8 ms·
Wave activity on Titan strong enough to erode the coastlines of lakes and seas
- andrewstuart 2y agoYou'd want to wear your warm jumper to wander those shores.
- EdwardDiego 2y agoWonder what the buoyancy would be like, and who will be the first surfer on Titan.
- isoprophlex 2y agoLiquid hydrocarbons? You'll sink like a brick. I don't know exactly what methane and ethane do at minus whatever but the density is at least 30% lower than water...
- eru 2y agoWikipedia says 422.8 g/L (liquid, −162 °C). (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane) So nothing you could swim in, but it would be relatively easy to build a boat. Hmm, come to think of it: Titan's gravity is 0.138 g. So you might be able to stay afloat in liquid methane by actively swimming upwards, even if you can't float. Similar to how birds stay afloat in the air, despite being heavier than air.
- lazide 2y agoIf you thought huffing was bad for your brain cells though…. Wouldn’t it dissolve a lot of things, including space suit seals? If it wasn’t for the extreme cold embrittlement anyway.
- rightbyte 2y agoSurely there are seals suitable for methane?
- lazide 2y agoMovable ones? At the temperatures methane is a liquid?
- eru 2y agoYou could perhaps build them out of ethanol or so? Basically, you wouldn't want to build them out of materials that are useful at human room temperature, but you could perhaps build them out of materials that are liquid or even a gas on earth, but solid at Titan's temperatures. (No clue whether ethanol would be good, it solidifies at -114.1C, but I have no clue what kind of solid it would be.)
- eru 2y agoYes, I was ignoring the effects of low temperature here.
- kombookcha 2y agoThere is something super raygun gothic about walking on the bottom of the liquid hydrocarbon sea in an old timey lead-boot diving suit.
- Cyphase 2y agoMy amusing thought was a "kite" boarder pulled by a person in some kind of flying gear: https://erikwernquist.com/wanderers https://erikwernquist.com/wanderers
- euroderf 2y agoI'd bet a modest sum that this hypothetical has been addressed in some cyberpunk story or another.
- KineticLensman 2y agoStephen Baxter's SF nivel 'Titan' [0] has some astronauts build a sort of boat on Titan but the generally depressing story otherwise lacks any surfer vibes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(Baxter_novel)
- Something1234 2y agoWell that’s depressing beyond belief. I don’t even have words for how sad the novel sounds. I think the best thing I can leave is “war pigs” by Black Sabbath
- KineticLensman 2y ago> “war pigs” by Black Sabbath War pigs is positively cheerful compared with Titan! At least Titan sort-of avoided another Stephen Baxter trope that annoyed me when it kept appearing: how humanity's first star ship, last-chance rescue ark, etc always somehow gets taken over by a gang of lowlife characters who were included for bizarre plot reasons / sneaked onboard at the last minute / etc. Although in Titan, instead of stowaways, madness due to increased radiation exposure turns one of the crew into the deranged psycho who has to be managed by the others. Many of his books also include a disgruntled ex-astronaut partnered with some all-knowing alien / robot / immortal / etc that provides exposition / info dumps as required when Baxter decides to 'tell' rather than 'show'.
- noisy_boy 2y agoThats why Dr. Manhattan is my favorite superhero; he can appear anywhere he wants in the universe and observe the glorious interactions without any harm to him. What a grand universe and how little we can observe with our mortal eyes!
- frr149 2y agoAnd doesn't need to wear warm jumpers.
- escapecharacter 2y agoWe all wish he’d wear something, anything, however.
- BriggyDwiggs42 2y agoAy speak for yourself buddy
- infotainment 2y agoSo hyped for the Dragonfly mission (Titan flying drone probe) to get a closer look at this kind of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(Titan_space_probe)
- pfdietz 2y agoDragonfly is powered by an RTG (with batteries), but higher performance nuclear aircraft should be possible on Titan also. It's possibly the best place in the solar system for nuclear energy (although the fuel has to be imported). The dense, cold atmosphere makes open cycle nuclear gas turbines very easy to build, even at modest core temperature.
- ceejayoz 2y agoIs “open cycle nuclear gas turbines” as terrifying as I’m reading it to be?
- adrian_b 2y agoNo. That should be just a gas turbine where the gas is heated through a heat exchanger and where the heat source happens to be a nuclear reactor. Normally such gas turbines with external heating use their gas in a closed cycle, because air is not a suitable working gas (one of the reasons is that it is too oxidizing at high temperatures, which can damage the turbine; another reason is that it is preferable if the working gas can be transformed into a supercritical fluid at a low enough temperature and low enough pressure, like carbon dioxide). In a place where the atmosphere would be an acceptable working gas, the cost of the turbine could be reduced by using the atmosphere as the working gas in an open cycle.
- pfdietz 2y agoThe big reason for this cycle on Titan is that at a given pressure ratio, the necessary absolute temperature in the hot part of the engine is proportional to the absolute inlet temperature. So, if the absolute inlet temperature is 1/3rd that of Earth's atmosphere, the peak temperature is also drastically reduced. All the hot parts could be made from cheap materials. The turbine blades wouldn't have to be cooled. Lower temperature also reduces the speed of sound in the gases, which reduces the velocity (and therefore stress) of the compressor and turbine blades.
- api 2y agoTitan is actually high on my list of places that could harbor life. I’m not talking about subsurface water though that’s possible. I mean chemically alien life. The reason I suspect this is a phenomenon understood in theory of complexity and evolutionary informatics circles called the “edge of chaos.” Oversimplifying a bit you get universal computation in the vicinity of a phase boundary. Titan is loaded with phase boundaries: solid, liquid, gas, dynamic changes between them, rain, dissolving and crystallizing solids, etc. The solvent is just light hydrocarbons not water. Life on Titan would be slow and low metabolism compared to us (probably). We should be aware of this likely difference when looking. What looks like minerals, rocks, weird films of chemicals, etc may be alive. We should look for structure, metabolism, isomer preferences, etc. Of course life on Titan is convinced there could never be life here. The third planet is a literal hell where it rains molten dihydrogen monoxide in an atmosphere of corrosive oxygen. Any life there would vaporize and oxidize instantly. Rumors of a strange disc shaped object being recovered with material and isotope ratios pointing to the third planet are entirely unfounded, as are rumors of amateur radio enthusiasts picking up signals from there.
- abhijat 2y agoAt least we share concepts of hell and amateur radio.
- pfdietz 2y ago> Life on Titan would be slow and low metabolism compared to us (probably). On the other hand, maybe the chemistry there could be using less stable chemicals where less energy is needed to change them. It's at a much lower temperature, after all. I suspect we'll find nothing, though, due to Fermi. If two different Origin of Life events happen in the same system, OoL (of at least one of those kinds) must be common in the universe, and that would remove what I consider the big potential obstacle to abundant intelligence in the universe. Just an intuition without more data, of course.
- kaibee 2y agoIts wholly possible for the universe to be teeming with single-celled life, but I think the jump to multicellular, intelligent, civilization, and space-faring (at least signals wise) could still cut it to a factor 1/1000 stars. And we're relatively early in the life of the universe still.
- lrivers 2y agoFetch finally happened!
- abecedarius 2y agoThe most informative sentence was down towards bottom of page: > The team mapped the shorelines of each Titan sea using Cassini's radar images, and then applied their modeling to each of the sea's shorelines to see which erosion mechanism best explained their shape. (I feel like phys.org is repeatedly disappointing in reward-to-time relative to their headlines.)