[extropy-chat] Mars and Titan

[Technotranscendence]

On Saturday, June 05, 2004 4:49 PM Jeff Davis jrd1415 at yahoo.com wrote:
> http://people.msoe.edu/~tritt/sf/titan.html
>
> Atmospheric pressure near Titan's surface
> is about 1.6 bars, 60 percent greater than
> Earth's. The atmosphere is mostly nitrogen,
> also the major constituent of Earth's
> atmosphere.
>
[snip]
> dissolved in the ethane. Titan's methane,
> through continuing photochemistry, is
> converted to ethane, acetylene, ethylene,
> and (when combined with nitrogen)
> hydrogen cyanide. The last is an
> especially important molecule; it is a
> building block of amino acids.  However,
> Titan's low temperature may inhibit more
> complex organic chemistry.

We might get a lot more info on Titan in a few months with the Cassini
probe...  I was also under the impression that a lot of complex
chemistry took place in Titan's upper atmosphere through reactions with
sunlight and radiation.  There could be enough energy up there to do
useful work like build amino acids.  Also, there could be localized warm
zones at or below Titan's surface.  You might say this wouldn't matter,
but you only need a few such zones to produce a lot of aminos and if
there's process to break them down efficiently, given enough time there
might be a lot of aminos on Titan.

This is not even bringing in outside sources of aminos and other complex
molecules.  Titan has had time to accumulate cometary impactors and the
like.  Under Titanian condition, maybe more of the complex molecules
would survive.

Regarding the atmosphere, while Alfio already pointed out the lower
temperatures and heavier molecular weight can account for much.  Also,
the lower solar wind and low amount of sunlight overall wouldn't strip
as much air as near Mars.  Add to this, Titan probably, in terms of
%ages, has a larger reservoir of what its atmosphere is made of.  IIRC,
the current model is that Titan is a mix of rock and volatile ices,
whereas Mars is almost totally rock.  (Of course, an reservoir will
eventually be depleted, but maybe under Titanian conditions -- as
opposed to Martian ones -- were nowhere close to the depletion point.)

It'd be interesting to develop a model -- I'm sure someone already
has -- of Titan based on what's now known, then see how new discoveries
over the next few years change that model.

Regards,

Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/MyWorksBySubject.html