As unlimited as the salt water on Earth, within an order of magnitude. Titan is loaded with hydrocarbons. Oceans and rivers and rainclouds of the stuff.
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Titan is far out from the Sun’s radiation, but it’s well within the ferocious storm of high-energy flux off Saturn itself. I’d be curious if Titan has a strong enough magnetic field to protect the surface to any significant degree.
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Although the atmosphere lacks oxygen, water ice just below the surface could be used to provide oxygen for breathing and to combust hydrocarbons as fuel.This sort of gloss really starts to annoy. Hydrocarbons are fuel on earth *only* because we have such abundant oxygen that it gets taken for granted. It doesn't work if you have to make it yourself. You can't have a series of reactions that start with ice and methane, both fully reduced, and somehow get net energy from them.
So you would need some other source of energy, and on Titan it is not going to be solar or anything mined locally. I suppose you might be able to get away with something like wind power.
I wouldn’t expect it to have too much, being mostly rock and ice with no core. Some quick searching finds this article from New Scientist, which mentions that whatever magnetic field it might have is essentially subsumed by Saturn’s.
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Hydrocarbons seem great as raw materials for manufacturing, but never an efficient source of energy. YMMV
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Not with that attitude!
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Well, but really. I understand where you’re coming from- but the whole surface of Titan is basically saturated in hydrocarbons.
However, that means something a little different than on Earth. It means that we would have basically unlimited quantities of carbon and hydrogen in chemically useful forms for modern chemistry and life- which cannot be said of most other corners of the solar system.
However, in the absence of oxygen, those don’t represent an energy source. Combustion and respiration aren’t going to be running concerns on Titan outside of whatever little bubbles of solar or nuclear powered habitat could be constructed.
Hydrocarbons would be unlimited in the sense that, say, silicon or aluminum are unlimited on Earth. True insofar as it represents all the dirt under our feet, and handy in that those are key inputs for the human habitat, but not exactly the limiting reactant…
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Suppose we just bring Titan to the Earth? Now you’ve got all the hydrocarbons you could possibly need. Goodbye peak oil!
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How deep does that go, though? I seriously doubt it extends down more than a foot.
Amanda Hendrix gave a talk on this book at the store where I work recently, and it didn’t sound like this was happening in the next few centuries for various reasons. I was kind of hoping she would talk about the effect of Trump’s election, possible near-future inventions like nanotechnology, etc., but mostly it was just “this is why Titan would be sort of okay”. She DID mention that someone is literally working on inventing a warp drive right now, though, which kind of makes me want to read the book just for that.
“Jerry, I’m going to Titan.”
“To Titan?”
“All the way baby!”
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So far we can’t even build a long-term, self-sufficient colony in Antarctica. So I’m not holding my breath for Titan (though I’d definitely have to hold my breath ON Titan).
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We don’t have a spacecraft that can maintain an oxygenated environment for the length of time it would take you to get there.
So you’d have to hold your breath on the way to Titan, too.
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Yup. 640k of hydrocarbon sludge should be enough for anybody.
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I think arguing about the differential habitability of Titan vs. Mars kinda puts the notion of space colonization as existential insurance to bed (which, in fairness, didn’t actually come up in the article itself, just the local gloss).
It’s true that most other bodies in the solar system are so depleted of carbon or water that trying to do chemistry- whether of the industrial or biological variety- is an exercise in shipping material all over the system and keeping it under proverbial lock and key, or putting in big energy expenditures to wrest it from whatever corners of the landscape it has accumulated in, and doing so in a bath of radiation that demands you put a lot of mass over your head (which might not be so rough in the reduced gravity of everwhere-but-here, but still). Of course, at the far end of that spectrum, you have O’Neill-esque space habitats, where zero-g is just such a nice place to build that it warrants building in the middle of nowhere.
And it’s true, in that race, Titan does pretty well. It has lots of nitrogen for making proteins and such, which gives it a leg up on Mars, and it has lots of water and other sources of hydrogen, which give it a leg up on Venus, and it has lots of carbon, which gives it a leg up on the Moon, and it has a surface and radiation shielding and an atmosphere for heat exchange that gives it a leg up on your average asteroid.
Which still leaves it vastly more hostile to the replication of human beings and their ecology and technology than any place on Earth, even in the midst of any bred of anthropogenic or cosmogenic disaster imaginable, and thus dependent, and fragile, and a pretty sorry excuse for an insurance policy for civilization/life/et al.
Sure, you don’t need pressure vessels on Titan- you just need to live like you do, because the air is six degrees above the temperature of liquid oxygen. And it’s nice that there are all of these volatiles- shame that they’re covering (in the sense the mantle covers the core) most all of the rock you might need to make metals, or furnish trace minerals to biology. And you could overcome some of these with plentiful inputs of energy- shame the sun is a bit dim at the orbit of Saturn, and a bit dimmer under the smog clouds, and that any fissionable uranium or thorium is deep under the ice crust too.
If we’re really talking about the absolute most habitable place we know of in the system, it’s in the subsurface ocean of Enceladus. It’s literally the only place we are pretty sure that we could scoop up organisms from Earth and deposit them and they wouldn’t die- there’s liquid water that’s exposed to rock, the pH in a range that known lifeforms find comfortable, there’s carbon and nitrogen and sulfur, no radiation, and it’s within the realm of possibility, though not confirmed, that there are infusions of hydrogen and heat from serpentinization to furnish energy. The fact that it is, ya know, underwater, and only accessible via a vertical shaft a couple times longer than the Chunnel seems to be quibbling, at these scales.
Any technology that makes it a safe bet that a colony in any of these horrifically inhospitable could survive without lifelines to Earth also ensures that Earth itself is insulated against the classes of existential threat that extraplanetary bolt holes might insure against. Worried about impactors? If you’re pushing around asteroids to mine or import volatiles to dry worlds or hollow out to live in, then you’re sitting on far more propulsive capacity than you need to ensure that Earth is secure. Miss one? The K-T impactor killed everything on land bigger than 50 pounds, in the fullness of ecosystem collapse, sure. But you could still breath the air, and drink the water, and it seems to me the odds of a human culture composed of some fraction of the teeming billions on Earth muddling through by eating things under fifty pounds and growing yeast on oil and mushrooms on dead forests is better than some thousands or millions of Martians or Titanians doing without their regular shipment of fusion initiators or vitamin X or the like. Ditto for a global thermonuclear war- filtering out fallout and eating canned goods in your deep sea submarine is still a better deal than making air. Worried about gamma ray bursts? Living underground on Earth works just as well as it does on Mars- or under the sea, where life on Earth has probably already survived a burst. Worried about massive ecological collapse and resource shortages? The closed-ecology farming and magical solar-panels-from-sand-machines or fusion reactors or whatever that you need for your Titan colony to live through the Interstellar-esque final corn crop also solve those problems here on Earth, and need not do so with nearly the same perfection. (Oh yeah, Interstellar- planetary evacuation because of a crop blight. Right. If you’re able to create biospheres in space where you didn’t drag this stuff in with you, odds are you understand it well enough to make a stand on Earth. See also, growing yeast on oil, etc.)
And on the longest scales, where anxieties about the habitability of Earth in light of the changing form and output of the sun take hold, we’ve got a few bits of worked math that suggest that managing the Earth’s radiation flux by erecting orbital mirrors or moving the planet itself using gravity assists powered by the momentum of the gas giants is a project that’s probably energetically cheaper than terraforming or interstellar colonies.
All of which makes it sounds like I’m not into the human experience in space. That’s not true. I think that having some people doing science and art and life in the infinite portions of the universe that are ‘not here’ is a wonderful thing, and one that I’ve even turned a wrench for. But this notion where it’s a sign of being a big thinker that your concern for the human race and the biosphere means that you’re willing to do the brave thing and say fuck it and build rocket ships is a way of thinking about the future that needs to quit.
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Not with any attitude.
Not with all the wishes and pipe dreams in the entirety of the world, either.
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The hydrocarbons and ice? If you mentally substitute ice for rock and hydrocarbons for waters, you’re in the ballpark for the right abundance of each on Titan. They constitute the landscape. Titan has hydrocarbon lakes (big enough to plausibly be ‘seas’)and hydrocarbon rain and snow, and hydrocarbon springs, and canyons carved by hydrocarbons, and there are sand dunes formed from eroded, wind-blown ice (which you’d think would just be ‘snow’, but no, it’s sand- ice is about as hard as granite as those temperatures and the stuff that ice does clustered around its triple point on Earth don’t really apply- it’s rock, that just so happens to be made of hydrogen and oxygen.
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You’re right, humanity should resign itself to extinction. What was I thinking???
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Yep, that’s totally what I said; ver batim; not at all taken out of context, or exaggerated, in way shape or form.
You “win.”
Thanks for playing.
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