Titan has oil?

[Rogue 9]

This is CNN

Saturn moon has liquid on surface, NASA says

PASADENA, California (AP) -- At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn's moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.

Cassini has made more than 40 close flybys of Titan, a giant planet-sized satellite of the ringed world.

Scientists had theorized that Titan might have oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons, but Cassini found hundreds of dark, lake-like features instead, and it wasn't known at first whether they were liquid or dark, solid material, JPL's statement said. iReport.com: Share your images of Saturn

"This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid," Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini's visual and mapping instrument, said in the statement.

The instrument was used during a December flyby to observe a feature dubbed Ontario Lacus, in the south polar region, that is about 7,800 square miles, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario.

Cassini reached Saturn in mid-2004 and at the end of that year launched a probe named Huygens that parachuted to the surface of Titan the following January.

The mission is a project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

Quickly! We must invade Titan to stop the, uh... Alien terrorists!

[Starglider]

The notion of importing oil from distant planets because the oil on earth had run out was detailed in the novelisation of Alien (I'm not sure if it was ever made clear in the film). The Nostromo was towing a huge spaceborne refinery that turned the oil into plastics on the trip. The notion was that Earth had long since switched to fusion power, but still needed to import feedstock. It seemed plausible to me at the time, but these days it seems to me that if you have the power and tech for FTL interstellar space tankers, it would be more practical to just make your feedstock from atmospheric CO2 and water.

[Rihannsu Science Officer]

It seemed plausible to me at the time, but these days it seems to me that if you have the power and tech for FTL interstellar space tankers, it would be more practical to just make your feedstock from atmospheric CO2 and water.

Titan's not so far you'd need FTL to ship supplies there and back in a reasonable amount of time. It's roughly 1.43 billion km from the Sun, so ~1.3 - 1.6 billion from Earth. According to this, a shuttle can go at ~8 km/s so we'd be talking 200 million seconds or about 6.3 years to get to Titan. Now, all we'd need is a tanker big enough to hold more than 12.6 years' worth of oil... and that's a LOT of oil.

Then again, I'm not familiar with alternative energy; how close are we to being able to make feedstock from CO2 + H2O?[/i]

[CaptainZoidberg]

The notion of importing oil from distant planets because the oil on earth had run out was detailed in the novelisation of Alien (I'm not sure if it was ever made clear in the film). The Nostromo was towing a huge spaceborne refinery that turned the oil into plastics on the trip. The notion was that Earth had long since switched to fusion power, but still needed to import feedstock. It seemed plausible to me at the time, but these days it seems to me that if you have the power and tech for FTL interstellar space tankers, it would be more practical to just make your feedstock from atmospheric CO2 and water.

Hmmm, what if humans had already used up our oil supplies to make huge amounts of plastic, but there was still a demand? I mean, there's only so much carbon you can find on the Earth.

As for using the oil as feedstock, wouldn't the animals be carbon neutral? I mean, you could always recapture it after they breathe it out, and process it out of their corpses.

[Starglider]

Titan's not so far you'd need FTL to ship supplies there and back in a reasonable amount of time.

It's still much easier and (energetically) cheaper to produce hydrocarbons here on earth, either by artificial analogues of photosynthesis or plain old biofuels (presumably with solar or nuclear-electric tractors).

As for using the oil as feedstock, wouldn't the animals be carbon neutral?

Definition.

[Surlethe]

Hmm. Titan (1.4E23 kg, radius 2.6E6 m) is 1.2E9 m from Saturn. Saturn (5.7E28 kg) is 9.5 AU from the Sun (2.0E30 kg), or 1.2E12 m. Earth (6.0E24 kg, radius 6.4E6 m), meanwhile, is 1.5E11 m from the Sun. To get from the Earth to Titan, you first have to escape from Earth's gravity well (6.3E7 J/kg), travel up the Sun's gravity well to Saturn (7.8E8 J/kg), and then escape from Titan's gravity well (3.6E6 J/kg) and Saturn's (3.2E9 J/kg). The energy density of what you're hauling from Titan to Earth will only be between 3E7 J/kg and 5.5E7 J/kg. Sending off to Titan for oil just doesn't seem worth it.

[Rihannsu Science Officer]

Yeah, like I said, or thought I'd implied - carrying around several years' worth of oil sounds ludicrous and does seem infeasible with modern technology; our current largest tanker is a little over half a megaton IIRC.

Nice to know there's oil out there, and since oil comes from living organisms it might be interesting to learn what organisms are / were on Titan, but as an energy source, it's useless for now.

[Rahvin]

Yeah, like I said, or thought I'd implied - carrying around several years' worth of oil sounds ludicrous and does seem infeasible with modern technology; our current largest tanker is a little over half a megaton IIRC.

Nice to know there's oil out there, and since oil comes from living organisms it might be interesting to learn what organisms are / were on Titan, but as an energy source, it's useless for now.

You misread.

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the international Cassini spacecraft mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.

There's not actual oil on Titan. There is liquid ethane, an organic compound but not a fossil fuel. It's just a component of crude oil, which is a very different thing.

Titan has tons of hydrocarbons, but so far they appear to be non-biologically originated organic compounds - basically pretty similar to what we think Earth was like before life formed, except a whole lot colder.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah, like I said, or thought I'd implied - carrying around several years' worth of oil sounds ludicrous and does seem infeasible with modern technology; our current largest tanker is a little over half a megaton IIRC.

The world’s largest tanker Knock Nevis displaces about 794,000 short tons fully loaded, dead weight tonnage is about 622,000 short tons. The ships capacity works out to be around 4 million barrels of oil. Clearly hauling oil home from Titan is absurdly impractical, but it’s not impossible. Your thinking 500,000 tons because normally the ships size is only quoted as the deadweight tonnage, and in metric tons.

A giant space going tanker could be nothing but an unmanned tank essentially, totally reliant on space going tugs. One set of tugs accelerates the tanker away from Titian, then detaches to go accelerate another one. The unmanned tanker then travels through space towards earth, and after five years or so an earth origin set of tugs would meet up with it to slow it down into earth orbit. This way you don’t worry about a crew being in space for years on end, you don’t worry about the engines breaking halfway along ect… course this all assumes you can accelerate the tanker quickly enough to make it practical for the tugs to leave, and that it can hold on course accurately enough with no source of thrust (or at least no major source of thrust, a few real small ion engines powered by nuclear batteries might be provided to help the guidance system along)

[Chardok]

This is, I think, where carbon nanotubes would come in handy. If one could somehow lower a loooooooooooooooong pipeline down to Titan From Orbit, and also one on Earth, there'd never be any need to escape earth's gravity, you could deliver the stuff from orbit. THAT would be practical, and superbad to boot.

[Rahvin]

This is, I think, where carbon nanotubes would come in handy. If one could somehow lower a loooooooooooooooong pipeline down to Titan From Orbit, and also one on Earth, there'd never be any need to escape earth's gravity, you could deliver the stuff from orbit. THAT would be practical, and superbad to boot.

Even with an extremely efficient space-elevator-pipeline mechanism, I would think the cost of extracting hydrocarbons from Titan's gravity well would make the practice moot.

We use oil because until now it has been cheap. We get a lot of energy our of oil for the energy invested. That no longer becomes the case when you talk about interplanetary tankers to the outer solar system to grab resources from a gravity well.

Not to mention it's not like you can just stick a siphon down to the surface from space and start pumping. You'll need surface industry to collect the hydrocarbons, possibly process them, and then load them into the space elevator.

Oil has a great energy investment/return ratio when it's pumped out of the ground and refined on Earth. Not so much when you need to support all of that industry and deal with two gravity wells.

[Themightytom]

we could just stop using fucking gas engines and everyone owning three two cars a motor cycle a lawn tractor etc...
then we wouldn't need to go to TITAN.

[Cykeisme]

we could just stop using fucking gas engines and everyone owning three two cars a motor cycle a lawn tractor etc...
then we wouldn't need to go to TITAN.

But God gave us Titan for a reason!

[Patrick Degan]

we could just stop using fucking gas engines and everyone owning three two cars a motor cycle a lawn tractor etc...
then we wouldn't need to go to TITAN.

Quiet, fool. You want to blow our chance to get them to fund the kind of space programme that will get us orbital habitats and interplanetary craft?!

Why, Titan has PLENTY of oil. Enough to meet our needs for the next million years, and it's all there just waiting for us to grab it. Unless we let the Chinese get there first!

[Tanasinn]

You know, putting hydrocarbons on Titan, where they're completely useless to us, would be entirely in character for the OT's god.

[Junghalli]

we could just stop using fucking gas engines and everyone owning three two cars a motor cycle a lawn tractor etc...
then we wouldn't need to go to TITAN.

I don't think anybody's actually serious about this.

[Surlethe]

*snip*

But the beauty is gravity just holds on to your energy. It's perfectly willing it give it right back if you can take it. A rocket could make the round trip with just like a puny 1.2 GJ/kg, given ideal conditions, since it can trade kinetic energy of its orbit for some of the gravitational potential energy it needs to gain. Further improving on this like using regenerative beanstalks for getting on and off earth instead of rockets may be realistic too.

I love gravity as much as any other man, but if you bleed your kinetic energy as heat at any point (like, oh, stopping on Titan to load oil ) you lose the potential energy, too.

Still not worth it energy wise, but I don't know about you, but I don't believe at all in this whole energy return on energy invested bullshit anyway. Sounds like alarmist lies to me.

Defeatism at its finest.