Titan - move along, nothing to see here.

I've been thinking about Titan and Saturn a lot since the Cassini / Huygens mission started sending back images. It's incredibly moving to see such an earthlike object tucked away, secretly growing up right under our collective noses.

I'd like to focus this thread on comparative armchair speculation about Titan based on some of the recent science. Think of it as a resource.

To start things off, I notice a number of anomalous conclusions are being circulated in fairly mainstream media about Titan and what we are now calling the Saturn system. I'm including a few talking points below:

1 Saturn is acknowledged to produce much more heat and radiation than was believed possible. Why isn't this mentioned as having an effect on the climate of Titan and Enceladus?

2 Enceladus is believed to be harboring liquid water beneath a layer of water ice despite having no atmosphere at all. So much energy and heat is present that geysers have proliferated and contain a rich soup of organic materials according to the most recent flyover of Cassini. Theories for warming this moon seem to be focused on Saturn's gravitational pull. If Saturn is heating Enceladus, then it must also be heating Titan.

3 Titan and Venus share similarly thick atmospheres. Venus is recognized as being many factors hotter than it should be do to the "runaway greenhouse gas" effect yet no mention is made of how Titan's atmosphere may be trapping heat to create a more hospitable climate for biological life.

4 How are some of the more esoteric theories, particularly the electric universe model, prepared to address the Titan / Saturn relationship?

My own personal conclusion is fairly simple, although somewhat controversial. Namely, Titan is warmer than we have been led to believe ...maybe much warmer. The implications are staggering. What if we're seeing exactly what we think we're seeing? - oceans of water and dark bands of organic material. What if those oceans and lakes aren't empty?

The best place to hide the truth is in plain sight. The bigger the lie....and so forth.

Please comment and draw your own conclusions.

P.S.
I originally posted this in the UFO forum but decided to repost it here. I stand by my comments in that thread but felt most of the content could find a greater audience and more constructive participation here.

1 Saturn is acknowledged to produce much more heat and radiation than was believed possible. Why isn't this mentioned as having an effect on the climate of Titan and Enceladus?

Saturn radiates more heat than it receives from the Sun, but it is still freezing cold. The temperature at it's surface is around -180 degrees Celsius, so it can hardly warm Titan and Enceladus to any appreciable extent.

2 Enceladus is believed to be harboring liquid water beneath a layer of water ice despite having no atmosphere at all. So much energy and heat is present that geysers have proliferated and contain a rich soup of organic materials according to the most recent flyover of Cassini. Theories for warming this moon seem to be focused on Saturn's gravitational pull. If Saturn is heating Enceladus, then it must also be heating Titan.

....to a much lesser extent. Enceladus is very close to Saturn (approx. 238,000 kms). At this distance, the tidal flexing of its interior by Saturn is very strong, and this results in huge amounts of internal heat. Titan is five times further away from the planet (approx. 1.2 million kms), so the tidal forces acting on it are negligible when compared to those acting on Enceladus (tidal forces decrease with distance following an inverse cube law, so they diminish much more rapidly with increasing distance than gravity, which follows an inverse square law).

3 Titan and Venus share similarly thick atmospheres. Venus is recognized as being many factors hotter than it should be do to the "runaway greenhouse gas" effect yet no mention is made of how Titan's atmosphere may be trapping heat to create a more hospitable climate for biological life.

Titan's atmosphere is thick, but it is nowhere near as thick as the atmosphere of Venus. In addition, you have to remember that the amount of heat that it receives from the Sun is a tiny fraction of that received by Venus. Simply put, the amount of heat that it absorbs is nowhere near enough for a runaway greenhouse effect to take place.


[edit on 4-4-2008 by Mogget]