Well, Titan has a thicker atmosphere than Earth, at about 1.5 bars vs Earth's 1. That puts water at a boiling point of 110'c So make sure your coffee is hotter than you would make it here on earth.
This is actually perfect temperature to liquid cool your superconductors. A bunch of them are in that perfect zone between -182 C and -161 C, so you would not need much work to cool them down. Send down a supercomputer in a sub, land it on a lake, let the methane ice thaw and sink down the sub. Eject a buoy on a cable so you have connection to a satellite around Titan, and you got supercomputer built with superconductors. The coolest methane always flows to the bottom of the lake, and the lake has huge surface area to radiate out the heat, and you even got methane atmosphere to speed it up. YBCO is at this exact temperature, and you can mass produce it.
> Eject a buoy on a cable so you have connection to a satellite around Titan, and you got supercomputer built with superconductors
How are you getting a super computer to titan? Powerful electronics that work on Earth don't fare well in space.
Technically, the electronics in the supercomputer would be under 100 feet of liquid methane, which, while not an amazing radiation shielding, 100 feet of it is going to make wonders for it. The only problem would be actually the communications, so the satellites would lose some of their effectiveness, resulting in more of them needed than normal. This is also more of a further in the future proposition, at least 20 decades in the future, likely more. But if you mean transport electronics though saturn radiation zones, then the ship could easily have few inches of polyethylene shielding, if you bring a ship big enough, then the shielding will weight almost nothing.
Larry Niven wrote a story about an astronaut stranded on Pluto. He runs out of air and commits suicide on the surface. His brain wakes up again, using superconductivity instead of normal ion transfer, etc. His brain works slowly and he becomes aware of native animals on the surface which appear to operate in similar ways. Sunlight heats him up so he is only active at night.
Which gets me thinking about native life on Titan which naturally exploits superconductivity.
Ever tested a buoy and cables in -161C in liquid methane and see how long they last? If you run those cables from a box housing the electronics, you would need to seal those cables, not sure if there's anything flexible that will withstand that cold liquid methane for prolonged periods of time.
I mean, computing is computing. If we can do it off world better, so be it. Crypto is pretty big part of the market, but it seems computing in general seems to be much bigger, especially now with AI. Considering that superconductors could be hundreds of times more powerful than room temperature computers, and that more and more, costs of computing go toward power and cooling, there might be some huge gains on supercomputers on Titan.
I guess there's probably not a lot going on at those temps, but it's like, billions of years of gunk that was irradiated by UV and cosmic rays in the atmosphere in every way possible. Things would get crazy in that soup by adding any heat.
There's a very interesting scifi short story Stephen Baxter about humans exploring a kuiper belt asteroid inhabited by a species of ultra-low metabolism sentients with a life cycle based on the rotation of the asteroid. They spend the 'night' as mobile, migratory nomads, and when dawn breaks they try to settle onto sunward slopes to store up energy for reproduction and the nighttime journey.
Part of the story takes place from the perspective of one of these critters, which sees a human, even in a vacuum suit, as a blazing ball of energy and light, and their ships are basically apocalyptic events for the tribes of critters.
The story ends with >!a description of the critter's heroic charge as it tries to frighten off the terrifying sun-people, where it sprints down a slope, then dies of old age as the sun comes up, despairing that it's not in a position where it will be able to store enough energy to reproduce. The human that witnesses this event remarks "hey, that weird thing fell down a hill, d'you think it's alright?"!<
At least, that's what I recall. I need to go back and read that book again.
It’s actually in Titan’s atmosphere that the interesting chemistry is happening. The atmosphere is basically a huge Miller-Urey experiment, producing all kinds of prebiotic molecules including amino acids.
But where does the methane come from?
> The methane in Titan’s atmosphere is what makes its complex atmospheric chemistry possible, but where all that methane comes from is a mystery. Because sunlight continuously breaks down methane in Titan’s atmosphere, some source must be replenishing it or it would be depleted over time. Researchers suspect methane could be belched into Titan's atmosphere by cryovolcanism—volcanoes releasing chilled water instead of molten rock lava—but they’re not certain if this or some other process is responsible.
https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/moons/titan/facts/
My extremely limited understanding of methane is that it comes either from decaying biological material OR certain minerals bumping up against each other AND water. Then, as we know, water precedes life. So…
If you do a time lapse of a sandy desert, you’ll see that they move in a wavelike fashion. Essentially we have possible evidence of movement and therefore potential for mechanical weathering.
I think finding life basically anywhere else is going to be one of the biggest scientific moments of the century. If we can find proof that even very primitive life developed elsewhere, it immediately opens up the possibility that somewhere else in the universe that there are other species like ours out there and changes a lot of our model of how the universe works.
I was discussing with my gf the discovery of sugars and other organic compounds like alcohol just floating around in massive clouds in space far away from any star.. It made me think.. What if there was some life form that just lived in deep space and somehow uses those resources and metabolizes them? Like maybe some life that spawned on an icey asteroid not even in a star system....
It would be funny if they discovered earth
and were like "WHAT!? THEY LIVE ON A PLANET... WITH GRAVITY AND AN ATMOSPHERE?? NEAR A STAR?? HOW ARENT THEY INSTANTLY CRUSHED AND BOILED ALIVE?!"
like they could be equally blown away by us after assuming all the conditions on Earth would be far too hostile for their version of life just like we do with the vacuum of space and no gravity. They could have their minds completely blown at the idea of us even being able to leave and re enter our planets gravity well after their scientist just wrote it off as impossible long ago. I bet any life we find is going to be like that to us where scientists are gonna feel like fucking idiots for just making a lot of wrong assumptions about how alien life could potentially exist
Tides have a pretty specific set of gravitational requirements in order to occur. IIRC the fact that the earth has tides is pretty spectacular coincidence, and is caused by our moon being much larger and closer than average. You probably don’t get that same specific set of forces on Titan
Titan is tidally locked with Saturn, so you wouldn't get the gravitational pull cycle you would get with it rotating faster/slower. It does have an elliptical orbit so maybe you get some change due to that as the elliptical orbits of the moon around the earth and earth around the sun can impact tidal forces.
Still missing out on the biggest reason for our tides here on earth though.
I found an article/blurb about this:
https://www.astronomy.com/science/does-titan-experience-any-tides-in-its-oceans-or-is-it-tidally-locked-with-no-tides/
And if the moon had bodies of liquid the tidal forces would be limited to those from the elliptical nature of its orbit and the sun. The earth rotates at a different speed than the moon orbits which is responsible for most of our tides. If we were tidally locked with the moon (and not the other way around), our tides would be much much smaller.
All large moons in our solar system are tidally locked and couldn’t have tides as we do on earth because of that. The gravitational pull from their planets is always on one location so the tide would not change.
Earths moon is super close and large (in comparison to the planet). Most moons don’t have nearly as much gravitational effect plus the planets with moons often have many, whose gravity will offset each other somewhat.
It’s because of how the moon was formed from debris ejected into space after a collision with a large mass object.
>This varying pull causes bulges on Titan, also called solid "tides." Near the middle of Titan's orbit around Saturn (quadrature), there is still sufficient pull to cause a gravitational distortion, or deviation from a spherical shape. Tides on Titan raised by Saturn's gravity can be as high as 30 feet (10 meters).
https://science.nasa.gov/resource/squeezing-and-stretching-titan/
Titan is tidally locked with Saturn. Like Earth's moon the same face always points at Titan.
If there are tides, they would need to be due to other moons (influence of the sun would be _very_ week out there).
I think on this case the actual moon bulges quite a lot, and viscosity of the liquid isn't the same. I see your point though, and you're probably right.
Assuming you had a suit capable of keeping you alive, I wonder if you *could* surf on a lake of what's essentially liquid natural gas. The surface tension and your buoyancy would be way different, and titan has like 1/5 the gravity of earth.
It's a cool thought experiment.
No, the density of liquid methane is less than half that of water. We’re about as dense as water. We’d sink straight to the bottom.
Edit- you said surf, not swim. Possibly, but it’d require a substantially larger board? I don’t know much about the mechanics of surfing, is it possible the board needed to float would be too large to surf on? It would also probably need some kind of polar coating. Styrofoam might be great for flotation, but it’ll probably dissolve in liquid methane. (Though it might be slow enough to be useful for some time. I’m not really sure.)
I had the same thought, but doing a bit of googling and it sounds like, between the low density and the lack of any real surface tension, coupled with the mass of a human being, liquid methane would be closer to a thick fog than liquid water.
It still might be fun to imagine what a surfboard would look like in this situation (how large the surface area would have to be, and how low the mass would have to be, to function similarly to a typical surfboard on earth)
Surface tension in a polar liquid (i.e. water) is the answer. Buoyancy allows for swimming, floating, surfing, skimming. Ethane etc. are non polar. You'll fall almost literally between the molecules...
Titan wouldnt be the hardest rock to keep humans alive on, I believe the surface pressure is 1.5xs ours, so you wouldn't need pressurized suits, just heated ones.
It's extremely cold, and the methane-ethane is super saturated in the atmosphere, because it rains. This reminds me of the conditions we use to prepare cloud chambers here on Earth for the purpose of visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. It's possible that in some areas on Titan you could see millions of these cloud tracks all over the surface, including over the lakes.
Whether we've wanted it or not, we've found a Destiny thread in an unrelated sub. So let's start pulling out all the Destiny memes, one by one.
Zavala's Mars strike intro. From what I can gather, he tasks the fireteam with finding a Cabal general directing operations from a land tank outside of Rubicon. It's commonly repeated, but with the right edits, we can punch through the repetition, whip this pasta out, and farm some upvotes.
Not a huge surprise. Titan has storms, clouds, lightning, rain, dunes, rivers, and more. We know the winds are strong and interact with the surface. We know there are mare (seas). We know waves ought to be there.
We’ve also seen ripples on the surface, though they were sub-millimeter waves IIRC.
Still, evidence of larger waves helps us further develop models and is exciting!!
No, there’s been a debate ongoing for many decades about whether or not titan’s lakes actually have waves. We know there is wind, and low gravity, so waves seem likely. But the images we have show (almost) mirror smooth lakes. So people have been thinking about alternative explanations for why there might be no waves (a wet mudflat or a more solid “crust” forming above the lakes f.ex), or even if you do assume there are waves (which seems likely these days), what exactly these look like and how they function (which says a lot about the climate). High resolution sat imagery (good enough to more accurately spot smaller waves) won’t come in for at least another decade, so this is an alternative method to try and get closer to solving the debate.
At first potentially and over time more and more likely, but even towards the end the exact properties and behaviour of the waves was still an important question since the waves were tiny compared to what was expected. It’s mostly just a lot of theoretical “probably’s” in terms of what and how
Interesting tidbit of information: Cassini Huygens was launched 26 years and 8 months ago tomorrow (launched October 27, 1997) on a Titan IVB rocket from Cape Canaveral, and took almost 7 years to get there (6 years, 261 days).
Waves of methane-ethane, it's worth noting.
So the sea is somewhere between -182 C and -161 C. Which is a bit too chilly to swim.
Nonsense you’re only saying that because no one ever has
Unexpected Princess Bride.
You'd be only mostly dead
Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there’s usually only one thing you can do.
Go through his pockets and look for loose change!
Haunt tf out of people.
Exactly! It's only a *hypothesis* until valid scientific testing is done along with a peer reviewed and validated publication edit: corrected
Think I definitely want my swim cap to avoid brain freeze if I test it out.
Could you reverse brain freeze by holding boiling hot coffee in your mouth?
Probably depends on the pressures there. Boiling might not be very hot by Earth standards.
Well, Titan has a thicker atmosphere than Earth, at about 1.5 bars vs Earth's 1. That puts water at a boiling point of 110'c So make sure your coffee is hotter than you would make it here on earth.
Still blows my mind that we’ve landed a probe on Titan’s surface. It’s a cool place!
I bet you are looking forward to the dragonfly mission!
you would definitely override the sensation with pain receptors….
DEFINITELY don’t do it until at least an hour after you last ate. Could be dangerous.
Yeah who knows what kind of leeches are in that sea.
You mean hypothesis. Theory happens after peer review.
Well, I don’t know if I’d want to build a summer home there, but the trees are quite lovely.
Don't start a fire
You’re more than welcome to give it a try!
Tomorrow. I’ve already been swimming today.
Right it's only the first few seconds that it is hard to catch your breath. Who needs to remember their name and shit.
My friend if I’ve been holding my breath since Earth, what’s a little immersion in cryogenic mostly organic liquid?
It's full immersion, which is what us humans strive for!
Everything's a beach if you're brave enough
Wim Hoff would argue
...that we know of....
This is actually perfect temperature to liquid cool your superconductors. A bunch of them are in that perfect zone between -182 C and -161 C, so you would not need much work to cool them down. Send down a supercomputer in a sub, land it on a lake, let the methane ice thaw and sink down the sub. Eject a buoy on a cable so you have connection to a satellite around Titan, and you got supercomputer built with superconductors. The coolest methane always flows to the bottom of the lake, and the lake has huge surface area to radiate out the heat, and you even got methane atmosphere to speed it up. YBCO is at this exact temperature, and you can mass produce it.
Yes to all the science things you just said.
Computers hate hot temperature, on Titan a lot of very cold fluids, dunk computers in very cold fluids on Titan = profit.
> Eject a buoy on a cable so you have connection to a satellite around Titan, and you got supercomputer built with superconductors How are you getting a super computer to titan? Powerful electronics that work on Earth don't fare well in space.
Technically, the electronics in the supercomputer would be under 100 feet of liquid methane, which, while not an amazing radiation shielding, 100 feet of it is going to make wonders for it. The only problem would be actually the communications, so the satellites would lose some of their effectiveness, resulting in more of them needed than normal. This is also more of a further in the future proposition, at least 20 decades in the future, likely more. But if you mean transport electronics though saturn radiation zones, then the ship could easily have few inches of polyethylene shielding, if you bring a ship big enough, then the shielding will weight almost nothing.
Larry Niven wrote a story about an astronaut stranded on Pluto. He runs out of air and commits suicide on the surface. His brain wakes up again, using superconductivity instead of normal ion transfer, etc. His brain works slowly and he becomes aware of native animals on the surface which appear to operate in similar ways. Sunlight heats him up so he is only active at night. Which gets me thinking about native life on Titan which naturally exploits superconductivity.
Oh, because your body will not decompose on Pluto, you just run out of oxygen and can't use chemical ion reactions. This is pretty smart.
There have been a couple of proposed Titan submarine rovers that would be powered by the methane, as well.
Ever tested a buoy and cables in -161C in liquid methane and see how long they last? If you run those cables from a box housing the electronics, you would need to seal those cables, not sure if there's anything flexible that will withstand that cold liquid methane for prolonged periods of time.
Bets on which comes first: doing this for advanced computing for science or doing this to mine crypto.
I mean, computing is computing. If we can do it off world better, so be it. Crypto is pretty big part of the market, but it seems computing in general seems to be much bigger, especially now with AI. Considering that superconductors could be hundreds of times more powerful than room temperature computers, and that more and more, costs of computing go toward power and cooling, there might be some huge gains on supercomputers on Titan.
You can’t tell me what to do.
Titan needs a Polar Bear Club
You can neatly sweep up the participants after they shatter on the ground.
The Titan Human Ice Cube Club.
I did a [polar bear club plunge] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear_plunge) when I lived in Coney Island, I think I can handle this
I am built different
It's a bit too chilly for *you* to swim.
-359 F in case anyone else was wondering!
Somebody isn't into the whole cold plunge trend I see.
You just don’t want us to surf your secret spot
Not with that attitude!
That's not what Wim Hof says.
Summer day at the beach in Scandinavia
"It s fine once your in!" : My mum
Remember you can do anything once, it's just that some things can only be done once.
Wim Hof says otherwise
Unless, of course, you're from Newcastle
Just fine for Finns to plunge in after sauna.
Just jump in without thinking about it. You'll get used to it faster.
Have you been outside this week?
I bet a member of the polar bear club would try. That would be nothing for them.
With a good wetsuit you'd be fine /s
A new meaning to polar baer plunge
As a Brit, I’ve had worse.
Perfect for a cold-dip. Just keep your hands out of the ~~water~~ methane-ethane and you'll be fine.
Freezing cold and smelly. And I thought St Kilda beach was bad
Laughs in Canadian…
Significant shrinkage at best.
The hardest part is the wading in is getting past the knees. It's all fun and games until your private parts hits the surf
You must be a millennial. Back in my day we would swim in -200 degree water to work. It was up stream both ways.
Scotland’s beaches are colder.
Not with that attitude
Speak for yourself. I now finally have an excuse when I get asked that question.
Just chucking Ewoks into a liquid fart!
Lots of hydrocarbon chemistry!
I guess there's probably not a lot going on at those temps, but it's like, billions of years of gunk that was irradiated by UV and cosmic rays in the atmosphere in every way possible. Things would get crazy in that soup by adding any heat.
There's a very interesting scifi short story Stephen Baxter about humans exploring a kuiper belt asteroid inhabited by a species of ultra-low metabolism sentients with a life cycle based on the rotation of the asteroid. They spend the 'night' as mobile, migratory nomads, and when dawn breaks they try to settle onto sunward slopes to store up energy for reproduction and the nighttime journey. Part of the story takes place from the perspective of one of these critters, which sees a human, even in a vacuum suit, as a blazing ball of energy and light, and their ships are basically apocalyptic events for the tribes of critters. The story ends with >!a description of the critter's heroic charge as it tries to frighten off the terrifying sun-people, where it sprints down a slope, then dies of old age as the sun comes up, despairing that it's not in a position where it will be able to store enough energy to reproduce. The human that witnesses this event remarks "hey, that weird thing fell down a hill, d'you think it's alright?"!< At least, that's what I recall. I need to go back and read that book again.
I thought that one was part of the xeelee sequence. I do love Baxter though him and Neal Asher are my absolute favs
Probably not anything complex, no, but I hold some curiosity over ultra-low-metabolism microscopic things possibly getting on.
If there are entire lakes of methane on Titan, wouldn’t there have been organic life or at least _water_ reacting with minerals at one time?
It’s actually in Titan’s atmosphere that the interesting chemistry is happening. The atmosphere is basically a huge Miller-Urey experiment, producing all kinds of prebiotic molecules including amino acids.
But where does the methane come from? > The methane in Titan’s atmosphere is what makes its complex atmospheric chemistry possible, but where all that methane comes from is a mystery. Because sunlight continuously breaks down methane in Titan’s atmosphere, some source must be replenishing it or it would be depleted over time. Researchers suspect methane could be belched into Titan's atmosphere by cryovolcanism—volcanoes releasing chilled water instead of molten rock lava—but they’re not certain if this or some other process is responsible. https://science.nasa.gov/saturn/moons/titan/facts/
It's all the space cows
My extremely limited understanding of methane is that it comes either from decaying biological material OR certain minerals bumping up against each other AND water. Then, as we know, water precedes life. So…
Carbon and hydrogen? Like oxygen and hydrogen here
Plus near any cryovolcanos that may be bringing enough heat to the surface.
Well, that's still a useful chemical.
But without noting it and emphasizing waves, you get more clicks!
I dunno, I read "liquid hydrocarbon waves" and thought "Ah, Space Force makes sense now."
Oh, I'm sorry, I'm just a methane-ethane mechant. And you have the brass balls to say my job - my LIFE'S WORK - is worthless??
Is there an echo in here?
So in need of freedom got it
Also worth noting that you'd sink to the bottom if you swam in methane, so don't go for a swim if you ever find yourself on Titan
Good thing I have this deep sea diver pod!
It’s fine once you’re in.
Asha lives in it. She’s very nice and helped us kill the embodiment of darkness
Let's turn the whole moon into a refuelling station.
If you do a time lapse of a sandy desert, you’ll see that they move in a wavelike fashion. Essentially we have possible evidence of movement and therefore potential for mechanical weathering.
[I… am my own *god*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SH-5djlb2m8)
Would I float or sink?
I want life to be fond here it would be so different
If it’s found, I will be fond of the discovery.
Opps that what i get for commenting at 5am
Happens to the best of us.
And the worst too
If anything, thank you for that gem!
You need better early morning "opps" for sure.
If life is discovered and you can cook it, I would be fond of deglazing the pan
I would use it for a fondue
I don't know about you, but I want fond life found.
I think finding life basically anywhere else is going to be one of the biggest scientific moments of the century. If we can find proof that even very primitive life developed elsewhere, it immediately opens up the possibility that somewhere else in the universe that there are other species like ours out there and changes a lot of our model of how the universe works.
I was discussing with my gf the discovery of sugars and other organic compounds like alcohol just floating around in massive clouds in space far away from any star.. It made me think.. What if there was some life form that just lived in deep space and somehow uses those resources and metabolizes them? Like maybe some life that spawned on an icey asteroid not even in a star system.... It would be funny if they discovered earth and were like "WHAT!? THEY LIVE ON A PLANET... WITH GRAVITY AND AN ATMOSPHERE?? NEAR A STAR?? HOW ARENT THEY INSTANTLY CRUSHED AND BOILED ALIVE?!" like they could be equally blown away by us after assuming all the conditions on Earth would be far too hostile for their version of life just like we do with the vacuum of space and no gravity. They could have their minds completely blown at the idea of us even being able to leave and re enter our planets gravity well after their scientist just wrote it off as impossible long ago. I bet any life we find is going to be like that to us where scientists are gonna feel like fucking idiots for just making a lot of wrong assumptions about how alien life could potentially exist
> biggest scientific moments of the century Thats an understatement. Potentially the biggest discovery in the history of the Earth.
I want to fondle the life there
Ok captain Kirk
Given the differences in temperature, that would likely cause thermal injuries to both organisms.
Fond if true
I’m fond of the idea of finding it
Me too, buddy, me too...
Why aren't tides a possible explanation?
Tides have a pretty specific set of gravitational requirements in order to occur. IIRC the fact that the earth has tides is pretty spectacular coincidence, and is caused by our moon being much larger and closer than average. You probably don’t get that same specific set of forces on Titan
Titan is a moon. Won't it have tidal influence from Saturns gravity?
Titan is tidally locked with Saturn, so you wouldn't get the gravitational pull cycle you would get with it rotating faster/slower. It does have an elliptical orbit so maybe you get some change due to that as the elliptical orbits of the moon around the earth and earth around the sun can impact tidal forces. Still missing out on the biggest reason for our tides here on earth though. I found an article/blurb about this: https://www.astronomy.com/science/does-titan-experience-any-tides-in-its-oceans-or-is-it-tidally-locked-with-no-tides/
Titan is kept warm by its partly elliptical orbit.
our moon is tidally locked with earth
And if the moon had bodies of liquid the tidal forces would be limited to those from the elliptical nature of its orbit and the sun. The earth rotates at a different speed than the moon orbits which is responsible for most of our tides. If we were tidally locked with the moon (and not the other way around), our tides would be much much smaller.
this was my thought
All large moons in our solar system are tidally locked and couldn’t have tides as we do on earth because of that. The gravitational pull from their planets is always on one location so the tide would not change.
TIL. thank you
Earths moon is super close and large (in comparison to the planet). Most moons don’t have nearly as much gravitational effect plus the planets with moons often have many, whose gravity will offset each other somewhat. It’s because of how the moon was formed from debris ejected into space after a collision with a large mass object.
>This varying pull causes bulges on Titan, also called solid "tides." Near the middle of Titan's orbit around Saturn (quadrature), there is still sufficient pull to cause a gravitational distortion, or deviation from a spherical shape. Tides on Titan raised by Saturn's gravity can be as high as 30 feet (10 meters). https://science.nasa.gov/resource/squeezing-and-stretching-titan/
Titan is tidally locked with Saturn. Like Earth's moon the same face always points at Titan. If there are tides, they would need to be due to other moons (influence of the sun would be _very_ week out there).
Same reason you don’t see Tides on the Great Lakes. The bodies of methane there aren’t big enough to show significant affects of tides.
I think on this case the actual moon bulges quite a lot, and viscosity of the liquid isn't the same. I see your point though, and you're probably right.
>but future crewed missions to Titan whhaaaattt???!!!! :D >should probably pack some surfboards just in case. oh GOD DAMNIT
Assuming you had a suit capable of keeping you alive, I wonder if you *could* surf on a lake of what's essentially liquid natural gas. The surface tension and your buoyancy would be way different, and titan has like 1/5 the gravity of earth. It's a cool thought experiment.
No, the density of liquid methane is less than half that of water. We’re about as dense as water. We’d sink straight to the bottom. Edit- you said surf, not swim. Possibly, but it’d require a substantially larger board? I don’t know much about the mechanics of surfing, is it possible the board needed to float would be too large to surf on? It would also probably need some kind of polar coating. Styrofoam might be great for flotation, but it’ll probably dissolve in liquid methane. (Though it might be slow enough to be useful for some time. I’m not really sure.)
Sounds like a good submission to XKCD's "What If?"
I had the same thought, but doing a bit of googling and it sounds like, between the low density and the lack of any real surface tension, coupled with the mass of a human being, liquid methane would be closer to a thick fog than liquid water. It still might be fun to imagine what a surfboard would look like in this situation (how large the surface area would have to be, and how low the mass would have to be, to function similarly to a typical surfboard on earth)
Surface tension in a polar liquid (i.e. water) is the answer. Buoyancy allows for swimming, floating, surfing, skimming. Ethane etc. are non polar. You'll fall almost literally between the molecules...
Titan wouldnt be the hardest rock to keep humans alive on, I believe the surface pressure is 1.5xs ours, so you wouldn't need pressurized suits, just heated ones.
The crews will land and immediate see a "VALLEY GO HOME" sign
those aren't mountains... they're waves
You tell that to Doyle..
No. It's necessary
It's extremely cold, and the methane-ethane is super saturated in the atmosphere, because it rains. This reminds me of the conditions we use to prepare cloud chambers here on Earth for the purpose of visualizing the passage of ionizing radiation. It's possible that in some areas on Titan you could see millions of these cloud tracks all over the surface, including over the lakes.
I wonder how Asha and Slone are doing over there?
Scrolled further than I thought I would for a Destiny reference lol
Yeah me too we’ve seen the waves on Titan ourselves.
Hanging around with the fishes we dumped from the HELM, perhaps.
Whether we've wanted it or not, we've found a Destiny thread in an unrelated sub. So let's start pulling out all the Destiny memes, one by one. Zavala's Mars strike intro. From what I can gather, he tasks the fireteam with finding a Cabal general directing operations from a land tank outside of Rubicon. It's commonly repeated, but with the right edits, we can punch through the repetition, whip this pasta out, and farm some upvotes.
Now that's some strong tusk
Transmat firing!
Kurt Vonnegut already told us this
Mines of Titan going to turn out to be a documentary-based game. Graphics were super realistic too, HAH
Someone else’s paradise….
That's cold.
Not a huge surprise. Titan has storms, clouds, lightning, rain, dunes, rivers, and more. We know the winds are strong and interact with the surface. We know there are mare (seas). We know waves ought to be there. We’ve also seen ripples on the surface, though they were sub-millimeter waves IIRC. Still, evidence of larger waves helps us further develop models and is exciting!!
I’m confused. Wouldn’t any body of water have a shoreline that is shaped by waves? Why is this noteworthy?
No, there’s been a debate ongoing for many decades about whether or not titan’s lakes actually have waves. We know there is wind, and low gravity, so waves seem likely. But the images we have show (almost) mirror smooth lakes. So people have been thinking about alternative explanations for why there might be no waves (a wet mudflat or a more solid “crust” forming above the lakes f.ex), or even if you do assume there are waves (which seems likely these days), what exactly these look like and how they function (which says a lot about the climate). High resolution sat imagery (good enough to more accurately spot smaller waves) won’t come in for at least another decade, so this is an alternative method to try and get closer to solving the debate.
I believe Cassini's radar demonstrated mm wave heights. Not sure if it was verified.
At first potentially and over time more and more likely, but even towards the end the exact properties and behaviour of the waves was still an important question since the waves were tiny compared to what was expected. It’s mostly just a lot of theoretical “probably’s” in terms of what and how
Really cool. Thanks for explaining!
Waves of liquid methane and ethane...
Why would this be surprising? Titan has a thick atmosphere so wind generated by differences in temperature and pressure would create waves.
As opposed to being shaped by what? Fairies?
Shorelines do be like that sometimes.
Okay then let’s just go there and find out. Duh.
Cowabunga d00ds
Waves of what though? Amonia? Methane?
liquid hydrocarbon
Literal oceans of hydrocarbons, who in the US government dropped the ball on sending Freedom and Democracy^tm to Titan?
So it's not impossible to imagine somewhere on Titan there being a part of a ship where the front fell off because a wave hit it?
Not typically.
Subnautica fear intensifies
You would be dead of hypothermia long before anything on Titan could kill you
Interesting tidbit of information: Cassini Huygens was launched 26 years and 8 months ago tomorrow (launched October 27, 1997) on a Titan IVB rocket from Cape Canaveral, and took almost 7 years to get there (6 years, 261 days).
Tide goes in, tide goes out..
Arthur C Clarke was right! Mr. Mackenzie is on his way.
It also looks like an upside down angry lizard so clearly they worship Godzilla on Titan. He is a titan so that makes sense.
New photos show evidence of heavy snow, industrial structures, and eyeless dogs :^)
Brand, Doyle, back to the Ranger, now!
*instagram cold plungers have entered the chat