On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea - Michael Carroll (SETI TALKS)
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- In this talk, Author/artist Michael Carroll will explore the bizarre methane-filled seas and soaring dunes of Saturn's largest moon, Titan. Recent advances in our understanding of this planet-sized moon provide enough information for authors to paint a realistic picture of this truly alien world. Following his presentation, he will be signing his new science fiction adventure/mystery book, "On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea".
"Carroll's descriptions of oily seas and methane monsoons put you in that alien world, front and center…I can imagine future astronauts doing exactly the kinds of things Mike describes. I wish I could be one of them." Alan Bean, Apollo 12 astronaut.
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A fun enjoyable talk from a scientific artist
Seti..can you stop making your videos private please!!
Danny
Fascinating talk
starts at 0:55
Michael Carroll is a fabulous artist. I have 4 of his paintings portraying spacecraft at other worlds.
what do we really need out there ? BETTER FUCKING CAMERAS ! super wide bandwidth beefy transmitters
They are gonna send a powered probe to titan. Gee. What could possibly go wrong there. Big fireball.
loved it, the guy makes the alien world seem familiar
Really good video thanks 🙃
I think TITAN CONTAIN LIFE AND SOME KIND OF ANIMALS OR FISH LIKE MAMMALS SIMILAR TO THE WALKING FISH MAN CROW BUT BIGGER AND COULD WALK UP RIGHT
"On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea". What a great title that would be for a Sci-Fi story.
Titan is a gem of the solar system, after earth of course!😍
The "methane monsoon" was invented by Arthur C. Clarke!
This was another great presentation! Thanks ^_^
HOW MUCH IS THE PRICE OF THE BOOK
48:47
A scifi book's been written based on Titan? That is cool. I have to get it.
Robert Heinlein wrote a novel titled "Farmer in the Sky" based on human colonization of Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmer_in_the_Sky
Of course, Heinlein didn't enjoy the advantage of scientific discoveries that a novelist today would enjoy concerning the Jovian moons. So there are certain things that later turned out to have been inaccurate.
openlibrary.org/works/OL59713W/Farmer_in_the_Sky
Stephen Baxter wrote a novel called "Titan" in 1997, it's pretty good.
Later! OL J R :)
That was awesome!
It would have been nice if someone had asked about the problems to overcome in using the liquid methane as a refueling station for rockets.
All of them! :P
Filter it and pump it into your rocket, basically... do some lab tests for purity (methane/ethane ratios, contaminants, etc) so you can properly calibrate the fuel injection system of your rocket engine, but that's about it. The stuff can be pumped directly out of the lakes.
The PROBLEM is, you need OXYGEN, and the only way to get it would be to melt ice water (which in the environment on the surface of Titan would appear to be rocks and sand grains) and then electrolytically split it into hydrogen and oxygen. For that you need a lot of electrical power (nuclear reactor-- too far from the sun for solar and besides the planet is under a permanent murky haze, so what little sunlight is at Saturn would be even MORE obscured) and if you have to do that, (split water into H2 and 02) you might as well use those as your rocket propellants, because of the higher specific impulse. The low temperatures make storing oxygen pretty easy-- at -290 degrees F on the surface of Titan, and 1.5 bars of pressure to help, you really only need to refrigerate the oxygen by about 70 degrees below ambient temperatures to keep it a liquid without pressurizing it (liquid oxygen at -360 degrees F). Hydrogen of course would be more difficult, since the atmosphere would require a dewar to provide insulation, but it COULD be stored as a compressed gas I suppose...
Basically, the problem on Titan can be thought of like this-- imagine you land on another Earth, but this on, instead of oceans of water, you have oceans of gasoline... Seems like that would make it easy to get around-- just bring a car with you and fill up from the closest lake or ocean, (make sure you have a good strainer or filter!) but basically fuel is EVERYWHERE, free for the taking. BUT, that's only less than half the equation-- you need the OXIDIZER to react with the fuel in the engine of the car to move you around-- and the hypothetical planet, while having fuel EVERYWHERE, has an atmosphere of mostly inert NITROGEN gas and a few other trace gases, NO FREE OXYGEN. This actually poses a BIGGER problem (for internal combustion engine cars, anyway) than having to bring fuel for the car would be... Because for an internal combustion engine, for EVERY GALLON of gasoline you burn, you burn 14.7 gallons of oxygen (more correctly, air-- which on Earth 21% of which is oxygen, most of the rest is nitrogen)... this is the "stoichiometric mixture", also called the "fuel/air ratio"... Now you COULD take the nitrogen from Titan's atmosphere, pull it through an air filter and intake into your engine, but you'd have to inject and mix oxygen into it as it was drawn into the engine, to bring it up to 21% oxygen like on Earth (using the car example) and then inject the "free" fuel you got from the nearest lake or stream... That reduces the amount of pure liquid oxygen you have to come up with from 14.7 gallons to just a shade over 3 gallons of oxygen... more reasonable, but it STILL means that if your car had say a 15 gallon fuel tank, you'd need a 45 gallon tank of oxygen, plus an oxygen "injector/vaporizer" to mix with the planet's nitrogen atmosphere to burn in the car's engine.
So it is on Titan... basically it'd be like swimming around in a refinery bulk tank, but no air... no OXYGEN anyway, to support combustion. SO, you have to either bring oxygen with you, or produce it locally from water "sand and gravel" you melt down, separate any residual clinging hydrocarbons (like drying wet sand on Earth) to get pure water, then break it down into hydrogen and oxygen using electrolysis to get pure oxygen. And, any leaks would be particularly explosive, as pure oxygen reacts very badly with the hydrocarbons that are literally EVERYWHERE on the surface of Titan, in the air, on the ground, in the ground, etc. Like he said in the video, every time you went for a walk outside, your suit would be saturated with hydrocarbons from outside, and you'd be tracking in hydrocarbon dust, all of which would be HIGHLY flammable in the 21% oxygen atmosphere inside the habs... and any spark of static electricity would trigger a fire or explosion... That's a tough nut to crack, keeping things safe... a leak of an inflatable hab could literally turn into a blowtorch if it were ignited, as oxygen leaking out would burn with the abundant hydrocarbons in the outside environment... You need three things for a fire-- 1) fuel (hydrocarbons in this case), 2) oxidizer (oxygen we need to breathe) and 3) an ignition source (spark or flame or whatever). ANY TWO of those alone, and you're perfectly safe-- it's how they weld inside natural gas pipelines that are still full of flowing gas without exploding-- no oxygen inside the pipe, so the sparks and welding arc have nothing to burn the gas with. BUT, burn through the pipe and create a hole, and the escaping gas will burn like a blowtorch in the outside air!
As for the "isolation" problem, I could see a solution-- a "double airlock"... you come in from the outside into the outer airlock, which is sealed and then filled with warm filtered nitrogen gas, you strip off your spacesuit and boots while breathing through a gas mask and hose providing oxygenated air. The nitrogen gas would be pretty much constantly vented (to some degree) to the outside to vent the "fumes" of hydrocarbons coming from the suits and boots. Then you'd have to pass through another airlock door into the inner airlock, which again is filled with pure warm nitrogen gas and is vented into the outer airlock, where you'd shower or otherwise make sure you were COMPLETELY CLEAN of hydrocarbons (at least down to safe limits) and ONLY THEN could you enter the actual hab module which would be filled with oxygenated air in a 'shirtsleeve' environment. Coming in from outside on the surface of Titan would sorta be like taking a swim in a pool full of gasoline and then walking into your house... OF COURSE you'd want to take some VERY CAREFUL precautions to decontaminate before entering the house, so you didn't burn the house down or blow it up because someone is making toast in the kitchen...
Later! OL J R :)
@@lukestrawwalker "The PROBLEM is, you need OXYGEN,"
And on Earth there's plenty of that but the problem is you need methane. Hmm. Two problems but could there be a solution for both hiding in plain sight? Suppose, to keep things simple, that burning one ton of methane combines it with exactly one ton of oxygen. Suppose that a craft setting off from Earth orbit with 3 tons of oxygen and 1 of methane could arrive at Titan with 2 tons of oxygen. It could then collect 3 tons of freely available methane while delivering 1 ton of oxygen for local use. A craft setting off from Titan with 3 tons of methane and 1 of oxygen could arrive at Earth orbit with 2 tons of methane. It could then collect 3 tons of freely available oxygen while delivering 1 ton of methane for scientific analysis, looking e.g. for signs of life. Repeat ad lib. The potentially tricky part is making the freely available Earth oxygen easily accessible to this process by getting it into Earth orbit without the wastefulness of a rocket launch from Earth, but there are many ways that might be accomplished e.g. using something like a space elevator. Then there is no reason why the entire process could not be entirely self-sustaining.
@@mtgradwell Well, there is available oxygen on Titan... The "sand" on the surface of Titan isn't silicon oxides (quartz) like on Earth, Titan's sand is actually particles of water ice, frozen rock hard by the minus 290 degree temperatures, weathered off granite-hard water ice outcrops of "stone" made of water ice, by erosion by the wind and methane/ethane rain, or ejected from water ice cryo-volcanoes... There are entire dune fields of water ice "sand"... Heat the stuff up to melt it, use a (probly nuclear) electrical source to split it into oxygen and hydrogen gas, and presto, oxygen to burn with your local methane... Course if you can electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, you can skip using the local methane and just burn the hydrogen and oxygen in a rocket engine or IC engine, or reverse the process to produce electricity in a fuel cell, merely using the water as a working fluid to store and produce electrical energy... You can do the same on the Moon with water ice trapped in polar crater floors.
You just need to energy source... Solar is good for the Moon, particularly in the polar regions, but Titan is FAR to distant from the Sun and too dim for solar to ever be viable there... Which basically leaves nuclear...
Later! OL J R
@@lukestrawwalker "You just need to energy source" - yes, but my point was that when you combine Earth's free oxygen with Titan's free methane, you DON'T need to energy source. You've got all the energy you need, naturally and for free.
"... Which basically leaves nuclear..." there's a problem with sending up a reactor powerful enough to split many tons of ice into oxygen and hydrogen. People, especially those living close to and downwind of the launch site, are going to worry about the safety of the launch procedure. You don't want a powerful radioactive reactor exploding into a million fragments directly above your head. And it doesn't scale well. After decades of operation your reactor will be producing less power than it did initially, while you are probably wanting significantly more. Your options then are to launch many reactors, or to launch one which is many times more powerful than the initial one. Neither option will make you popular. And if you're going to get all your power from nuclear reactors then what at the end of the day is the attraction of Titan's lakes? They're freely available methane but so what? You could make methane from water ice and the co2 atmosphere on Mars, and Mars is closer.
An impressive and inspiring talk ! So few women in the audience though ! Are we the alien life form ? Or do you guys make it alienate us ! Sort it ! Because we are not only talented, we bring a perspective friendly to life - being the hosts to its genesis and the guardians of its growth as mothers , crèche workers and teachers ......and on the topic, where are the female oriented sci fit novels ? Ones that integrate tech and the rich dynamic of empathy and cooperation , undervalued but permeating our planets dominant life form !
should be titled another person who can not see all the structures on titan.
We urgently need to move all those moons closer to earth, hoping not to cause a planetary chaos. Then we can use all those natural resources for human needs. Then we can pay more money to SETI. Amazing job by the way.
"Such a beautiful Earth-like landscape"
Bruh, this is literally a rocky desert. Deserts aren't pretty, and rocky deserts are ugly as sin.
They're also very boring to look at.
Come to Utah and be amazed