Titan's Lakes of Methane and Ethane

Rob Carr writes "During the most recent Cassini fly-by, the surface-mapping radar spotted what appear to be lakes in the high northern latitudes of Titan. From the article: 'The channels have a shape that strongly implies they were carved by liquid. Some of the dark patches and connecting channels are completely black, that is, they reflect back essentially no radar signal, and hence must be extremely smooth. In some cases rims can be seen around the dark patches, suggesting deposits that might form as liquid evaporates.' At Titan's temperatures, water is a solid; the lakes would be comprised of methane and ethane. The fluids are different, as are the temperatures, but these lakes cement Titan's status in the solar system as the place with the most earth-like weather — except for Earth, of course."

Re:No ethanol?

[Anonymous Coward]

bring oxygen!

Re:Grammar Nazi

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

"is composed of" or "comprises"... not "is comprised of"

You are correct, but:

1) The meaning is quite clear.

2) The American Heritage Dictionary sez: [bartleby.com]

Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected. See Usage Note at

Re:Grammar Nazi

[192939495969798999]

Hmmm, me not know what you're talking about... Basic grammar & spelling has never been issues here. /ha

Re:Grammar Nazi

[creepynut]

Hmmm, me not know what your talkin' aboot... Basic grammer & spelin has never been issue hear. /ha

Fixed:)

Re:Grammar Nazi

[19061969]

Huh, you grammer looser...

Oh, btw, just in case a mod thinks this is a flame: ;-) - that's a wink meaning that I'm joining in on the joke. Sheesh! The things you have to do to for post-modern irony!

Re:Oh, great!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

"How long till Bush tries to stick a goddamned american flag on that rock ?"

Though I get the political commentary here, but wouldn't we all be happy if Bush funded a mission to stick a rock on that moon?

Spore!

[NsOmNiA91130]

I think it'll be a while before we get any humans there anyway. Why don't we grow the moon, Spore-style?

Fluid

[MichaelSmith]

I remember that when the Huygens probe landed there were lots of pictures of dark areas presumed to be lakes with channels leading into them from higher ground. But the probe landed close to a channel and didn't see any liquid.

Later the consensus was that the channels seen from Huygens were dry channels left over from flows in the past.

The evidence in this case seems to be the darkness (in radar) of the "lakes", which imply that we are seeing liquid Methane or Ethane. So why are these areas different from the Huygens landing site? It is in a polar area (gee I wish we had a second probe now) but most of the heat on Titan comes from internal sources anyway so having the sun close to th horizon won't make it much colder.

In any event Arthur Clarke is looking more right then wrong at the moment, We should be on the lookout for a Methane Monsoon.

Re:Fluid

[Tablizer]

I remember that when the Huygens probe landed there were lots of pictures of dark areas presumed to be lakes with channels leading into them from higher ground.....Later the consensus was that the channels seen from Huygens were dry channels left over from flows in the past. The evidence in this case seems to be the darkness (in radar) of the "lakes", which imply that we are seeing liquid...So why are these areas different from the Huygens landing site?

The darkness in the areas where Huygens landed was ph

Titan is amazing

[GreggBz]

We are pretty certain it has liquid lakes, but it may
have caves [newscientistspace.com] as well.

We know so little about our solar system.

And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[popsicle67]

None at all to explore the solar system. We are wasting money that would be better spent feeding people who are too lazy too feed themselves. I just love democrats, I just got through being berated by my ex-mother in law for being excited about this story and space exploration in general. I guess she doesn't get that we'll have to move out there one day because this planet will be too crowded. She says people need to wise up and stop breeding so fast so we can achieve a stable population with zero growth. W

we can have zero population growth

[r00t]

That's 2 or 3 surviving children, on average, where "surviving" really just means that they go onto reproduce and thus have families included in the average. Castration and death are equivalent.

So how is this:

At age 3, we execute the kids that can't walk and talk. At age 7, we execute the kids that can't read and do basic math. At age 11, we execute the kids who can't do algebra, geometry, 10 sit-ups, 2 pull-ups, 3 push-ups, a quarter-mile run, enough vision for safe driving, and able to carry out a ph

Re:we can have zero population growth

[Tim C]

It's not even the logical way. Arbitrary measures risk disposing of people with a great talent or potential who otherwise do not make the cut.

Re:we can have zero population growth

[r00t]

It's no different from them randomly not being born, unless you have reason to believe that genes for "great talent" or "potential" are significantly associated with traits that will cause someone to not make the cut.

It's rather clear that the opposite is true, unless you have an inverted idea of "great talent" or "potential".

Re:we can have zero population growth

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

Nah, I like our current model of selecting women with hips too narrow to bear children and increasing survival rates for terminal illness such that everybody can survive long enough to pass on genes for early onset cancers, diabetes, effective blindness, and all the other wonderful things we have developed once we started living past 35.

Seriously tho. I'm the only person in my circle of friends with 20/20 vision. And none of them have light prescriptions. None of them can drive without their glasses. how

Re:we can have zero population growth

[PateraSilk]

> Seriously tho. I'm the only person in my circle of friends with 20/20 vision.
> And none of them have light prescriptions. None of them can drive without their
> glasses. how fucked up is that, evolution?

This is a fallacy that many people like to use as a proof of the (genetic) degeneracy of these End Times. If someone could show me statistics that prove that bad eyesight (or another supposed modern degenerate trait) was actually selected against in a way that affected breeding populations be

Re:we can have zero population growth

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

Uh... care to support your claim that it *is* a fallacy?
we could just play the "no the burden of proof is on *you*" game back and forth, wouldnt that be fun.
Do I have proof? obviously not. Nor do you, or you'd have included it rather than just being a trumped up negative nancy.
but...
I am, however, equiped with powers of reasoning, so I'll just work them a bit. If you're basically blind, you're more likely to trip and fall, and therefore more likely to be injured walking around. You're less likely to see

Re:we can have zero population growth

[PateraSilk]

One fallacy here is that humans have been susceptible to sabre-tooth tigers until the near past. (Haha, that's a joke.) If we look at humans as a wild population, non-norm eyesight might be a detriment. But we're talking about humans in their natural setting, that is, within bands or tribes that have division of labor.

Let's look at the breakdown of possible eye problems. Presbyopia, or "far-sightedness", precludes easy detail work because the eye cannot focus closely but excels at focuses near infinity. M

Re:we can have zero population growth

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

but we're also talking about the survival rate of a given allele over competitor alleles for a given trait, which means that we're speaking about individuals. yes, individuals agregated over a mating population as whole, but individuals nonetheless. One given allele may make individuals with it more societally valuable, but that does not really inform their status of biological fitness. So the presyobic would make better guards for the fort than the myopic. That in no way aids them in avoiding life-threa

Re:we can have zero population growth

[PateraSilk]

I hear what you're saying. However, IMHO, from what I've read, a trait that confers a genuine disadvantage on individual members will be weeded out rather quickly in a population. Those that confer slight disadvantage or are survival neutral will persist. In modern society, granted, our superior medical care will convert many afflictions to survival neutral, but the prevalence of things like cystic fibrosis or Tay-Sachs are much much less than simple myopia or presbyopia. In other words, the prevalence of b

Re:we can have zero population growth

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

slight disadvantage is obviously what I was talking about.
poor eyesight is obviously nowhere near negatively selected trait as cystic fibrosis, or that condition, whose name i cannot remember where kids age to like 100 before they turn 10.
My point was merely that we have removed the negative-feedback cycle which contributed to whatever equilibrium point poor eyesight existed in the population.

Re:we can have zero population growth

[kimvette]

Seriously tho. I'm the only person in my circle of friends with 20/20 vision. And none of them have light prescriptions. None of them can drive without their glasses. how fucked up is that, evolution?

I don't know, let's take a look at the first thousand years (in Biblical terms) shall we?

Genesis 27
1 It happened, that when Isaac was old, and his eyes were dim, so that he could not see, he called Esau his elder son, and said to him, "My son?" He said to him, "Here I am."

Hmm, it seems that right from the get-g

Re:we can have zero population growth

[AdmiralWeirdbeard]

Um, I'm not entirely sure what you're really saying. I was not advocating creationism, nor attempting to weaken evolution. I was merely pointing an area in which i believe we have eliminated a mechanism of negative selection. Namely: if you cant see the bison about to run you over, you dont progress to passing on the genes that caused you to be unable to see said bison.
I was not "making fun" of evolution, I was personifying evolutin to join me in making fun of humanity.
and yes, bad eyesight has been arou

Re:we can have zero population growth

[PateraSilk]

Uh, Admiral Weirdbeard wasn't trolling, and he wasn't talking about entropy or any other creation science red herrings.

Yes, you can mod me "Troll" for this.

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[TapeCutter]

Have you ever heard the term "family planning" or do you just keep screwing until someone shouts "I'm pregnant"?

I was born the year after sputnik was launched and have lived through the history of space exploration, the hubble pictures are worth every cent. Space exploration has shown mankind that we all live on what Carl Sagan called a pale blue dot [infoimagination.org]. It has also shown us that it is all we have got, it's our collective "bird in the hand".

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[Alexandra Erenhart]

sex != reproduction, since the birth control pill and even counting days.

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[mcsnee]

Yeah. Those stupid Democrats. Why, if it were up to Democrats, we never would have gone to the moon!

Fortunately, we have a wise, fiscally responsible Republican administration in office--one that would never waste money entrusted to it by the taxpayers of this country on anything irresponsible.

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[popsicle67]

Not Democrats, John Kennedy. To the chagrin of his own party he managed to keep his promise to get to the moon despite strenuous efforts to derail the program by democrats who were already mad about the tax cuts he pushed through. Read a history book sometime, it may open your eyes.

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[Melllvar]

If Kennedy was the only thing keeping the Democrats from KO'ing the moonshot/space program, then how come NASA's Houston command post is called Johnson Space Center?

And listen, mac. Maybe you don't want him to be one, but that still doesn't change the fact that JFK was a Democrat. Not a single history book I've ever read attempts to claim otherwise. If you judged a President's party affiliation by how in sync he was with the rest of the gang, then this country hasn't had a Democratic President since Andy J

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[Tablizer]

I don't think it matters much. I expect that machines be smarter than us in a generation.
     

Re:And the hand-wringers say there is no reason

[popsicle67]

It's a fact that we will be dumber than the machines that we use. I don't se it taking more than 5 years though. Right now our only edge is imagination, and from what I see that is becoming a rare commodity.

Re:Just throw a rock at it

[CogDissident]

And god help you if that rock strikes a spark against another one.

WHOOM! Oops, half the planet is on fire...

Yes, I know that it wouldn't burn without oxygen in the atmosphere, but work with me here people.

Re:Just throw a rock at it

[rah1420]

Arthur C. Clarke noted this in his book "Imperial Earth."

(Imperfectly quoted) "On Earth, they light a jet of hydrocarbon and let it burn in the oxygen atmosphere. Here, we light a jet of oxygen and let it burn in our hydrocarbon atmosphere."

Pretty good book.

Liquid suggested as vital component of prelife

[weemattisnot]

I just recently finished a fascinating article in "Artificial Life II" from the Santa Fe Institute in the Sciences of Complexity. The author used Cellular Automata (think Conway's game of life) to show that complex structures only occur when the rules of the Cellular automata fall within a certain range of the possible sets of rules.

The range works like this (this is over-simplified btw):

• If the rules tend too much towards the "quiescent state" (think all the cells turning black in conways game of life),

Re:Liquid suggested as vital component of prelife

[weemattisnot]

The article arguing that the ability to pass on information happens spontaneously given a system with a certain ratio of chaos and order. Unless I misunderstand what you're saying, this passing on of information is analogous to the "instructions" that you mentioned in your post.

That's a pretty safe bet

[dexter riley]

Finally this puts forward my hypothesis that life may only require liquids to form (i.e. perhaps it's not necessary to have liquid _water_, but just liquid something).

Diffusion in solids is prohibitively slow. The common molecules that could form information-storing polymers are very, very insoluble in gases. That pretty much leaves liquids. I wouldn't say that life could never evolve without the benefit of liquids, but it could require timescales far longer than the current age of the universe.

I high

Strange comment on the NASA site

[rotenberry]

On the Cassini-Huygens Home page ( http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm [nasa.gov] ) we read that:

"These lakes appear to be filled with hydrocarbon liquids, possibly making Titan the only place other than Earth known to contain lakes."

This statement is a bit misleading since there are lava lakes on both the Earth and on Jupiter's moon Io. The Earth's lava is primarily silicon, while Io's lava is primarily sulfur, but remember that on Titan water is considered a rock.