable speed thus every form of life is highly unlikely no matter on what chemicals it's based, carbone or not.
Unless you expect something like Startrekkish energy beings or somethings Titan certainly wouldn't be a place too look for life on.
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Originally posted by Tiara
You just can't let it go, eh? Every time... :sigh:
You insult my country every chance you get. Can't take as you give?
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Technically you didn't insult her country you insulted everyone in the EU. However, considering NASA's history when it comes to money I will sit in silent smugness over here.
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Originally posted by karajorma
That's what you'll hear from any astrobiologist but tell a xenoscientist that and you're looking at several hours worth of lecturing about alternatives.
Like? (I'm honestly interested, not pulling the piss. It can be hard to tell on a one word post. :))
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Silicon-based instead of carbon-based, with ammonia instead of water, IIRC. But any organism like that would have an extremely slow metabolism.
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and that would be something that could not be described as an earthlike life form.
Titan:cool ass moon (no pun intended)
worthy of exploration, and posable home of (very non-earthlike) life
not a good place to learn about (the very very hot) young earth
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Ok, Titan's atmosphere, like Earth's, is full of nitrogen. But it also has methane and traces of other organic molecules. So the recipe for Titan's atmosphere is very similar to the Earth's at the time when life began. Titan may be too cold for life now. But in several billion years time, our Sun will become a red giant, swelling to fifty times its current size. Then the temperature on Titan's surface will rise to a more hospitable -100ºC. This should be warm enough to melt the frozen surface mixture of water and ammonia. So as the Earth becomes too hot to inhabit, Titan may start a whole new lease of life.
That's my whole point. I'm not saying it's identical to Earth but it's the closest to Earth we have to study. The current condition it is in allows us to study how life is formed, at least the way it was before life was formed anyway (which will be similar to how it happened on Earth even if it takes a radically different direction). This all is due to the static state it is in right now.
But as I said before in this thread, we'd all be dead by then :p
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Isn't methane a sign of organic life anyway? It's an organic molecule, right?
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Methane is a very very simple organic molecule. It looks like this
....H
....|
H-C-H
....|
....H
It's not like it's complicated or anything, just good old CH4.
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Bear in mind, Titan is less than half the size of Earth and a quarter the mass.
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Originally posted by Liberator
You insult my country every chance you get. Can't take as you give?
:wtf: At least i don't do it in a thread that isn't about a funky US Vs EU debate...
Anyway, for the topic at hand, yes, methane is a simple organic molecule. Wasn't there also ethane on Titan (C2H6)?
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Prior to listening to the ESA briefings on BBC America, I had no idea the brits pronounced methane as "meeethane".
/wonders if they have "meeth" labs over there
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Next door to the aloominum refineries.
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You mean, "alyoominiyum", right?
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God damned yokels
Anyway, yes, there is supposedly liquid ethane on the surface
More pics (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMC8Q71Y3E_0.html). Well, one new pic and one processed versions of an older image
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Diamond Geezer has brown hair
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Originally posted by ZylonBane
Prior to listening to the ESA briefings on BBC America, I had no idea the brits pronounced methane as "meeethane".
/wonders if they have "meeth" labs over there
It's not our fault that you mangle the language.
Originally posted by diamondgeezer
God damned yokels
Anyway, yes, there is supposedly liquid ethane on the surface
More pics (http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Cassini-Huygens/SEMC8Q71Y3E_0.html). Well, one new pic and one processed versions of an older image
Beats the **** out Bognor Regis, at least.
Actually, whats really neat is that AFAIK this is the first picture of a non-Earth coastline........
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And did you see this? Giant landslide on Iapetus (http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/media/ir/2005/711_1413_1.jpg) :cool:
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Diamond Geezer loves a good starfield
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Might i remind you nay-sayers of life on Titan, that you are forgeting the single greatest life creating force on any planet? Vulcanic activity. Even if the planet itself is cold, vulcanic pudles or thermal springs can create perfect conditions for life to prosper.
And you call yourselfs sci-fi freaks...
:p
PS: They are not looking for little green men, over there. At most, they are looking for microbiological life, bacteria, fungus, amebas, stuff like that. And Earth has thought us that life spawns in the weirdest and unexpected places, like sulfuric acid puddles, or the deep sea with pressures of 1000+ atmospheres. Life is resilient, and will survive anything you throw at it, given enough time to adapt.
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It's true. There's some bacterias that can even exist without oxygen, they've been found deep in the ice of Antartica.
Funny that there's ice, an atmosphere comprised of organic molecules, and very ltitle oxygen on Titan :D
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Originally posted by Unknown Target
There's some bacterias that can even exist without oxygen, they've been found deep in the ice of Antartica.
and in the space between your teeth and your gums...
and there is volcanism on titan IIRC, though it's liqid nitrogen.
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The current enviroment of Titan is anthema to life, much less it's formation. The surface temperate is -178c at the poles. It's a ball of water ice, and various common gases in a liquid form. There are no 'Thermal Puddles' as you concieve them. No pockets of significantly normalized temperature, and if there were, they wouldn't last for long because they're surrounded on all sides by a 3000 kilometer heat sink. It is so cold there that no amount of insulation could protect you from the bonerotting temperatures, you heard me bonerotting. If you somehow fell into a lake or even a small pond, you'd freeze so fast you'd never know what hit you. It is so cold there that even specially manufactured low temp resistant alloys and composited shatter and disintigrate.
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From www.thebestpageintheuniverse.com
The picture NASA didn't show you...
(http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/images/titans_secret.gif)
:lol:
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There are no 'Thermal Puddles' as you concieve them.
Hey, we don´t need to send up any more probes, we just ask Liberator! He seems to have Titan´s Enciclopedia Brittanica!! NASA should hire him instead!!!
:doubt:
It´s curious how you presume to know what the best astronomers on Earth still do not. You wouldn´t be "titanian", would you? Wait, maybe that´s you in that picture there!
:lol:
On another note, look at another picture the NASA never intended for us to see:
(http://www.3dactionplanet.com/hlp/hosted/14_year_war/Swamp_Thing/marte.jpg)
Now we know...
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My assumption is based on the all too obvious fact that any heat on Titan is quickly absorbed by the surrounding colder material, and that the entire body is composed of materials in their liquid state that we use to freeze things in cryogenic plants. It's simple when you think about it.
The surface is covered, at least in part, by a methane "snow". If an area did manage, through some miracle, attain a temperature at which any kind of life could form, it would be blindingly obvious to all but the more ignorant because there would be a gigantic crater where one shouldn't exist, melted all the way down to the rocky core and Titan would be one lopsided moon.
We cannot conceive of how obscenely cold it is there. That is the one word that can be used to describe Titan's climate.
C O L D.
The surface temperature is a balmy 95.15 degrees Kelvin,-288.40 degrees Faranheit.
You wouldn't even get a chance to see you're breath solidify and fall to the ground because your blood would freeze solid almost instantaneously.
Hold an ice cube in your hand until it hurts it's so cold, then imagine something 200x colder and that's a summer's day on Titan. We knew this before we went, the probe only confirmed it.
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sounds like a blast
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Originally posted by Liberator
My assumption is based on the all too obvious fact that any heat on Titan is quickly absorbed by the surrounding colder material, and that the entire body is composed of materials in their liquid state that we use to freeze things in cryogenic plants. It's simple when you think about it.
It´s a wrong assumption, then. I´ll explain:
We know for a fact that there is ice on Titan, correct? Ice means water. We know from the pictures that there are water canals built into the bedrock, wich means that at one time there were rivers running on Titan. Now, if there were rivers, there was also underground water streams of wich i can´t remember the name in english. Freatic something..? Anyway, put that all together, add volcanic activity, and you get geysers, thermal springs and other such events. Following me so far?
Now lets see the temperature, that you claim drains the heat away.
Have you ever seen a japonese breed of monkeys that bathe in a thermal spring? Well, the temperature in that mountain reaches often -50 degrees celsius (not Kelvin), and yet the water maintains itself at a very cosy 60 degrees celsius. If your claims were accurate, those monkeys would be monkesicles by now, wouldn´t they? Yeah, i know, you are probably thinking "but it´s waaaaay colder in Titan". The simple fact is, it doesn´t matter how cold it is in Titan, what matters is the thermal amplitude. What matters is the diference between the thermal spring´s temp and the ambient air temp. Titan could be -500 degree celsius, and still the spring could be hot enough to support life. Liguids hold temperatures better than air, and plus there is an endless supply of geothermal heat. Not to mention that there are springs where the water is much hoter than a simple 60 degrees.
Look, do a little experiment. Fill a pot with boiling water, and place it in your freezer, and see how long it takes for the water to reach the freezer´s temperature. Simple.
Now imagine that you place a bunsen burner inside the freezer with the pot, because geothermal activity never ceases. The heat keeps coming up and heating the water.
Oh, and another thing: the arctic temperatures reaches sometimes -70 dergrees and less, and yet polar bears live there with no problems. Why do you think unicelular life could not live in such temperatures, if mammals can?
Lesson over. Be ready, there will be a test tomorrow.
:rolleyes:
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Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
We know for a fact that there is ice on Titan, correct? Ice means water. We know from the pictures that there are water canals built into the bedrock, wich means that at one time there were rivers running on Titan. Now, if there were rivers, there was also underground water streams of wich i can´t remember the name in english.
Wrong.
Those river beds and shore lines are most probably formed by fluid methane which is abundant on Titan and. freaking.cold. Alternatively it could be formed by flowing water ice, though judging by the temperatures it would happen very slowly.
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
Freatic something..? Anyway, put that all together, add volcanic activity, and you get geysers, thermal springs and other such events. Following me so far?
As a small body, Titans mass is too low to sustain any volcanic or geothermic activity itself for prolonged time(there might have been some after it'S formation though, but not for long) and it's too far away from Saturn to be significantly influenced by it's gravitational pull. As Bobbau said, if there's any geothermic activity, it's geysers of fluid nitrogen.
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
Now lets see the temperature, that you claim drains the heat away.
Have you ever seen a japonese breed of monkeys that bathe in a thermal spring? Well, the temperature in that mountain reaches often -50 degrees celsius (not Kelvin), and yet the water maintains itself at a very cosy 60 degrees celsius.
Where did you get that!!?!
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
If your claims were accurate, those monkeys would be monkesicles by now, wouldn´t they? Yeah, i know, you are probably thinking "but it´s waaaaay colder in Titan". The simple fact is, it doesn´t matter how cold it is in Titan, what matters is the thermal amplitude. What matters is the diference between the thermal spring´s temp and the ambient air temp. Titan could be -500 degree celsius, and still the spring could be hot enough to support life.
There are no seasons on Titan, so there are no significant changes in the thermal amplitude. Titans axis is too stable and Saturns orbit around the sun isn't eccentric enough to cause significant temperature changes. And to build more complicated biological components you'd probably need a rather stable climate.
Originally posted by Swamp_Thing
Oh, and another thing: the arctic temperatures reaches sometimes -70 dergrees and less, and yet polar bears live there with no problems. Why do you think unicelular life could not live in such temperatures, if mammals can?
Lesson over. Be ready, there will be a test tomorrow.
:rolleyes:
And where do this bears originally come from?
Life has a very good adaptability to various climates, but that doesn't mean **** if there's no life in the frst place, since for the formation of life you need rather high temperatures to support the formation of advanced bological chemical compounds, a climate that has never ever existed on Titan. Life on earth, no matter what theory, needed a stable and warm climate to form.
If you're looking for a world similar to titan, it's not Earth, but Neptune moon Triton which is very similar in it's overall surface and chemical composition to Titan.
Lesson over.:p
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Originally posted by Tiara
Dude, do you not know how the sun grows in intensity? In a few billion years it'll be just as hot there as it is here on Earth.
Sun has about 5 billion years left, Titan is in a bit of hurry.
And most organic compounds mean preciously little - they tell as much as "well, see, here we have organic compounds!".
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You lot watched ET on bbc1 last night didn't you? That's what this is all about.
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Originally posted by Janos
Sun has about 5 billion years left, Titan is in a bit of hurry.
Ehm, the sun has about 5 billion years left as a main sequence star. But before that, the sun will have grown to a subgiant (still main sequence though) also warming up Titan. Not to mention that the sun will remain a red giant for 250 million years. In total, the temperature on Titan would be below -120° C for 1 billion years IIRC.
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Even as red giant, the sun won't warm Titan significantly, but Mars would be shifted into the habitable zone, and the Jupiter moons, while still being cold, would be warmed up a few degrees.
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Originally posted by Tiara
Ehm, the sun has about 5 billion years left as a main sequence star. But before that, the sun will have grown to a subgiant (still main sequence though) also warming up Titan. Not to mention that the sun will remain a red giant for 250 million years. In total, the temperature on Titan would be below -120° C for 1 billion years IIRC.
Still not enough time or heat.
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Originally posted by Lynx
Even as red giant, the sun won't warm Titan significantly, but Mars would be shifted into the habitable zone, and the Jupiter moons, while still being cold, would be warmed up a few degrees.
Titan would be heated up from -178 degrees to -100 degrees. That is a significant change.
And Mars would be burning so hot, you really won't wanna be there. Earth might even be envelopped in the sun itself;
(http://ulink.net/stargazerdan/rgsystem.gif)
Also, it seems to me like people are talking about intelligent life. No, there won't be enough time for that. DUH! But i'm talking simple life. And there is more thgen enough time for that to form.
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Don't forget that the sun get's colder while it inflates. As red giant it probably only has 2500-3000 Kelvin.
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Originally posted by Lynx
Don't forget that the sun get's colder while it inflates. As red giant it probably only has 2500-3000 Kelvin.
That's the surface. The corona is actually much hotter then the surface. :)
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Still, I don't see the relevance of Titan's conditions when the sun hits red giant 5 bn years from now if the question at hand is whether it is now of any relevance in the study of early life or early earth.
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Originally posted by Lynx
As Bobbau said, if there's any geothermic activity, it's geysers of fluid nitrogen.
Ummmm. No (http://www.geotimes.org/current/NN_Cassini.html)