Titan Has More Oil Than Earth

space.com ^ | Today | Space.com Staff

[Names Ash Housewares]

Saturn's smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.

The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. "This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan."

[thackney]

Can you read this and give me yor 2 cents?

I do not know what additional information you want me to read.

The reason I think the laws of thermo don’t apply here as it doesn’t “appear to be a closed system 30k below the earths crust.

If you can draw a circle (sphere) around all of the components, that system can be evaluated as a closed system.

The entropy of a system is not going to decrease over time forming fewer, higher energy state molecules of longer hydrocarbon chains.

But there is no reason to debate the theory. The practical application of heat and pressure on hydrocarbon molecules are already in practice in modern refineries. Multiple different systems use heat and pressure to create smaller, not larger hydrocarbons. Use the link above to learn more. If you want more detail I can chase you down some more information.

[kennyboy509]

sorry the link i posted did not come across.

here it is.

http://www.eurekalert.org/features/doe/2005-08/drnl-tsf082205.php

[Scythian]

The truth is they don’t know any of this to be true, this is pure nonsense.

[Names Ash Housewares]

We have made direct measurements from the atmosphere....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe

[thackney]

The article does not discuss the formation beyond Methane. Methane is already known to be naturally occurring in the universe. It is not the same as forming octanes or other more complex, higher energy molecules.

[kennyboy509]

OK Well thank you for your help.

Ken

[gondramB]

>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_probe<<

That’s not the one with the naked pictures is it?

[gondramB]

>>Titan Has More Oil Than Earth<<

You know they probably shouldn’t even call this oil since its unlikely it would be liquid at room temperature and earth pressure.

Even the long chain hydrocarbons they have found called tholins are formed due to solar radiation and thus are not analogous to anything happening underground on earth.

But this is incredibly interesting - for one thing tholins may have been the first organic “food” for organisms on earth.