[Swamp_Thing]

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...

[Tiara]

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...

[karajorma]

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.

[diamondgeezer]

First colour piccy:



Mmm, looks like a real charmer

__________________
Diamond Geezer doesn't trust horses

[Black Wolf]

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.

[Unknown Target]

It's......
orange.
I always imagined Titan as being more blue.

[Corsair]

[conspiracy]Looks kinda like Mars.[/conspiracy]

[Solatar]

Looks very familiar, but there may be an explanation...

[Tiara]

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 )

[Bobboau]

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.

[Blaise Russel]

Originally posted by Unknown Target
It's......
orange.
I always imagined Titan as being more blue.

*gasp*

You didn't play Battlezone (PC)?

[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.

[Tiara]

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? Well, it was on the news here that they said that scientists would have a field day becuase of this.

Meh... whatever.

[diamondgeezer]

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

__________________
Diamond Geezer is extremely glad KFC is doing mini-fillets again

[Corsair]

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

[Black Wolf]

Originally posted by Tiara
Ofcourse I have to boast a bit how Huygens is the one who discovered Titan. And he was Dutch. Naturally.

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... And that's SURFACE temperature. Not to mention the planet is half water ice.

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!

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 ) 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.

[karajorma]

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.

[Lynx]

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.

[Liberator]

Originally posted by Tiara

You just can't let it go, eh? Every time...

You insult my country every chance you get.  Can't take as you give?

[vyper]

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.