from the is-the-methane-and-ethane-rain-purple? dept.
Scientists have suggested that non-water based life could form on the surface of Titan, Saturn's largest moon:
A team of researchers at Cornell University has built and run a simulation that showed prebiotic reactions could possibly occur on the surface of one of Saturn's moons, Titan, suggesting the possibility of life evolving in a place where it is too cold for water to be a factor. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team describes the simulation they created in response to the discovery (by the Huygens probe) that polymers such as polyimine might have already developed on the moon's surface.
[...] For life to come about in such places, researchers reason, there would likely need to be some sort of action going on—and that is why there has been so much focus on Titan; it is the only object in our solar system, besides Earth, that has both rainfall and erosion due to liquid movement. But the water it has is locked far underground and the moon is too cold to support an impact by water anyway. But, as the researchers with this new effort discovered after poring over data sent back by Huygens, the surface does have hydrogen cyanide in its sediment, brought down from the atmosphere by methane and ethane rain.
Polymorphism and electronic structure of polyimine and its potential significance for prebiotic chemistry on Titan (open, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1606634113)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @06:36AM
When I'm taking it from a titan I like his hunk of man meat well lubed up with olive oil while he stretches my hungry pussy wide open.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @04:25PM
Your "hungry pussy" should be called "Mother". And, you should get off your lazy ass, find a job, and help with the bills, so Mother doesn't have to go hungry.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @06:53AM
Quick! Somebody medicate it!
It's almost like this is some kind of test that humanity is failing at miserably.
Think about it. Giant moon, clearly visible in the starry sky, exactly the same apparent diameter as the sun when viewed from the Earth. Beaconing us to investigate the heavens, not some smallish dot like so many other moons. The surface is composed of exactly the same composition of materials here on earth, all we have to do is get the life cycle started up there and dig in to avoid cosmic rays.
Further in we have Venus, with caustic sulphuric acid clouds, and further out we have Mars with its iron oxide enriched surface. Mars is a better proving ground for longer term colonization than the moon because of its higher gravity. In either event we need to solve the lack of electromagnetic field problem. That's a problem we have on Earth too! The magnetic poles used to flip as they were torn down and rebuilt, which left the surface vulnerable to radiation for ten to a hundred years. So, solve the lack of EM Shield problem out there, and we might survive a pole flip here on Earth. We're over 500,000 years overdue for the poles to filp, and they stopped flipping around the same time intelligent life began to evolve here... hmm.
A bit further out is the asteroid belt is convieniently broken up chunks of raw material and the dwarf planet Ceres there has more water than all of Earth -- Everything we could ever need to build space habitats. Then there's Jupiter which is almost a brown dwarf star, with enough radiation and gravity to study gravometrics without getting burnt up in a sun. There's Titan, a moon full of methane -- That's rocket fuel ready to use.
Further out there's Saturn, a beautiful ringed world that rains diamonds in the hot depths of its gaseous atmosphere. Neptune that spins on its side, and Uranus with inexplicably fast winds whipping around it.
You really couldn't design a better solar system for a potential space faring sentient life form to evolve in. And we're just sitting here on this comfortable moist rock. Haven't even left the magnetosphere in almost 45 years. We're not launching probes full of bacteria, enzymes, and other organic material to try and see what might work to begin terraforming every planet and moon in the solar system. Just imagine how much it might be costing others to maintain our magnetosphere in this quarantined paradise. We laze about, gazing at the tiniest fraction of the wonders of the Universe, while certain doom approaches in the form of massive corronal mass ejections, super volcanoes errupting, a cosmic gamma ray burst, a smallish sized space rock, or the sun explodes.
You would think the #1 priority of any sentient species would be to eliminate all chance of extinction, but we're content to lolly gag like the ignorant terrestrial dinosaurs before us, right up until we go extinct. "It's better to send robot explorers," say the 100% moronic fools with a galactic scale death wish. Fine, but the bots better be sentient just in case we really did luck into all this amazing fortune. Intelligence and self awareness is just too damn precious to let wink out of existence along with apathetic humanity.
Fuck "predicting", let's do some real science and test the hypothesis. Relocate the trillion dollar military budget and let's have the newly enlisted be space cadets. Let's go do experiments on other planets. We spent more air conditioning the troops in Iraq than an entire year of NASA funding -- and we cut NASA funding!
The difference in outlook is so vast I'm fairly certain I'm not even the same species as the willfully earthbound simpletons who are content with collecting worthless baubles from the dregs of existence. If I were an alien overseer I'd have damn near given up hope on this human space preserve and maybe tried to goad humanity into action with small meteor or two they wouldn't see until it's too late.
::cough::Chelyabinsk ::cough::
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @07:04AM
As a society, we're giving all our money to whoever cries the loudest or has the best victimhood story. And the press is only too happy to go along with that. NBC has a bunch of new sections on their website: NBCLatino, NBCBLK, NBCOut. There is no NBCScience.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @07:44AM
You mean that one must go to http://www.nbcnews.com/science [nbcnews.com] rather than http://www.nbcscience.com/ [nbcscience.com]? Clearly that is symptomatic of the decline of the west.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @07:05AM
P.S. At risk of violating the prime directive: Sulphuric Acid Clouds from Venus + Iron Oxide Dust from Mars:
Fe2O3 + 3H2SO4 => Fe2(SO4)3 + 3H2O (Water, and ferric sulfate salt [wikipedia.org]).
I won't hold my breath. You humans still didn't take the hint, even after your damn mars rover got "unexpectedly" stuck in a batch of iron sulphate salt.
I'm trying to behave, but these Terrans are just so damn infuriating! Fire me, see if I care, I need a vacation!
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 07 2016, @08:06AM
Beats me if I understand what the ferric sulphate salts on Mars has to do with the polyimines on Titan.
Take a break, mate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Thursday July 07 2016, @08:06AM
Not conclusive that this would kill off humans. [wikipedia.org]
You have those two planets mixed up.
Almost all of the technology needed to do manned missions in space has improved. We are on the cusp of propulsion technologies that will cut the time to Mars to as low as one third. Solar panels and batteries have improved dramatically in 45 years, and usable fusion [nextbigfuture.com] is on the way. Computing and robotics have improved - and these are necessary tools to help set up manned bases in advance, so that researchers and colonists can actually stay on the surface of places like the Moon or Mars without dying. With reusable rockets that can manage to get payloads to the Moon or Mars, the cost needed to set up these bases will drop. I'm glad that you want to see NASA with 20x or more budget, but since that is a political impossibility at this point, it makes sense to work within the constraints you have.
We have a possible manned mission to Mars in 8 years courtesy of SpaceX (more details will be announced in September). The cost of getting payloads to Mars will be declining to below $100 million [spacex.com]. We have companies seriously talking about asteroid mining and doing accidental science because of it (launching asteroid-detecting satellites [planetaryresources.com]). Perhaps the pursuit of capital or the overabundance of accumulated capital (which can be blown on space missions by personal choice rather than relying on democracies or bureaucracies to do it) will save humanity.
The most pressing threats to human existence don't come from space. They come from other humans. If we survive 100 years worth of supervolcanoes, pole flips, and gamma ray bursts, we will have a presence in space. Maybe not enough to survive a gamma ray burst that blasts the entire solar system, but enough to at least mitigate the impact of most threats to humanity. Hopefully a Mars colony would have enough manufacturing capability and population to send themselves back to Earth decades after some supervolcano or nuclear war catastrophe.
Linear declines in costs could lead to exponential increases in human presence in space. Figuring out how to harness resources in space without enormous initial capital costs or big risks will speed this up. If a fatcat can get to Mars and make all the products they need to live (and some of what they want) using the soil, mining, and renewable energy, then this can work. If it has to be resupplied periodically by Earth, forget it.
You had better support the anti-war candidate then. Was that Donald Trump, Gary Johnson, or Jill Stein? How much money would you wager on your preferred candidate winning?
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(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday July 07 2016, @11:34AM
>>which left the surface vulnerable to radiation for ten to a hundred years.
>Not conclusive that this would kill off humans. [wikipedia.org]
Oh, well that's alright then. Good news everybody, we don't need to worry about magnetic reversals because we MIGHT NOT go extinct! Go back to your facebooks.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 07 2016, @06:12PM
What are you going to do, add a Faraday cage to your doomsday prepper lair?
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(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 07 2016, @07:40PM
If Lockheed were the only group working on "portable fusion" I'd be quite skeptical. As it is, I'm just rather skeptical. Because of secrecy, fraud, etc. it's hard to tell how serious any of the groups are, and what the probable cost/benefit ration will be if they are successful. (E.g., how much waste heat is produced? How much electricity? This is quite important if one is thinking of using it to power a space habitat.)
My real guess is that if there is success the first uses will be military. This isn't all bad, as many technologies are first developed in military environments, and then improved and streamlined until they are suitable for more general uses.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday July 07 2016, @08:23PM
The groups are, in general, targeting 0.1 to 1 cent per kilowatt-hour [nextbigfuture.com] electricity. There is a lot more specific information about the groups than that roundup post, which should not be too hard to find now that you know their names.
Lockheed specifically has talked about the size of their reactors - being able to fit onto a truck and produce 100 MW. They have also hinted at getting it to fit on a plane. Spacecraft would seem to be a logical next step. This would increase the amount of power available to ion engines and similar electric propulsion schemes by orders of magnitude. Wikipedia talks about an experimental [wikipedia.org] magnetoplasmadynamic thruster [wikipedia.org] (MPDT) and lists input power of 100 kilowatts to 7.5 megawatts. In any case, you could power several engines if you had 10-100 MW available.
To rope in an even more dubious technology, the "emdrive" will supposedly scale [nextbigfuture.com] (image) [blogspot.com] to much higher thrusts when input power increases into hundreds of kilowatt and megawatt territory. This is borderline magical thinking, but the tests meant to disprove emdrive are going to have to increase input power anyway, and I don't think it will be more than 2-5 years until emdrive passes or fails. If by some miracle the technology works like it is said to and thrust scales up dramatically with increased input power, then interstellar travel and possibly ground-to-orbit/hovercar capabilities would be unlocked.
For use in space habitats, a 100 MW reactor would be greatly appreciated, and would deliver far more power than solar panels could, especially if we are talking about a base on say, Callisto [wikipedia.org].
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 07 2016, @10:43AM
Rather than spreading our seed to any rock that will take it, we as a scientific sentient species are trying to determine if life exists anywhere else in order to better understand the universe. Once we know whether or not life exists outside of our comfortable moist rock then we'll ruin the rest of the solar system the way we're destroying the Earth.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday July 07 2016, @04:38PM
Appropriate quote at the bottom of the page: Law of the Jungle: He who hesitates is lunch.
Hail to the Nibbler in Chief.