Posted on 02/16/2008 8:21:16 AM PST by jmcenanly
Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.
The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.
"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."
At minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan would be an awful place to live. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term "tholins" was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.
Titan has long been viewed as a place that might be somewhat like Earth just before biology got going.
Cassini has mapped about 20 percent of Titan's surface with radar. Several hundred lakes and seas have been observed, with each of several dozen estimated to contain more hydrocarbon liquid than Earth's oil and gas reserves, according to a NASA statement. The dark dunes that run along the equator contain a volume of organics several hundred times larger than Earth's coal reserves.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Dinosaurs lived on Titan?
you stole my post....lol
That sure is a poor choice of words Space.com put in the title. Oil is not the same as liquid hydrocarbon.
Yes.
We know.
Sit down.
I guess we better hurry up and get there and harvest it before those hydrocarbons evolve into protein and DNA
environmentalists will prohibit any further probing of titan lest it may upset the inter-galactic yellow-bellied space snipe which may, or may not, inhabit this frozen wasteland. studies must be commissioned, federal permits issued..we won’t see any oil from titan in my lifetime..:(
Since fossil fuel theory is an absolute and unassailable truth for the eternity, this the only conclusion that will and could be reached: Titan dinosaurs did it.
Since fossil fuel theory is an absolute and unassailable truth for the eternity, this the only conclusion that will and could be reached: Titan dinosaurs did it.
Not to nitpick on your title but I think the article is referring to natural gas — not oil...
‘Dinasaurs got Space Shuttles!’
If this story ran in the B.C. comic strip....
Poor dinosaurs!
Solar System:2 Dinosaurs: 0
Too bad they can’t find a moon somewhere covered with uranium.
Gas and heating prices would be non-existent if it were feasible to capture the energy there.
Biogenic formation is the most accepted explanation for the vast majority of petroleum reseves on Earth, mainly because of the presence of biogenic markers. However, abiogenic formation is not only possible but is acknowledged as the origins of several deep-crust deposits of methane and other hyrdocarbon gases.
Considering that Titan's conditions closely match those that are thought to be conducive to the abiogenetic formation of hydrocarbons, and that hyrdogen and carbon are known to be quite ubiquitous throughout the solar system, it is no scientific shock to find lots of petroleum on Titan.
Oh, and the closest thing to an 'absolute and unassailable truth' about 'fossil fuel theory' is that it didn't come from dinosaurs. If you really think that is what scientists say then you obviously don't read anything they write.
Is all that petro still there since the last thread?
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