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Write every day no exceptions – Titan June 19, 2010

Posted by Conventioneering in spaaaaaaaaaaace, write every day no exceptions.
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Continuing my astrobiology theme from yesterday, let’s talk Titan.

Titan is currently the most exciting thing in the solar system (besides Earth, of course, but since we’re on it most of us have this strange habit of not noticing how exciting it is.). Titan is to the 21st century what Mars was to the 19th – a strange, distant world full of infinite possibility. Where with a Mars we got excited because some guy thought he saw canals on the surface (what turned out to be the insides of his own eyeballs!), on Titan we’re excited because there’s molecules that are going somewhere.

As I understand it (and, again, as I say in every one of these posts: I don’t have internet while writing these, so I’m probably wrong about some of the science here), there’s methane, nitrogen, ammonia, argon, ethane, propane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide, and cyanogen (spelling?) on Titan. There’s some compound (acetone? Acetylene? Ammonia? I can’t remember and I don’t have internet where I am!) that’s disappearing when it shouldn’t be.

There’s a couple of possibilities as to why this stuff keeps going poof on Titan’s surface. All the theories I’ve heard involve some kind of mad-crazy chemical process. Some of these processes may be fairly mundane, just the normal interaction of molecules (well, normal by some standards anyway). But the theory that really excites people is the idea that maybe, just maybe on Titan’s surface there exists an exotic form of life that consumes this compound, kind of like how we need oxygen and water to live.

Again, I’m no a biochemist (and thank god, organic chemistry is some of the most wall-bangingly difficult stuff in school. Ask any biologist or chemist that doesn’t specialize in the stuff and you’ll get shudders). And just like with Europa, life on Titan, if it exists, is probably tiny and analogous to Earth bacteria. This would still be super-exciting because it’d be proof that life CAN exist elsewhere, even if it’s small.

But what if it wasn’t small?

I’m more interested in what kind of culture Titanites would develop . I can’t speculate very far in this space and without a lot more research, but I can make baseless conjecture (and who knows, maybe some day I can write a golden-age sci-fi novel about it).

First, life on Titan would probably have wings. There’s just no evolutionary reason not to. The atmosphere on Titan is so starkly ideal for flight that it sends aeronautics experts into a frothing stupor. Titan has the unlikely combination of very low gravity and a very dense atmosphere. Its winds are, as far as I’m aware, not particularly violent (unlike, say, Jupiter or Saturn.) This means that anything which flies needs a very short wing surface area to get into the air. You, a mere human, could probably fly by just stretching out a bedsheet attached to your ankles and running really fast (granted, not very well, and we’re ignoring the fact that you’d suffocate and freeze to death first).

Since flight is so easy, it’d be silly for things not to evolve it. Ground based creatures would still exist, as would, perhaps, beings that swim in Titan’s methane seas, but there would be a vast variety of things that soar through the atmosphere. There might even be gas-bag creatures, things that take in the abundant hydrogen from Titan’s atmosphere and use it to float gently above the ground (see the TV series ‘Alien Planet’ for a few examples of such creatures). Imagine a flighted species that builds vast towers on mountaintops to glide from, great rookeries. I again say that they would probably not see in visible light due to how little there is on Titan and also because of the moon’s thick atmosphere; more likely they’d see in some other wavelength (infrared, probably. I am fond of this as a way of seeing). Unlike the inhabitants of Europa, however, they might be able to see Saturn through the clouds, a looming ringed presence in the sky. Their early ancestors likely worshiped the ringed sky-being in much the same way Earth-people worshiped the sun. Maybe they gave their own names and personalities to the other moons of Saturn, and made up legends about why they disappear and re-appear. Maybe they eventually built great telescopes to watch the skies, and maybe they came to look at the small blue-green planet that sometimes appeared in their sky.

And maybe they dismissed the possibility of life there completely. After all, that huge and distant world’s gravity is far too heavy, its atmosphere too thin, the temperature too hot for methane to exist in liquid form on its surface. Life couldn’t possibly exist there.

Or maybe they’d look and hope, like we do, that someone’s looking back.

Next, I’m either going to talk about a hypothetical martian-venusian war that took place long before the first humans. Of course, I said nonfiction every day no exceptions, so I may be straying too far from my subject…

Write every day no exceptions – Europa June 18, 2010

Posted by Conventioneering in spaaaaaaaaaaace, write every day no exceptions.
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I’ve been reading an awful lot about Europa and Titan lately. For those that don’t know, Europa and Titans are moons of Jupiter and Saturn, respectively, and if there’s currently extraterrestrial life within our solar system, they’re the two most likely candidates. Europa probably contains a vast ocean of liquid water beneath its icy surface, water that’s heated by tidal forces exerted by Jupiter and its sister Io, while Titan has a thick atmosphere and a variety of complex hydrocarbon compounds on its surface, as well as weather and, yes, water, though in this case the water is in the form of rock-solid ice.

It’s extremely unlikely that any life we’d find there would be particularly complex. Our most optimistic current theories say that we’re likely to find bacteria or other micro-organisms, likely similar to the type we find clustered around hot springs or beneath Antarctic ice on our own planet – that is, adapted to extreme temperatures and circumstances.

But let’s consider a thought experiment for the moment, not unlike authors of old once speculated on what life beneath the clouds of Venus or in the deserts of Mars might be like. There’s a vast body of wonderful literature based on these concepts, even after the majority of the scientific community realized that we probably weren’t going to find glorious thick jungles on Venus or water-starved canal-building civilizations on Mars.

Europa is covered in extremely thick plates of ice. I’m not sure (and can’t look up at the moment) if that surface ice ever cracks enough to let liquid water to the surface, only to rapidly freeze again, and I can’t fully speculate on the kinds of ‘weather’ they’d have down there as I don’t understand the fluid-dynamics of ocean currents well enough, nor do I know what the core of Europa is like. I don’t know if it has a rocky center with a molten core or what, though I do gather it’s protected by cosmic radiation by Jupiter’s vast magnetic field, and from asteroid impacts by the outer moons of Ganymede and… Calypso, I think (see, my inability to access Wikipedia on the train already hurts my ability to write articles).

A civilization on Europa would live suspended in this liquid universe. They would have concepts of up and down, but they’d be rather different from ours since as a species they’d be able to ‘fly’ from the start. There’d be no Europan Wright Brothers; there’d be no need. Let me for the moment conjecture that like Earth, Europa has a rocky floor beneath those marvelous oceans, some of which are close to the surface and some of which are crushing, deadly depths. Europans would not, at first, turn to the skies, but rather to the depths, for their inspiration and exploration. They would build carefully pressurized vehicles to allow them to descend further and explore the chasms of their planet, before eventually sending explorers to the ice-cold skies. I can imagine them finding the upper levels difficult to live in due to the temperature, but an intelligent species would find ways to create tools to let them live there. Imagine fantastic cities in reverse, anchored in solid ice – to Europans, as if the sky were covered in air so cold it was solid.

And then one day, one Europan gets the idea to drill into the great ‘ceiling’. Or, perhaps, the shifting gravitational field of Jupiter (for which the Europans have many ultimately incorrect theories) or a stray meteor impact punches a vast hole in the ice, and, at last, they see…

… what?

Europans would be unlikely to see in visible light – if I was going to give any candidate for how they ‘see’ I would conjecture some combination of infrared and echolocation. Infrared would mean that the core of their planet would glow softly, while the sky would be black. Detail would be gathered through echolocating. So, what would the sky look like to such a creature?

I unfortunately can’t give any sort of accurate description right now due to, as I said, the fact that I write these essays on the train and thus can’t magically access Google or Wikipedia (damn!). But I can conjecture based on what I know:

Jupiter would be a great glowing red presence in the sky, covering much of it. If Io were visible, it would be a brightly studded orb that would approach and then recede at regular intervals. Stars would be faint, the Sun itself only a much brighter dot among them, and the whole sky would be full of peculiar background radiation. I don’t know what Earth would look like, but in this stage of Europan development, I doubt they would even think to look for life yet, or have the tools to do so. Indeed, even if they suddenly decided to build dozens of telescopes peeking through to the surface, they’d likely dismiss the Earth as an unlikely candidate for any sort of life – too close to the Sun, and therefore too exposed to dangerous ultraviolet radiation detrimental to the development of life.

Perhaps I’ll speculate on Titan civilization tomorrow.

In before all my biology and physics friends explain exactly why I am wrong.