[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 5/04/2006. Thanks NormsRevenge.

An "extra, extra" ping to the APoD list members. Update link from Red Badger.

Peer Through the Smothering Haze of Titan to Admire Its Massive Seas of Dunes

[Red Badger]

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Gizmodo - Chris Mills 6/18/15 12:22am

Despite the obvious similarities, this isn't another satellite shot showing the Droughtpocalypse engulfing California. Instead, it’s a radar scan of methane-filled lakes on Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

The images were taken by the international Cassini mission, as part of a study into what forms depressions on Titan. Although scientists have a handle on why the lakes are filled with hydrocarbons -- turns out it rains liquid methane, thanks to the -180C climate -- the origins of the depressions are less obvious, a problem Cassini has been working to solve:

A team of scientists have turned to home for the answer and discovered that Titan's lakes are reminiscent of 'karstic' land forms seen on Earth. These are terrestrial landscapes that result from erosion of soluble rocks such as limestone and gypsum in groundwater and rainfall percolating through rocks. Over time, this leads to features including sinkholes and caves under humid climates, and salt-pans under more arid climates.

The rate of erosion depends on factors such as the chemistry of the rocks, the rainfall rate and the surface temperature. While all of these aspects clearly differ between Titan and Earth, the underlying process may be surprisingly similar.

In other words: the liquid hydrocarbons that form the lakes are dissolving Titan's surface, at a rate of around 300 feet every 50 million years.

[ESA]

GLOBAL WARMING!..........................

[henkster]

This article and the posts remind me of a science fiction novel I read many years ago. The premise was an ancient advanced civilization would send out robotic “factory ships” to pre-colonize worlds by mass producing everything needed for them. Houses, appliances, cities, everything. Then when the people showed up a few decades later, a whole planet with every robotic convenience was already waiting for them.

However, one of the factory ships got too close to a supernova on the way out, or something like that, and landed with a damaged central computer on Titan or on Triton, not sure which. Well, it tried to produce the items it was programmed to produce, but they were not what they were supposed to be. In the end, the “defective” robotic devices it produced became self-replicating, and evolved into mechanical life forms, eventually the most advanced of them evolved to the point of the becoming sentient. The life forms were all metallic robots, but the materials they used were all complex hydrocarbons found on the cold moon, in a reversal of our hydrocarbon life/metal instrumentalities form of life.

The humans arrived and found this “robot civilization” and had to deal with them, and there was a very interesting interplay between the two species.

Damned if I can recall the name of that book.