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Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.

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Speaker 1: Time to go into the Vault. That's right. And since

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Speaker 1: the last Vault episode was about the moons of Jupiter,

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Speaker 1: we figured what we should also revisit our episode about

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Speaker 1: the moons of Saturn. Right. So this originally aired on

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Speaker 1: August four, two thousand sixteen, and it's an episode called

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Speaker 1: Saturn's Brood Beyond the Outer Ring, which, man, that would

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Speaker 1: have been a good B movie title. I don't know

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Speaker 1: if we say the same thing in the episode. I

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Speaker 1: think we do get into a little bit into films

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Speaker 1: that take place on or around Saturn. I think we

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Speaker 1: talk a little bit about Outland. Do we talk about Ali?

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Speaker 1: I think we did, yeah, and uh. And then also

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Speaker 1: I think Silent Running comes up as well, the classic

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Speaker 1: Brewster and film where he sort of hides out in

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Speaker 1: your Saturn man, what is wrong with our brains? The

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Speaker 1: main thing we remember about every episode we do is

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Speaker 1: what Sean Connery sci fi movie we talked about. These

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Speaker 1: are the Sean Connery based guide posts that are just

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Speaker 1: kind of tacked into the ground so we can revisit

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Speaker 1: these episodes in the future coming soon on Stuff to

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Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind The Science of Czardas. Okay, well, we

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Speaker 1: shouldn't take any more time at the beginning here have

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Speaker 1: fun with Saturn's brood. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your

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Speaker 1: Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. There's peace in

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Speaker 1: those rings. As we spiraled into Jupiter, our orbit decaying

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Speaker 1: rapidly inside the path of the sulfurous io we assumed

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Speaker 1: that we and our forest ste bio arc were headed

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Speaker 1: for the same fate as the old Galileo probe, through

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Speaker 1: the fierce radiation ELTs, through the crushing gravity, into the

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Speaker 1: Jovian atmosphere, and all the way down. But then something happened.

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Speaker 1: It was as if a hand of a silent god

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Speaker 1: reached out from the darkness of space and just plucked

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Speaker 1: us gently from the depths of the gas giant's gravity

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Speaker 1: well and lifted us up up to freedom. We still

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Speaker 1: don't know what happened. Our navigational computers have no explanation,

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Speaker 1: but our orbits ceased its decay, and with the slow

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Speaker 1: gradual acceleration, driven from some source totally foreign to the

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Speaker 1: ship itself, we were on our way, but not on

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Speaker 1: our way home, something out there, some unknown forces urging

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Speaker 1: us in the other direction. Despite the long journey, our

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Speaker 1: ever dwindling share of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath

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Speaker 1: we just endured, the plants that once struggled for life

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Speaker 1: in our forest dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if

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Speaker 1: more of the Solar system great moons want to be seen,

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Speaker 1: want to be understood, and some hidden intelligence is helping them.

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Speaker 1: And now the cold golden wheel of Saturn looms in

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Speaker 1: the foreground, with its major moons appearing as tiny points

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Speaker 1: of light in the darkness, growing ever closer as our

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Speaker 1: spiral begins again. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.

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Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and my name is Joe McCormick,

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Speaker 1: and backed by popular demand, we are now going to

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Speaker 1: explore the moons of Saturn. So this will be, I guess,

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Speaker 1: a sequel of sorts to the episode we did a

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Speaker 1: while back about the moons of Jupiter or the major

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Speaker 1: moons of Jupiter. In both cases, these are large gas giants.

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Speaker 1: They have lots of moons, so we have to uh,

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Speaker 1: I would say, pick our battles, but they're not battles.

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Speaker 1: Their missions of peace and exploration, that's right. Yeah, and

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Speaker 1: the case of Saturn here, there are currently fifty three

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Speaker 1: known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, So that's a lot

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Speaker 1: of moons. But we are gonna, indeed going to stick

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Speaker 1: to just the the key items of interest here, the

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Speaker 1: ones indeed that you've likely heard of in science fiction,

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Speaker 1: that you've certainly heard of h in science journalism. So yeah,

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Speaker 1: we're gonna, we're gonna. We've picked up some good destinations

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Speaker 1: here for our trip. So Robert, Saturn is a kind

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Speaker 1: of different beast than Jupiter, isn't it. Yeah, I mean

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Speaker 1: it's easy to lump them together. They're the two biggest

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Speaker 1: objects in our Solar system, the biggest objects to enormous

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Speaker 1: gas giants, easily the two jazziest planets as well. Like

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Speaker 1: my my son who's four, I haven't really been pushing

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Speaker 1: the space agenda as much as I have like the

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Speaker 1: Earth sciences agenda, But even he instantly knows Saturn and

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Speaker 1: he knows Jupiter. Well. Saturn, I would say, is the

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Speaker 1: iconic image of a planet. Now, if you go to

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Speaker 1: if you're looking for clip art or vector images or

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Speaker 1: something like that of images of planets, you're gonna see Saturn.

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Speaker 1: Because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings. It's

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Speaker 1: the planet that's not just different in terms of coloring

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Speaker 1: and uh and what you might see about its atmosphere

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Speaker 1: or lack thereof, or cratering and stuff like that, its

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Speaker 1: whole profile is different. It's like a different animal altogether. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and it's it's kind of the pin up model of

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Speaker 1: the Solar System. It is the one that you see

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Speaker 1: the most just really gleaning, elegant, just crisp images. And

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Speaker 1: if you have just a row of globes, a row

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Speaker 1: of circles, the presence of Saturn, perhaps more so than

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Speaker 1: any of the others, is going to queue you in.

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Speaker 1: Oh I'm looking at a model of the Solar System.

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Speaker 1: Oh right, Yeah. It's the difference between a bunch of

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Speaker 1: balls and planets. But it's also different than Jupiter in

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Speaker 1: that Jupiter was this very intense experience. Now Saturn also

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Speaker 1: is very large, it has a deep gravity. Well you know,

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Speaker 1: it's got those same things going forward. But Saturn, i

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Speaker 1: would say, is a more peaceful and colder thing to experience,

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Speaker 1: unlike the intense radiation bath of Jupiter. Yeah, it's a

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Speaker 1: little more serene. Those we'll discuss here. It itself is

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Speaker 1: a very hostile world, and its moons are pretty hostile

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Speaker 1: as well, at least two beings like at least too,

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Speaker 1: you know, weak fragile beings like us, so we can

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Speaker 1: scarcely survive outside of a slim portion of our own

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Speaker 1: planets environment. Reading reading up for this episode, I was

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Speaker 1: astonished to discover how excited scientists are about the possibility

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Speaker 1: for life and a couple of Saturn's moons. Because when

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Speaker 1: you think about life in our Solar system beyond Earth,

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Speaker 1: everybody always mentions Europa that that's the one that comes

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Speaker 1: to mind, and for a good reason. There's a lot

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Speaker 1: of reason to want to study Europa from an astrobiological perspective.

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Speaker 1: But Saturn has some really good moons going for it,

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Speaker 1: and we're going to explore what's going on on those

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Speaker 1: moons today. All right. Before we get into that, though,

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Speaker 1: let's let's just roll through some of the basics about Saturn,

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Speaker 1: just to give everyone a grounding in the planet that

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Speaker 1: plays host to all of these wonderful spheres and ovals

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Speaker 1: in occasion, just lumps of rock, uh, and the potatoes,

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Speaker 1: the spongey potato. So again, it's the second largest planet

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Speaker 1: in our Solar system. It's a gas giant without solid

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Speaker 1: substance save it's dense, hot, pressurized core of rock, ice, water,

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Speaker 1: and other compounds, and all of this is enveloped by

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Speaker 1: liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen.

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Speaker 1: So it's located nine point five astronomical units away from

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Speaker 1: the Sun six planet in our Solar system, as the

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Speaker 1: posters tell us, and has seven icy rings that encircle it,

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Speaker 1: spanning up to one seventy five thousand miles or two

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Speaker 1: two thousand kilometers. So what are the rings consist of? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I've always wondered this. Yeah, the contrary to what bugs

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Speaker 1: Bunny may have taught you, if I remember correctly, they

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Speaker 1: are not the solid rings that you can run around on.

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Speaker 1: They're not like a treadmill or anything. But scientists haven't

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Speaker 1: always known that that's true. They have not always been

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Speaker 1: aware of that. We know now that it's it's mostly

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Speaker 1: water ice. The planet's ring system extend hundreds of thousands

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Speaker 1: of kilometers out from the planet, but the vertical height

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Speaker 1: is typically about ten meters or thirty feet in the

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Speaker 1: main rings. Are you serious? But but but but there's

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Speaker 1: there's there's a key butt coming up. They can grow

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Speaker 1: far larger. During Saturn's autumn two thousand nine equinox, the

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Speaker 1: Cassini spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations and some

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Speaker 1: of the rings had piled the particles up, but in

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Speaker 1: ridges more than three kilometers or two miles tall. And

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Speaker 1: there's some fascinating structures and behaviors that you can see

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Speaker 1: within the rings to including these like a propeller shaped

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Speaker 1: objects that can form. It's crazy now light Jupiter. Saturn

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Speaker 1: is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and in the

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Speaker 1: upper atmosphere, wind speeds can reach five hundred meters or

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Speaker 1: sixteen hundred feet per second in the equatorial region. These

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Speaker 1: winds fast. It's pretty fast, so it looks more peaceful

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Speaker 1: than it is. Just because it doesn't have a big

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Speaker 1: red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger to it. Uh.

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Speaker 1: These winds, combined with heat rising from the planet's interior,

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Speaker 1: cause the yellow gold bands that we see visible in

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Speaker 1: the atmosphere. But they're not as visible as the bands

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Speaker 1: we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah, it's not. It's not

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Speaker 1: as angry. It's not. It doesn't look like somebody just

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Speaker 1: poured a bunch of like red liquid into you know,

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Speaker 1: a swirling mixer bowl of pancake batter and blood. That

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Speaker 1: is a great way to describe it. That's how I

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Speaker 1: think of Jupiter. Yeah, this one is more just like

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Speaker 1: pancake batter with some with some honeyead. You know. There's

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Speaker 1: a wonderful coincidence with the other episode that we recorded

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Speaker 1: this week, Robert, which was the episode on the Library

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Speaker 1: of Babel. And now I'm not sure what the publishing

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Speaker 1: schedule is going to be, but in the episode on

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Speaker 1: the in the Library of Babble, we discussed how people

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Speaker 1: in the Library of Babel seek out the Crimson hexagon.

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Speaker 1: That's right, and indeed there is a hexagon on Saturn.

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Speaker 1: It's it does not contain any books. It is not

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Speaker 1: a room per se. Well, you don't know that, I'm

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Speaker 1: pretty sure, but yes, if you look at you I'm

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Speaker 1: sure I'm number of people have seen seen images of

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Speaker 1: this here. But if you if you look at various

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Speaker 1: images of Saturn, there appears to be a hexagon at

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Speaker 1: the top, almost as if it has a little hexagonal hat,

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Speaker 1: a little skull cap on um. And it's weird to

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Speaker 1: look at because you're seeing this in nature. This is

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Speaker 1: not obviously an object designed by anybody on purpose. But

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Speaker 1: it's not circular. It's got these clear corners. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: not the kind of shape that you would necessarily expect.

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Speaker 1: But there is, of course a very natural reason for this.

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Speaker 1: This is caused by jet streams uh in the in

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Speaker 1: the wind systems of Saturn. Basically you have a region

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Speaker 1: here that's bound on each side by different editing edditing storms.

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Speaker 1: So it's uh, it's the kind of thing if you've

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Speaker 1: ever met somebody who's playing with a lot of bubbles,

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Speaker 1: you know, like doing a lot of bubble art and

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Speaker 1: not sure what you mean bubble bubble, like blowing bubbles

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Speaker 1: and then sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke into those bubbles. Okay,

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Speaker 1: I'm not very familiar with this art form. Oh you're not.

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Speaker 1: Oh it was big medicine on like Sesame Street and

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Speaker 1: and um Mr Rogers neighborhood and back in the day,

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Speaker 1: I really completely lost touch with my inner child. Well,

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Speaker 1: blowing big bubbles is a lot of fun, but blowing

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Speaker 1: small bubbles too, because you can join them together and

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Speaker 1: if you really know what you're doing, you can form

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Speaker 1: geometric shapes at the center where these bubbles bubbles border

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Speaker 1: other bubbles and kind of force different shapes towards the center.

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Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, I think I know what you're talking about.

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Speaker 1: So I I tried to think of that when I

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Speaker 1: think of this particular scenario, to try and remind myself

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Speaker 1: that yes, uh, non spherical shapes are possible within nature

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Speaker 1: given the right circumstances. Now, another quick fact about Saturn.

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Speaker 1: Here a day last ten hours and a year. The

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Speaker 1: time it takes for the body to orbit its central

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Speaker 1: star last twenty nine earth years, and the planet's magnetic

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Speaker 1: field is smaller than Jupiter's, but still five seventy eight

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Speaker 1: times as powerful as Earth's, shielding Saturn and many of

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Speaker 1: its moons from the solar wind. Okay, well that's going

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Speaker 1: to be important if we're talking about, I don't know,

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Speaker 1: putting a colony there or something very important. So on

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Speaker 1: that note, let's start talking about the discovery of Saturn,

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Speaker 1: the discovery of Saturn's moons. Saturn, of course, is a

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Speaker 1: very We've known about Saturn for a very long time. Right,

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Speaker 1: nobody knows who discovered Saturn, because the ancients knew about Saturn.

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Speaker 1: We've known about Saturn as long as we've had history.

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Speaker 1: You know, naked eye astronomers could peer up into the

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Speaker 1: night sky and see Saturn. So uh so, what we're

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Speaker 1: really going to be talking about is the first telescopic

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Speaker 1: studies of Saturn. And you might recall from the last

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Speaker 1: episode that the person usually credited with discovering the largest

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Speaker 1: moons of Jupiter, the four Galilean Moons, was the Italian

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Speaker 1: astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos also given credit for discovering

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Speaker 1: the rings of Saturn, though he didn't really understand what

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Speaker 1: he was looking at. Now, Like we said, everybody already

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Speaker 1: knew about Saturn, but they knew it as a point

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Speaker 1: of light in the sky. And when gali Leo looked

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Speaker 1: at Saturn, he saw something very odd, a triple star.

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Speaker 1: It looks like one enormous star with two tiny stars

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Speaker 1: attached to it on either side, like little side cars

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Speaker 1: riding along with it. Now. Fun fact, Galileo wanted to

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Speaker 1: get credit for being the first person to discover this

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Speaker 1: triple star, but he wasn't ready to publish his findings yet,

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Speaker 1: so he used a method that I thought was pretty clever.

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Speaker 1: He instead disseminated an anagram and by the way, when

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Speaker 1: this came up, I had to look up anagrams of

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Speaker 1: our names for fun. I have no good ones, not really.

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Speaker 1: My name is. I've got comic jock rim and that's

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Speaker 1: about it. But Robert, you've got some awesome anagrams in

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Speaker 1: case you've never looked him up before. You've got Mr

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Speaker 1: babele Rot. That's pretty good. You've also got barrel tomb,

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Speaker 1: barrel to m okay. But anyway, uh So, anagram jumbled

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Speaker 1: around letters, you know, jumbled up, and then you can

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Speaker 1: you can un jumble them to spell the original message

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Speaker 1: and show if it's a sufficiently short number of letters,

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Speaker 1: you know, you can show that you had this idea

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Speaker 1: all along, and that that was Galileo's idea. So the

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Speaker 1: antagram that Galileo spread around could be un jumbled to

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Speaker 1: read something along the lines of I've discovered the triform planet,

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Speaker 1: and if anybody tried to scoop him, he could just

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Speaker 1: unscramble it and show that he had seen it first.

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Speaker 1: But we now know that Saturn is not a triform planet.

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Speaker 1: So who figured that out? Well? In sixteen fifty five,

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Speaker 1: around six fifty six, the Dutch astronomer mathematician and all

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Speaker 1: around science guy Christian Hygans made a study of Saturn

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Speaker 1: through a more powerful telescope, and he made his own discoveries.

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Speaker 1: So by observing how the side stars of Saturn could

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Speaker 1: disappear and then reappear. And this is something other observers

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Speaker 1: hadn't noticed too, Hygans realized that he was actually looking

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Speaker 1: at a planet surrounded by a flat disc of rings.

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Speaker 1: It could disappear because of what you mentioned about how

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Speaker 1: flat it is, right, so it could be very bright

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Speaker 1: when we're looking at it at an angle where the

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Speaker 1: rings are reflecting up toward us. But when the rings

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Speaker 1: suddenly turned to where they're pretty much perpendicular with our view,

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Speaker 1: they completely disappear. There's not enough surface to reflect anything.

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Speaker 1: It's like a It's like a lady in a hat

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Speaker 1: with a wide brim. Depending on how she is holding

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Speaker 1: her head, the positioning of her neck, you may or

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Speaker 1: may not see the brim of the hat, and you'll

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Speaker 1: see at a very degree. Yeah, so she tilts her

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Speaker 1: head towards you, you see the brim. She tilts her

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Speaker 1: head flat relative to your perspective, you don't really see much.

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Speaker 1: And so Hyggan's observed that but Hygan's didn't know what

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Speaker 1: the rings were made of. I think he actually thought

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Speaker 1: they might be some kind of solid structure, maybe more

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Speaker 1: like the bugs money example, And just try to imagine

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Speaker 1: that in reality. Again, I love thinking about like when

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Speaker 1: you had less information and and just we're trying to

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Speaker 1: conceive of what the universe was like solid rings around

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Speaker 1: the planet. Yeah, I mean they based on the information

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Speaker 1: avaiable at the time. Yeah, why not fascinating. But of

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Speaker 1: course subsequently we learned more about the rings of Saturn. Now,

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Speaker 1: of course, Hygan's discovered something else while studying Saturn, a moon.

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Speaker 1: Nobody had seen any of the moons of Saturn up

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Speaker 1: until this time, and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn,

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Speaker 1: which is Titan, which is going to be a fascinating

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Speaker 1: thing to explore in a little bit here. But then

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Speaker 1: subsequently other moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like

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Speaker 1: Giovanni Cassini and William Herschel, And we're still learning more

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Speaker 1: about Saturn's smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there

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Speaker 1: is to know about Saturn's moons, and especially it's smallest moons. Yeah. Again,

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Speaker 1: like I mentioned earlier, fifty three known moons, nine currently

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Speaker 1: awaiting confirmations, so we're still figuring it all out. Now.

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Speaker 1: We have actually sent exploration missions to Saturn, so there

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Speaker 1: were several fly bys Pioneer eleven, Voyager one and two

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Speaker 1: that they did fly bys of Saturn, did a little

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Speaker 1: bit of observation. But the big one, the real hero

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Speaker 1: for for planetary science and discovery and the Saturn sphere

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Speaker 1: is Cassini. The Cassini Hoygien's mission. So the Cassini orbiter

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Speaker 1: entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand four during Saturn's northern winter,

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Speaker 1: and it's been conducting research on Saturn and its moons

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Speaker 1: ever since, and it has sent back some awesome photos.

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Speaker 1: One of the coolest thing about the Cassini photos I've

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Speaker 1: always thought is how real photos that are taken by Cassini. Now,

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Speaker 1: of course they're usually like color enhanced or enhanced in

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Speaker 1: some way, but real photos taken by this probe look

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Speaker 1: like illustrations. They often they just don't look like a

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Speaker 1: picture that somebody took with a real camera, but they

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Speaker 1: are with of course some enhancements. I don't know. I

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Speaker 1: love that. I love it when reality can't pass for real. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: because the thing that you're photographing is so utterly unreal. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we

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Speaker 1: have evolved a view here on this world. Yeah. And

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Speaker 1: of course another part of the Cassini mission was the

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Speaker 1: Huygens probe, which went down landed on Titan in two

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Speaker 1: thousand five after Cassini reached Saturn in two thousand four,

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Speaker 1: and that also sent back some amazing imagery and made

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Speaker 1: some fascinating discoveries that we will talk about in a

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Speaker 1: bit when it's time to speak of Titan. So now

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Speaker 1: it's time to take a quick break. But when we

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Speaker 1: come back, we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning

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Speaker 1: with the outermost moons and working our way in. All right,

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Speaker 1: we're back, Robert. It it seems like we're coming up

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Speaker 1: on a on a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact,

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Speaker 1: we're coming up on the largest of the outer moons.

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Speaker 1: Iappodus Appetus. Yes, it didn't that sound lovecraft. I in

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Speaker 1: like something they would worship. A chanted name I appatus.

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Speaker 1: You just want to invoke it. Yeah, named, by the

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Speaker 1: way for a Tartarus bound Titan. So it's nice and

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Speaker 1: has a nice gloomy feel to it. Iopodus is not

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Speaker 1: unlike the Yen Yang of Chinese philosophy. Just to prepare

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Speaker 1: everyone for what you're gonna see here. Uh, it's leading

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Speaker 1: hemisphere is dark, while it's trailing hemisphere is significantly brighter.

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Speaker 1: It's a tidally locked world, like a number of moons,

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Speaker 1: meaning that one side always faces Saturn and the other

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Speaker 1: side always faces the void. It essentially looks like the

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Speaker 1: yen Yang. It essentially looks like the black and white

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Speaker 1: cookie from that episode of Signfeld. It's like that the

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Speaker 1: two face of Saturn's moons, and it's it's crazy to behold,

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Speaker 1: and it's been crazy for scientists to try and figure

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Speaker 1: out exactly why this is. We'll get into shortly and

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Speaker 1: mentioning two face. It's it's monstrous in more than one

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Speaker 1: way in appearance, that's right. It also has an equatorial ridge,

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Speaker 1: which is a chain of six mile or ten kilometer

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Speaker 1: high mountains. And this is wonderful. It it might have

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Speaker 1: formed that during a high speed rotation period or most

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Speaker 1: exciting abot all of it might be a collapsed ring. No,

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Speaker 1: you're making that up. No, that's one of the theories.

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Speaker 1: Collapsed ring. Yeah, these are essentially like the collapsed ring mountains,

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Speaker 1: which sounds like a perfect It sounds like something out

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Speaker 1: of a Jack Vance novel, you know. So it could

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Speaker 1: have had a ring that was drawn into the planet

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Speaker 1: by gravity, collapsed into it and became this planet wide

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Speaker 1: ridge of mountains that looks like a horror movie monster

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Speaker 1: backbones sticking up out of the planet's flesh. Yeah, it's crazy,

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Speaker 1: a killer now. It It orbits at about a little

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Speaker 1: over two million miles or three million kilometers away from Saturn,

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Speaker 1: and it has probably and this has probably protected it

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Speaker 1: from tidal forces and melting episodes that would have resurfaced it.

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Speaker 1: So it's far enough away from Saturn that it Saturn's

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Speaker 1: gravity is not warping it too much. It's not heating

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Speaker 1: it and causing the geological activity exactly. But you do

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Speaker 1: have the strange dark and white side. And there have

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Speaker 1: been three major theories over the years as to why

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Speaker 1: one side is black and the other is white. Hit

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Speaker 1: me all right. So one theory is that i Appetus

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Speaker 1: maybe sweeping up particles from the more distant dark moon

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Speaker 1: phobe and steadily renewing this dusting to cover up all

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Speaker 1: but the newest craters. Okay, so that's one possibility. Another

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Speaker 1: one is that I saw a volcanism may be distributing

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Speaker 1: the dark materials. We're talking of volcano like eruptions of hydrocarbons,

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Speaker 1: perhaps to due to chemical reactions that are in turn

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Speaker 1: caused by solar radiation. Oh nice, so you've got a

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Speaker 1: planet that's half covered in soot sort of. Yeah. Now

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Speaker 1: the third theory, then, this is the one that's that

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Speaker 1: is backed up by a lot of data from two

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Speaker 1: thousand seven's uh Cassini fly by, and that is that

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Speaker 1: thermal segregation is going on. So what is that? So, yeah,

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Speaker 1: the salad works. It takes the Moon as long as

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Speaker 1: seventy nine days to rotate around Saturn, and it's some

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Speaker 1: dark material areal made its way to the Moon at

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Speaker 1: some point in the past. Perhaps dude tying into one

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Speaker 1: and to the first theory, um, then the long periods

385
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Speaker 1: of solar exposure on the dark side would have caused

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00:22:12,040 --> 00:22:15,480
Speaker 1: the dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials

387
00:22:15,960 --> 00:22:19,640
Speaker 1: within the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions.

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00:22:19,840 --> 00:22:24,240
Speaker 1: The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get dark. Okay,

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00:22:24,320 --> 00:22:27,480
Speaker 1: so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay, so a

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Speaker 1: Yapodus is a fairly small world, right, it's about one

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Speaker 1: seven the mass of Pluto, about the width of Earth's moon.

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Speaker 1: But what is the life potential? I want to know?

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00:22:37,760 --> 00:22:40,760
Speaker 1: That's our main question with all these right, yeah, yeah,

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00:22:40,800 --> 00:22:43,320
Speaker 1: that's certainly, that's the one thing we want to know

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00:22:43,400 --> 00:22:45,280
Speaker 1: on each of these. Is it possible that there's some

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00:22:45,320 --> 00:22:48,240
Speaker 1: sort of life clinging to this little moon? Now we

397
00:22:48,280 --> 00:22:51,280
Speaker 1: know that the planet itself is probably alive and it's

398
00:22:51,320 --> 00:22:54,199
Speaker 1: a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurl with

399
00:22:54,240 --> 00:22:57,760
Speaker 1: its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back

400
00:22:57,800 --> 00:23:01,520
Speaker 1: out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case,

401
00:23:01,560 --> 00:23:04,359
Speaker 1: and it's just a rock in space, what we are

402
00:23:04,480 --> 00:23:07,399
Speaker 1: what's the hope that there's life on it? Very very little,

403
00:23:07,600 --> 00:23:10,800
Speaker 1: very little hope for life here? Despite the insistence by

404
00:23:10,880 --> 00:23:14,200
Speaker 1: various UFO groups that there are domed cities or other

405
00:23:14,280 --> 00:23:17,320
Speaker 1: such constructions here, well, if you look closely enough and

406
00:23:17,359 --> 00:23:19,760
Speaker 1: you want it enough, you can find dumb cities. Not

407
00:23:19,880 --> 00:23:23,400
Speaker 1: just about any world, Ain't that always the case? Uh?

408
00:23:23,480 --> 00:23:26,440
Speaker 1: Could we put a colony there though, if it were

409
00:23:26,680 --> 00:23:29,040
Speaker 1: entirely self contained and we had the you know, in

410
00:23:29,080 --> 00:23:33,000
Speaker 1: the necessary technology, of course, possibly, but you get down

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00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:35,320
Speaker 1: to the fact that there are worse and better places

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00:23:35,359 --> 00:23:38,320
Speaker 1: to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't be like

413
00:23:38,320 --> 00:23:40,960
Speaker 1: trying to put a colony on Io or something. No,

414
00:23:41,119 --> 00:23:43,320
Speaker 1: it means like you could do it, but they're better places.

415
00:23:44,080 --> 00:23:47,919
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the monolith

416
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Speaker 1: in the original novel two thousand one of Space Odyssey.

417
00:23:50,920 --> 00:23:54,720
Speaker 1: Oh so not wait, hold on the monolith the monolith

418
00:23:54,840 --> 00:23:58,200
Speaker 1: on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit

419
00:23:58,240 --> 00:24:01,520
Speaker 1: around Jupiter. Right in the movie it's in orbit around Jupiter,

420
00:24:01,880 --> 00:24:04,160
Speaker 1: but in the book it was Saturn. But in making

421
00:24:04,160 --> 00:24:06,800
Speaker 1: two thousand and one space honestly, they couldn't get the

422
00:24:07,640 --> 00:24:10,879
Speaker 1: models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they changed

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00:24:10,920 --> 00:24:15,720
Speaker 1: it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Um.

424
00:24:15,760 --> 00:24:19,159
Speaker 1: It's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional

425
00:24:19,200 --> 00:24:22,639
Speaker 1: attention that has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and I

426
00:24:22,680 --> 00:24:25,840
Speaker 1: feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn is

427
00:24:25,880 --> 00:24:31,320
Speaker 1: the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our future

428
00:24:31,320 --> 00:24:34,480
Speaker 1: Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter, or

429
00:24:34,480 --> 00:24:38,199
Speaker 1: at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiter is where the

430
00:24:38,359 --> 00:24:41,919
Speaker 1: Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases and weird

431
00:24:42,320 --> 00:24:46,800
Speaker 1: weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn. For

432
00:24:46,840 --> 00:24:48,640
Speaker 1: the most part, it seems like there's a lot of

433
00:24:49,040 --> 00:24:53,040
Speaker 1: dreamy or stuff going on there, or maybe that's just me.

434
00:24:53,160 --> 00:24:55,119
Speaker 1: That's my my read on some of the examples I

435
00:24:55,160 --> 00:24:57,359
Speaker 1: was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're exactly right.

436
00:24:57,359 --> 00:25:00,080
Speaker 1: I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the saturn An

437
00:25:00,160 --> 00:25:04,240
Speaker 1: imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's very serene,

438
00:25:04,480 --> 00:25:09,800
Speaker 1: very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver light in

439
00:25:09,840 --> 00:25:13,359
Speaker 1: the background of space. Now we're gonna do a quick

440
00:25:13,400 --> 00:25:16,359
Speaker 1: fly by of the next moon because it doesn't seem

441
00:25:16,400 --> 00:25:18,159
Speaker 1: like there's a whole lot to see there, but it

442
00:25:18,240 --> 00:25:21,159
Speaker 1: is worth pointing out as a strange landmark in the

443
00:25:21,200 --> 00:25:25,400
Speaker 1: sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion,

444
00:25:25,480 --> 00:25:29,920
Speaker 1: despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect

445
00:25:30,040 --> 00:25:35,080
Speaker 1: of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would,

446
00:25:35,119 --> 00:25:37,600
Speaker 1: by the way, do not take place on this hyperiond

447
00:25:37,600 --> 00:25:41,959
Speaker 1: I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion

448
00:25:42,520 --> 00:25:46,200
Speaker 1: is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to

449
00:25:46,400 --> 00:25:49,800
Speaker 1: hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things, because

450
00:25:49,920 --> 00:25:54,400
Speaker 1: hyperion in our Solar system, as it orbits around Saturn,

451
00:25:54,720 --> 00:25:58,840
Speaker 1: is essentially a giant potato. Yeah. It's an irregular shaped

452
00:25:58,960 --> 00:26:01,760
Speaker 1: and it's very small, about one point one times the

453
00:26:01,800 --> 00:26:05,119
Speaker 1: mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas in

454
00:26:05,160 --> 00:26:09,480
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, about ten percent percent the width of Earth's moon.

455
00:26:09,640 --> 00:26:13,359
Speaker 1: It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like

456
00:26:13,400 --> 00:26:18,080
Speaker 1: a like a spongy, low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've

457
00:26:18,119 --> 00:26:21,600
Speaker 1: seen it described as a large frozen rubble pile. Uh.

458
00:26:21,600 --> 00:26:25,320
Speaker 1: It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons,

459
00:26:25,600 --> 00:26:29,679
Speaker 1: and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that

460
00:26:29,760 --> 00:26:32,560
Speaker 1: was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just

461
00:26:32,640 --> 00:26:34,720
Speaker 1: a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not

462
00:26:34,800 --> 00:26:39,240
Speaker 1: gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here,

463
00:26:39,480 --> 00:26:41,240
Speaker 1: but it's kind of worth the point out as we

464
00:26:41,280 --> 00:26:47,960
Speaker 1: continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah.

465
00:26:48,000 --> 00:26:50,400
Speaker 1: Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think

466
00:26:50,400 --> 00:26:54,480
Speaker 1: we're coming in now. What is that sound? It's signaling

467
00:26:54,480 --> 00:26:59,720
Speaker 1: the Titans. So Titan Titan is about the mass of

468
00:26:59,760 --> 00:27:02,600
Speaker 1: murk Cury, about one point eight times the mass of

469
00:27:02,640 --> 00:27:05,880
Speaker 1: Earth's Moon, about a hundred and fifty of the width

470
00:27:06,080 --> 00:27:10,680
Speaker 1: of the Moon, the Earth's moon. It's spherical, obviously, and

471
00:27:10,800 --> 00:27:15,159
Speaker 1: it Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury. And

472
00:27:15,200 --> 00:27:17,800
Speaker 1: this is the only moon that we're discussing today that

473
00:27:17,920 --> 00:27:22,159
Speaker 1: has been explored by a lander, by a human made lander,

474
00:27:22,160 --> 00:27:26,480
Speaker 1: the Hygan's Tightened Lander, a beast of planetary exploration. There

475
00:27:26,480 --> 00:27:29,840
Speaker 1: are videos available online that show the landing imagery sent

476
00:27:29,920 --> 00:27:33,040
Speaker 1: back by the Hygan's probe. You should watch them, but

477
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:37,400
Speaker 1: try to imagine a tighten landing. What this world is like.

478
00:27:38,280 --> 00:27:40,960
Speaker 1: Unlike so many of the moon's that we've surveyed before,

479
00:27:41,040 --> 00:27:44,640
Speaker 1: this approach is very unique in the Solar System. On Titan,

480
00:27:45,359 --> 00:27:49,760
Speaker 1: we descend from orbit through a thick, cold atmosphere and

481
00:27:49,920 --> 00:27:53,840
Speaker 1: everything below is shrouded from our view from space by

482
00:27:53,840 --> 00:27:57,919
Speaker 1: this murky haze, and you descend through the freezing fog

483
00:27:58,119 --> 00:28:01,879
Speaker 1: and strong winds shake your ending craft. Yeah, this is

484
00:28:01,920 --> 00:28:04,320
Speaker 1: the only moon in our Solar System that has clouds

485
00:28:04,320 --> 00:28:08,159
Speaker 1: in a dense atmosphere mostly nitrogen and methane, and the

486
00:28:08,200 --> 00:28:12,200
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure is is about six greater than Earth, so

487
00:28:12,320 --> 00:28:14,439
Speaker 1: roughly the same as you would find at the bottom

488
00:28:14,480 --> 00:28:17,480
Speaker 1: of a swimming pool. That's right, but that's actually so

489
00:28:17,640 --> 00:28:20,879
Speaker 1: that's heavy sounding to us, like you wouldn't want to

490
00:28:20,880 --> 00:28:22,720
Speaker 1: spend your life at the bottom of a swimming pool.

491
00:28:23,440 --> 00:28:27,760
Speaker 1: But it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared to almost everywhere else

492
00:28:27,880 --> 00:28:31,399
Speaker 1: in the Solar systems Venus. Yeah, so in Venus you

493
00:28:31,480 --> 00:28:34,680
Speaker 1: might have what like nine atmospheres or something like that.

494
00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:38,200
Speaker 1: It's like a cure. Yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh, And

495
00:28:38,200 --> 00:28:42,280
Speaker 1: then other places there's almost no atmosphere atmospheric pressure to

496
00:28:42,320 --> 00:28:45,240
Speaker 1: speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum. Titan

497
00:28:45,440 --> 00:28:48,320
Speaker 1: is close. Yeah, this is the goldilocks finding the bed

498
00:28:48,480 --> 00:28:51,920
Speaker 1: or the porridge. That is. It's not ideal, but in

499
00:28:52,000 --> 00:28:56,520
Speaker 1: a pinch, little my ears, but I can survive. But

500
00:28:56,640 --> 00:28:59,120
Speaker 1: so you land on Titan, you land in the middle

501
00:28:59,360 --> 00:29:02,960
Speaker 1: of a net puatorial desert, and there's a strange sound

502
00:29:03,160 --> 00:29:08,200
Speaker 1: and tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry

503
00:29:08,240 --> 00:29:13,959
Speaker 1: thud like hitting rock, but a splat the sound of

504
00:29:14,000 --> 00:29:18,560
Speaker 1: the soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to

505
00:29:18,600 --> 00:29:22,640
Speaker 1: bog World. Now, it's maybe not exact exactly fair to

506
00:29:22,640 --> 00:29:25,120
Speaker 1: say bog world, because the soil isn't as wet as

507
00:29:25,160 --> 00:29:28,000
Speaker 1: the mud you'd find in many bogs on Earth. But

508
00:29:28,280 --> 00:29:31,320
Speaker 1: relative to the rest of the Solar System, it's bog world.

509
00:29:31,400 --> 00:29:34,000
Speaker 1: Titan is bog world. And as far as we know,

510
00:29:34,640 --> 00:29:37,080
Speaker 1: Titan is the only place in the Solar System other

511
00:29:37,120 --> 00:29:43,400
Speaker 1: than Earth that has beaches. Some planets have subterranean oceans

512
00:29:43,400 --> 00:29:45,640
Speaker 1: covered in ice a rock, right, We've talked about that,

513
00:29:46,640 --> 00:29:51,400
Speaker 1: Some have frozen polar water ice or frozen ice surfaces entirely,

514
00:29:51,800 --> 00:29:57,400
Speaker 1: But Titan has liquid lakes on a terrestrial surface. However,

515
00:29:57,600 --> 00:30:00,400
Speaker 1: those lakes are not the water lakes we know love.

516
00:30:00,720 --> 00:30:06,560
Speaker 1: Titan has a hydrocarbon hydrological system, which translates to seas

517
00:30:06,600 --> 00:30:11,080
Speaker 1: and rivers of liquid methane. So in the equatorial region

518
00:30:11,120 --> 00:30:15,680
Speaker 1: there's this vast desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds,

519
00:30:15,680 --> 00:30:19,040
Speaker 1: and dried up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come

520
00:30:19,080 --> 00:30:24,440
Speaker 1: across clouds and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself

521
00:30:24,560 --> 00:30:27,360
Speaker 1: is uh It's it's mass is composed mainly of water

522
00:30:27,640 --> 00:30:30,440
Speaker 1: in the form of ice and rocky material in fact

523
00:30:30,720 --> 00:30:36,680
Speaker 1: Titan is so cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius

524
00:30:36,880 --> 00:30:40,280
Speaker 1: that water essentially acts like rock and lava too on

525
00:30:40,320 --> 00:30:43,480
Speaker 1: our world. So the ground you walk on, I guess

526
00:30:43,320 --> 00:30:47,480
Speaker 1: it's ice mostly, but it is water water ice that

527
00:30:47,560 --> 00:30:50,240
Speaker 1: acts like rock. Yeah, so it's it's crazy to think

528
00:30:50,240 --> 00:30:52,840
Speaker 1: about that that it's this this It sounds like an

529
00:30:52,840 --> 00:30:56,120
Speaker 1: alternate dimension where everything is a little skewed instead of

530
00:30:56,520 --> 00:30:59,760
Speaker 1: instead of motions of water, it is. It's it's this

531
00:31:00,000 --> 00:31:03,160
Speaker 1: of substance. And uh. And and the rock is actually water.

532
00:31:03,360 --> 00:31:05,640
Speaker 1: It's like everything's turned on its head in topsy turvy.

533
00:31:05,800 --> 00:31:08,840
Speaker 1: Totally true. And that's actually something that's covered in a

534
00:31:08,920 --> 00:31:13,480
Speaker 1: fantastic lecture that I listened to given in two thousand

535
00:31:13,560 --> 00:31:17,800
Speaker 1: eleven by the NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay about the

536
00:31:17,840 --> 00:31:21,520
Speaker 1: possibility of life on Titan. And Uh. I listened to

537
00:31:21,560 --> 00:31:23,400
Speaker 1: this lecture. I thought it was great, and I just

538
00:31:23,440 --> 00:31:26,280
Speaker 1: wanted to cover some of the things he talks about

539
00:31:26,320 --> 00:31:28,360
Speaker 1: and and maybe we can have a discussion about what

540
00:31:28,400 --> 00:31:32,239
Speaker 1: they mean. But so in this Christopher McKay lecture, he

541
00:31:32,280 --> 00:31:36,160
Speaker 1: begins by noting a curious fact. So several years back,

542
00:31:36,400 --> 00:31:41,520
Speaker 1: we had detected that titans atmosphere features a hydrogen flux

543
00:31:41,600 --> 00:31:45,040
Speaker 1: towards the surface. That means there's hydrogen in the atmosphere

544
00:31:45,400 --> 00:31:48,440
Speaker 1: and it appears to flow down to the ground and

545
00:31:48,480 --> 00:31:51,960
Speaker 1: then not come back up. So what's happening to the

546
00:31:52,040 --> 00:31:56,560
Speaker 1: hydrogen on the surface of Titan. We will come back

547
00:31:56,600 --> 00:31:59,800
Speaker 1: to that question. So McKay talks about how all forms

548
00:31:59,840 --> 00:32:03,280
Speaker 1: of life needs some way of harnessing energy. So on

549
00:32:03,360 --> 00:32:07,480
Speaker 1: Earth there are two primary strategies. You've got like photosynthesis, right,

550
00:32:07,520 --> 00:32:13,280
Speaker 1: capturing sunlight energy, and then you've got chemical energy redox

551
00:32:13,400 --> 00:32:17,080
Speaker 1: chemical energy. So life also needs several other things. It

552
00:32:17,120 --> 00:32:20,760
Speaker 1: needs carbon, you know, organic molecules to make its tissues

553
00:32:20,800 --> 00:32:23,479
Speaker 1: out of for food and stuff like that. And it

554
00:32:23,520 --> 00:32:27,280
Speaker 1: needs liquid water. I've already discussed why that's a little

555
00:32:27,280 --> 00:32:31,120
Speaker 1: problematic here exactly. So there is gonna be no liquid water,

556
00:32:31,240 --> 00:32:34,040
Speaker 1: and the main constraint on an environment being able to

557
00:32:34,080 --> 00:32:37,360
Speaker 1: host life on Earth is the absence of liquid water.

558
00:32:37,440 --> 00:32:40,760
Speaker 1: You can mess with all the other variables, and as

559
00:32:40,760 --> 00:32:44,120
Speaker 1: long as there's liquid water there, there's still probably going

560
00:32:44,160 --> 00:32:46,680
Speaker 1: to be something alive. This is why world's with some

561
00:32:46,760 --> 00:32:49,000
Speaker 1: form of liquid water, sort of the hot spots of

562
00:32:49,040 --> 00:32:55,120
Speaker 1: solar system astrobiology investigation like Europa Enceladus, another moon of

563
00:32:55,120 --> 00:32:58,040
Speaker 1: Saturn will get to in a bit. And the recently

564
00:32:58,040 --> 00:33:02,040
Speaker 1: discovered spongy wet spot that appear seasonally on Martian soil.

565
00:33:02,040 --> 00:33:03,440
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've read about that, but it's

566
00:33:03,440 --> 00:33:05,920
Speaker 1: pretty cool, uh that they found that. You know that

567
00:33:06,040 --> 00:33:08,560
Speaker 1: there's some parts of the soil on Mars that seemed

568
00:33:08,600 --> 00:33:12,520
Speaker 1: to thaw seasonally. So even if there's just occasionally liquid water,

569
00:33:12,800 --> 00:33:16,440
Speaker 1: there's more hope than in this world of Titan, which

570
00:33:16,440 --> 00:33:19,400
Speaker 1: seems to just be ever in the freezer. Yeah, but

571
00:33:19,560 --> 00:33:23,800
Speaker 1: McKay points out something interesting. It's not necessarily the compound

572
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:28,000
Speaker 1: H two O itself. That's important because there are plenty

573
00:33:28,000 --> 00:33:31,440
Speaker 1: of worlds full of completely frozen water ice that that

574
00:33:31,520 --> 00:33:34,680
Speaker 1: don't seem to be good candidates for for life. Life

575
00:33:34,720 --> 00:33:38,320
Speaker 1: is ultimately a subset of chemistry. It's biochemistry, and that

576
00:33:38,440 --> 00:33:42,000
Speaker 1: chemistry needs a liquid medium to take place in Liquid

577
00:33:42,080 --> 00:33:44,440
Speaker 1: is sort of like the canvas on which you you know,

578
00:33:44,520 --> 00:33:49,360
Speaker 1: paint the wonderful artistry of complex chemistry. So maybe it's

579
00:33:49,400 --> 00:33:52,760
Speaker 1: not water that's the key. It's just liquid. It's the

580
00:33:52,840 --> 00:33:57,120
Speaker 1: liquid phase of matter. So how about those methane lakes

581
00:33:57,160 --> 00:34:01,960
Speaker 1: on Titan. In many ways, Titan is analogous to Earth.

582
00:34:02,440 --> 00:34:05,440
Speaker 1: So Christopher McKay points out that, like Earth, that has

583
00:34:05,440 --> 00:34:08,239
Speaker 1: a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if you're saying, wait a second,

584
00:34:08,280 --> 00:34:10,920
Speaker 1: I thought we had an oxygen atmosphere. Oxygen is only

585
00:34:10,920 --> 00:34:15,239
Speaker 1: about our atmospheric composition. About seventy eight percent of our

586
00:34:15,280 --> 00:34:19,480
Speaker 1: atmosphere is nitrogen, and if our atmosphere were entirely oxygen,

587
00:34:19,600 --> 00:34:22,760
Speaker 1: this would be a problem for you at high concentrations

588
00:34:22,760 --> 00:34:27,000
Speaker 1: at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy

589
00:34:27,040 --> 00:34:32,080
Speaker 1: your lungs. As we mentioned, it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure.

590
00:34:32,120 --> 00:34:34,880
Speaker 1: Mackay compares it to being under fifteen feet of water.

591
00:34:35,000 --> 00:34:36,920
Speaker 1: That sounds about right compared to what you said, right

592
00:34:36,960 --> 00:34:40,919
Speaker 1: being at the bottom. So it's not like Venus, it's

593
00:34:40,960 --> 00:34:44,319
Speaker 1: not like Mars. It's it's not you know, it's not

594
00:34:44,400 --> 00:34:46,920
Speaker 1: the nicest place to be compared to what we're used

595
00:34:46,920 --> 00:34:49,800
Speaker 1: to on Earth, but it's closer to Earth than anything

596
00:34:49,840 --> 00:34:53,400
Speaker 1: else we're aware of. It has a hydrological cycle with

597
00:34:53,520 --> 00:34:57,960
Speaker 1: clouds and rain storms. Now this is crazy. Yeah, I

598
00:34:57,960 --> 00:35:01,759
Speaker 1: I don't usually think of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah,

599
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,200
Speaker 1: and here we're talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane,

600
00:35:05,200 --> 00:35:07,320
Speaker 1: of course, so the methane is going to be H

601
00:35:07,440 --> 00:35:11,080
Speaker 1: four raining down from the sky. And speaking of methane,

602
00:35:11,120 --> 00:35:14,399
Speaker 1: Titan is rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean

603
00:35:14,480 --> 00:35:17,280
Speaker 1: stuff that we know to be alive or organic compounds

604
00:35:17,280 --> 00:35:19,959
Speaker 1: are just a sort of group name for carbon based

605
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:24,080
Speaker 1: compounds like methane that are very often associated with life,

606
00:35:24,120 --> 00:35:26,319
Speaker 1: but they exist independent of life. You don't have to

607
00:35:26,400 --> 00:35:29,680
Speaker 1: have life to make them. But if you want carbon

608
00:35:29,680 --> 00:35:32,400
Speaker 1: based life to exist, these compounds need to be around.

609
00:35:33,040 --> 00:35:36,919
Speaker 1: But the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth

610
00:35:36,960 --> 00:35:40,800
Speaker 1: temperature is almost two hundred degrees cintegrade more than average

611
00:35:40,840 --> 00:35:46,160
Speaker 1: Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth.

612
00:35:46,239 --> 00:35:49,240
Speaker 1: All this stuff that you see going on on Earth,

613
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:53,600
Speaker 1: you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere,

614
00:35:53,640 --> 00:35:56,640
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin

615
00:35:56,760 --> 00:36:00,200
Speaker 1: that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin, the

616
00:36:00,320 --> 00:36:04,000
Speaker 1: much colder cousin, And that kind of makes you wonder

617
00:36:04,120 --> 00:36:07,920
Speaker 1: if one of Earth's main features life also has a

618
00:36:07,960 --> 00:36:12,480
Speaker 1: cold cousin. Uh So, this is a situation where we're

619
00:36:12,480 --> 00:36:15,160
Speaker 1: forced to to not dream of an entirely different form

620
00:36:15,200 --> 00:36:19,239
Speaker 1: of life, but to say life as we know it

621
00:36:19,600 --> 00:36:23,359
Speaker 1: existing on a slightly different world like but basically all

622
00:36:23,400 --> 00:36:26,239
Speaker 1: things being equal, If the parameters were skewed a little bit,

623
00:36:26,320 --> 00:36:30,200
Speaker 1: could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd

624
00:36:30,200 --> 00:36:31,960
Speaker 1: be life as we know it in one way, but

625
00:36:32,000 --> 00:36:35,240
Speaker 1: not in another. So it would be carbon based life.

626
00:36:35,280 --> 00:36:37,520
Speaker 1: So it's life as we know it in that sense,

627
00:36:37,560 --> 00:36:39,560
Speaker 1: and we don't know of any other way that you

628
00:36:39,560 --> 00:36:43,080
Speaker 1: could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it

629
00:36:43,080 --> 00:36:46,480
Speaker 1: could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it

630
00:36:46,600 --> 00:36:49,719
Speaker 1: is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life

631
00:36:49,760 --> 00:36:54,319
Speaker 1: is water based, and this would be methane based, so

632
00:36:54,440 --> 00:36:58,600
Speaker 1: it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in

633
00:36:58,640 --> 00:37:01,200
Speaker 1: that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still

634
00:37:01,239 --> 00:37:03,680
Speaker 1: have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is

635
00:37:03,719 --> 00:37:06,720
Speaker 1: the only chemical basis we can think of for building

636
00:37:06,760 --> 00:37:09,920
Speaker 1: up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life.

637
00:37:10,280 --> 00:37:13,160
Speaker 1: So what did the Hygan's probe find when it landed

638
00:37:13,160 --> 00:37:16,360
Speaker 1: on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no,

639
00:37:16,640 --> 00:37:18,520
Speaker 1: because we would have heard about that. But it wasn't

640
00:37:18,520 --> 00:37:21,400
Speaker 1: equipped to find microbes, so there could have been microbes

641
00:37:21,480 --> 00:37:24,279
Speaker 1: there and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it

642
00:37:24,320 --> 00:37:28,200
Speaker 1: came back so exactly. Um, and that might be a

643
00:37:28,239 --> 00:37:31,200
Speaker 1: problem if it did, because as as we now know,

644
00:37:31,400 --> 00:37:36,239
Speaker 1: it's very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But

645
00:37:36,320 --> 00:37:39,000
Speaker 1: a little bit about the science behind the Hygans probe.

646
00:37:39,040 --> 00:37:43,080
Speaker 1: So we when we sent the Hyggans probe to UH

647
00:37:43,120 --> 00:37:46,040
Speaker 1: to Titan, we built it sort of like a raft,

648
00:37:46,160 --> 00:37:50,560
Speaker 1: as a floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that

649
00:37:50,600 --> 00:37:52,600
Speaker 1: Titan was going to be covered in a in a

650
00:37:52,880 --> 00:37:56,640
Speaker 1: surface wide liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for

651
00:37:56,680 --> 00:37:59,360
Speaker 1: this is because they were able to detect previously that

652
00:37:59,440 --> 00:38:03,600
Speaker 1: the app sphere was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane

653
00:38:03,760 --> 00:38:07,839
Speaker 1: doesn't last forever. It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from

654
00:38:07,840 --> 00:38:11,200
Speaker 1: the Sun and transformed into other compounds. So you can't

655
00:38:11,200 --> 00:38:13,640
Speaker 1: have a methane atmosphere that just hangs around for the

656
00:38:13,800 --> 00:38:16,279
Speaker 1: entire lifetime of a planet, you know, four billion years

657
00:38:16,360 --> 00:38:19,479
Speaker 1: or however old it is since Titan was formed, so

658
00:38:19,800 --> 00:38:22,680
Speaker 1: there has to be something on the surface to replenish it.

659
00:38:22,760 --> 00:38:25,480
Speaker 1: And from this they reasoned it looks like there's liquid

660
00:38:25,520 --> 00:38:28,480
Speaker 1: methane on the surface of Titan. Which is slowly evaporating

661
00:38:28,520 --> 00:38:33,520
Speaker 1: being processed turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay,

662
00:38:33,560 --> 00:38:36,040
Speaker 1: we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll

663
00:38:36,040 --> 00:38:39,279
Speaker 1: see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it

664
00:38:39,360 --> 00:38:42,280
Speaker 1: dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something

665
00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:45,719
Speaker 1: more like a desert. But the probe was able to

666
00:38:45,760 --> 00:38:48,359
Speaker 1: detect that it was not as totally desert like as

667
00:38:48,400 --> 00:38:51,720
Speaker 1: it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft,

668
00:38:51,760 --> 00:38:55,319
Speaker 1: and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able

669
00:38:55,320 --> 00:38:58,600
Speaker 1: to notice that methane steam was coming out of the

670
00:38:58,640 --> 00:39:04,880
Speaker 1: soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay,

671
00:39:04,920 --> 00:39:09,600
Speaker 1: so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid

672
00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:13,440
Speaker 1: methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an

673
00:39:13,480 --> 00:39:16,359
Speaker 1: analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much

674
00:39:16,400 --> 00:39:19,960
Speaker 1: anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.

675
00:39:20,560 --> 00:39:23,520
Speaker 1: By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan,

676
00:39:23,640 --> 00:39:26,200
Speaker 1: we should be able to find it all over the place,

677
00:39:27,040 --> 00:39:29,480
Speaker 1: even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because

678
00:39:29,480 --> 00:39:32,160
Speaker 1: even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's

679
00:39:32,239 --> 00:39:35,160
Speaker 1: any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some

680
00:39:35,239 --> 00:39:38,560
Speaker 1: kind of life. So in his lecture, mackay asks, Okay,

681
00:39:38,600 --> 00:39:41,240
Speaker 1: so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives

682
00:39:41,239 --> 00:39:44,560
Speaker 1: in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we

683
00:39:44,640 --> 00:39:47,600
Speaker 1: be able to look for clues of this? And one

684
00:39:47,719 --> 00:39:50,520
Speaker 1: one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably

685
00:39:50,520 --> 00:39:53,960
Speaker 1: read about how in looking for exo planets, they've theorized

686
00:39:54,000 --> 00:39:55,759
Speaker 1: that one way we could look for life on exo

687
00:39:55,800 --> 00:39:59,919
Speaker 1: planets is by looking for oxygen, right, because the pred

688
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:04,040
Speaker 1: sense of anomalous oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms,

689
00:40:04,040 --> 00:40:08,280
Speaker 1: Like our atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics

690
00:40:08,280 --> 00:40:11,399
Speaker 1: of planetary formation. That wasn't it wasn't like that when

691
00:40:11,440 --> 00:40:15,799
Speaker 1: Earth was formed. Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full

692
00:40:15,800 --> 00:40:21,160
Speaker 1: of critters like plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere

693
00:40:21,160 --> 00:40:24,360
Speaker 1: of our planet exactly. It's their waste, it's their waste product,

694
00:40:24,360 --> 00:40:27,200
Speaker 1: it's their poop, you know, So they there or I

695
00:40:27,200 --> 00:40:29,200
Speaker 1: guess they're they're breathing out, I don't know, however you

696
00:40:29,239 --> 00:40:31,640
Speaker 1: want to phrase it. They take in sunlight and CEO two.

697
00:40:31,880 --> 00:40:34,000
Speaker 1: They use the energy from the sunlight to split up

698
00:40:34,000 --> 00:40:36,240
Speaker 1: the COO two, make body parts out of the carbon,

699
00:40:36,560 --> 00:40:39,080
Speaker 1: and then spit out the oxygen as a waste product.

700
00:40:39,520 --> 00:40:42,080
Speaker 1: And so you could look at the original oxygenation of

701
00:40:42,160 --> 00:40:46,839
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere. Is this mass poisoning event? Uh? We just

702
00:40:46,880 --> 00:40:49,279
Speaker 1: happened to be the kinds of animals that evolved to

703
00:40:49,480 --> 00:40:53,600
Speaker 1: thrive amidst this mass poisoning and to work well with it.

704
00:41:00,719 --> 00:41:04,439
Speaker 1: So how could we look for similar clues on Titan? Uh? Well,

705
00:41:04,600 --> 00:41:07,560
Speaker 1: you would have to imagine what an organism that gets

706
00:41:07,560 --> 00:41:10,360
Speaker 1: along in liquid nitrogen to do to make a living.

707
00:41:11,160 --> 00:41:14,600
Speaker 1: So you imagine a carbon based life form that lives

708
00:41:14,600 --> 00:41:17,080
Speaker 1: in liquid methane and imagine how does it eat? What

709
00:41:17,120 --> 00:41:20,799
Speaker 1: does it do? Well? Titan has tons of compounds on

710
00:41:20,800 --> 00:41:23,279
Speaker 1: it that make perfectly good food. One one example would

711
00:41:23,280 --> 00:41:26,520
Speaker 1: be acetylene, or another would be ethane. So if you're

712
00:41:26,520 --> 00:41:29,360
Speaker 1: an organism on Titan, food is just all over the place.

713
00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:32,640
Speaker 1: In McKay's words, food is quote falling from the sky.

714
00:41:32,840 --> 00:41:35,680
Speaker 1: It's not not hard to get a meal there. But

715
00:41:35,960 --> 00:41:39,240
Speaker 1: organisms like us get energy by a combination of eating food.

716
00:41:39,400 --> 00:41:42,239
Speaker 1: So taking in these carbon based compounds and then breathing

717
00:41:42,360 --> 00:41:46,200
Speaker 1: taking an oxygen and then reacting that carbon and oxygen

718
00:41:46,239 --> 00:41:49,359
Speaker 1: to create usable energy and the molecules we need and

719
00:41:49,400 --> 00:41:53,239
Speaker 1: the waste product of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on

720
00:41:53,320 --> 00:41:57,000
Speaker 1: Titan could perform a pretty much analogous process by reacting

721
00:41:57,160 --> 00:42:01,759
Speaker 1: carbon based compounds and food with instead out of oxygen hydrogen,

722
00:42:03,280 --> 00:42:05,600
Speaker 1: and that would create usable energy and then a waste

723
00:42:05,600 --> 00:42:11,759
Speaker 1: product containing carbon and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So,

724
00:42:11,920 --> 00:42:14,800
Speaker 1: if there's life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted

725
00:42:14,840 --> 00:42:17,280
Speaker 1: that it would probably alter the chemistry of the surface

726
00:42:17,320 --> 00:42:20,920
Speaker 1: by depleting it of the compounds it eats and breathes,

727
00:42:21,000 --> 00:42:25,640
Speaker 1: like acetylene, ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with

728
00:42:25,680 --> 00:42:28,600
Speaker 1: that missing hydrogen, so that there's hydrogen flowing down to

729
00:42:28,640 --> 00:42:32,960
Speaker 1: the surface and then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility

730
00:42:33,040 --> 00:42:35,239
Speaker 1: is that some kind of organism at the surface is

731
00:42:35,280 --> 00:42:39,040
Speaker 1: consuming hydrogen spitting out methane as part of its metabolism

732
00:42:39,080 --> 00:42:42,200
Speaker 1: and respiration, and that's how it gets along. Now we

733
00:42:42,280 --> 00:42:44,400
Speaker 1: don't know. This isn't proof, right, we don't know that

734
00:42:44,440 --> 00:42:48,600
Speaker 1: there's something alive on Titan, but but it definitely makes

735
00:42:48,600 --> 00:42:51,000
Speaker 1: Titan worth a closer look. I think we should send

736
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:54,000
Speaker 1: more probes right, Oh, most definitely, we definitely, we should

737
00:42:54,080 --> 00:42:57,319
Speaker 1: definitely send more probes because one reason is always more

738
00:42:57,360 --> 00:43:01,839
Speaker 1: problem One reason, of course, is that you know, if

739
00:43:01,840 --> 00:43:04,520
Speaker 1: we find and this is something that McKay points out,

740
00:43:04,560 --> 00:43:07,440
Speaker 1: is that if we find life on Mars or Europa,

741
00:43:07,680 --> 00:43:10,319
Speaker 1: current life, past life, etcetera, there's a chance that it's

742
00:43:10,320 --> 00:43:14,279
Speaker 1: related to us. Right, but when in contemplating Titan, this

743
00:43:14,320 --> 00:43:17,279
Speaker 1: would be an entirely different form. It would be it

744
00:43:17,320 --> 00:43:19,279
Speaker 1: would be unconnected to us because it would be based

745
00:43:19,320 --> 00:43:22,680
Speaker 1: on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean there's no liquid

746
00:43:22,719 --> 00:43:25,680
Speaker 1: methane based biochemistry on that then, and there probably couldn't

747
00:43:25,719 --> 00:43:28,399
Speaker 1: be because Earth is just not cold enough. Like we

748
00:43:28,480 --> 00:43:30,919
Speaker 1: look at at Titan and say, how could you live

749
00:43:30,960 --> 00:43:34,040
Speaker 1: on a world that cold? But any life form on

750
00:43:34,120 --> 00:43:36,879
Speaker 1: Titan would look at Earth as like like we look

751
00:43:36,920 --> 00:43:40,200
Speaker 1: at Venus. You know, it's just this unbearable hell of

752
00:43:40,280 --> 00:43:43,799
Speaker 1: intense heat where you know, the stuff you need to live,

753
00:43:43,840 --> 00:43:46,560
Speaker 1: the liquid methane you need it just it boils. You know,

754
00:43:46,680 --> 00:43:49,640
Speaker 1: you can't you can't sustain it. So anyway, we mentioned

755
00:43:49,640 --> 00:43:52,040
Speaker 1: sending those probes, what what would they look for if

756
00:43:52,080 --> 00:43:55,680
Speaker 1: we did send probes? Well, McKay suggests one thing look

757
00:43:55,760 --> 00:44:00,560
Speaker 1: for evidence of the chemistry of life there. So uh.

758
00:44:00,600 --> 00:44:04,319
Speaker 1: The example he gives is that organisms on Earth we

759
00:44:04,560 --> 00:44:07,480
Speaker 1: get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult for us to

760
00:44:07,520 --> 00:44:11,040
Speaker 1: come by, so we have enzymes that have to bust

761
00:44:11,160 --> 00:44:15,520
Speaker 1: up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere and make them

762
00:44:15,560 --> 00:44:19,040
Speaker 1: into ammonia in H three. Now, on a world like Titan,

763
00:44:19,280 --> 00:44:23,520
Speaker 1: the problem wouldn't be getting uh, getting nitrogen making ammonia.

764
00:44:23,560 --> 00:44:26,719
Speaker 1: It would be getting oxygen because there's no oxygen available

765
00:44:27,040 --> 00:44:30,160
Speaker 1: except that which is locked up in the frozen H two. Oh,

766
00:44:30,200 --> 00:44:33,280
Speaker 1: the water ice that makes the rocky ground of this planet.

767
00:44:34,680 --> 00:44:38,000
Speaker 1: So you'd see organisms with enzymes for melting water ice

768
00:44:38,040 --> 00:44:40,839
Speaker 1: and getting that oxygen out of it. Uh. And then

769
00:44:40,880 --> 00:44:45,080
Speaker 1: another thing he finally suggests, is to scoop up organic

770
00:44:45,160 --> 00:44:48,880
Speaker 1: material from Titan and then look for biases in the

771
00:44:48,960 --> 00:44:53,640
Speaker 1: distribution of organic materials. You know, so looking for molecules

772
00:44:53,680 --> 00:44:58,160
Speaker 1: that are appearing an anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained

773
00:44:58,200 --> 00:45:01,160
Speaker 1: by inorganic chemistry, but would be explained if you're looking

774
00:45:01,200 --> 00:45:03,759
Speaker 1: at a place where the chemistry of the surface is

775
00:45:03,800 --> 00:45:08,839
Speaker 1: being processed constantly by life forms. But the idea of

776
00:45:08,920 --> 00:45:12,000
Speaker 1: life on Titan is interesting to me because of how

777
00:45:12,040 --> 00:45:15,920
Speaker 1: cold it is, So we know there's a basic correlation

778
00:45:16,040 --> 00:45:19,279
Speaker 1: between heat and metabolism, right, So a life form that

779
00:45:19,320 --> 00:45:24,640
Speaker 1: lives on Titan is probably a very slow moving form

780
00:45:24,800 --> 00:45:29,279
Speaker 1: of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle, slow evolution. And

781
00:45:29,800 --> 00:45:32,240
Speaker 1: this kind of makes me wonder about weird thought experiment

782
00:45:32,280 --> 00:45:36,920
Speaker 1: extending out from this, what would intelligent life that evolved

783
00:45:36,960 --> 00:45:40,960
Speaker 1: on a freezing, liquid methane world look like? Because in

784
00:45:40,960 --> 00:45:44,200
Speaker 1: many ways, I think our idea of intelligence is heavily

785
00:45:44,320 --> 00:45:49,480
Speaker 1: colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine an organism

786
00:45:49,480 --> 00:45:53,400
Speaker 1: that has as much technological and problem solving intelligence as

787
00:45:53,440 --> 00:45:57,600
Speaker 1: a human but does everything literally one hundred times slower

788
00:45:58,360 --> 00:46:02,640
Speaker 1: mm hmm, but but but potentially living a lot longer

789
00:46:02,680 --> 00:46:06,960
Speaker 1: as well. So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative.

790
00:46:07,040 --> 00:46:11,160
Speaker 1: Then I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate,

791
00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:16,680
Speaker 1: Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not

792
00:46:17,000 --> 00:46:20,600
Speaker 1: a like whale sloth in this scenario and then wondering

793
00:46:20,680 --> 00:46:23,560
Speaker 1: and then it's even a greater leap for me to

794
00:46:23,560 --> 00:46:28,640
Speaker 1: try to imagine this alien methane based whale sloth even

795
00:46:28,960 --> 00:46:33,359
Speaker 1: developing crude technology on this world, Like, yeah, it's just

796
00:46:33,440 --> 00:46:37,399
Speaker 1: it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean

797
00:46:37,480 --> 00:46:41,719
Speaker 1: sirens obviously. Oh yeah, well let us not speak of

798
00:46:41,719 --> 00:46:45,920
Speaker 1: the sirens of Titan. But I I I agree with

799
00:46:45,920 --> 00:46:48,880
Speaker 1: you about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale

800
00:46:48,880 --> 00:46:53,440
Speaker 1: sloth Like. Um, I just tried to do some math here, like,

801
00:46:53,520 --> 00:46:57,719
Speaker 1: if a development happened in humans one million years after

802
00:46:57,760 --> 00:47:01,759
Speaker 1: the emergence of the species, did you expect a hypothetical

803
00:47:01,840 --> 00:47:05,000
Speaker 1: liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred times

804
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:10,120
Speaker 1: slower to reach the same development in a hundred million years. Well,

805
00:47:10,239 --> 00:47:13,040
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be ruled out by the age of the universe.

806
00:47:13,120 --> 00:47:16,520
Speaker 1: But then that sort of introduces questions about like, well,

807
00:47:16,520 --> 00:47:18,000
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I mean, how would you even get

808
00:47:18,000 --> 00:47:21,399
Speaker 1: a complex nervous system. Because it took life on Earth

809
00:47:21,440 --> 00:47:23,920
Speaker 1: what like four billion years to evolve from the first

810
00:47:23,920 --> 00:47:28,080
Speaker 1: self replicating molecules to technological intelligence. So would it take

811
00:47:28,160 --> 00:47:32,120
Speaker 1: life on a cold planet four hundred billion years? Uh?

812
00:47:32,360 --> 00:47:34,920
Speaker 1: And again, I'm just using a hundred times faster or

813
00:47:34,920 --> 00:47:37,239
Speaker 1: a hundred times slower as a hypothetical. I don't know

814
00:47:37,320 --> 00:47:40,640
Speaker 1: exactly how slower it would be, but if it would

815
00:47:40,640 --> 00:47:42,880
Speaker 1: take something like that long, we've got a lot of

816
00:47:42,880 --> 00:47:45,320
Speaker 1: a long time to wait before we meet these slow

817
00:47:45,360 --> 00:47:48,279
Speaker 1: moving organisms, because that's much older than the universe. Yeah,

818
00:47:48,360 --> 00:47:51,440
Speaker 1: and again to say nothing of the various cataclysms and

819
00:47:51,480 --> 00:47:55,279
Speaker 1: extinction events that are likely to to occur in the

820
00:47:55,480 --> 00:48:00,040
Speaker 1: history of any life sustaining, life evolving world. So it

821
00:48:00,360 --> 00:48:02,920
Speaker 1: might very well be on the path towards creating this

822
00:48:03,000 --> 00:48:09,279
Speaker 1: and then whammouh, some some body in Saturn's um gravitational

823
00:48:09,280 --> 00:48:13,400
Speaker 1: system just crashes into you and wipes everything out. But

824
00:48:13,480 --> 00:48:16,120
Speaker 1: then again, I also think of a very slow organism

825
00:48:16,160 --> 00:48:19,520
Speaker 1: as a very resilient organism. You know, it's just hard

826
00:48:19,560 --> 00:48:23,280
Speaker 1: to put them down. Yeah, but you know, the right commets,

827
00:48:23,440 --> 00:48:26,719
Speaker 1: commet strike, the right the right medior can certainly do that.

828
00:48:29,360 --> 00:48:32,239
Speaker 1: Has anybody ever created a sci fi alien like that?

829
00:48:32,280 --> 00:48:34,480
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of one, Like an alien that's

830
00:48:34,520 --> 00:48:40,120
Speaker 1: just amazingly slow. M hm. The nts sort of sort

831
00:48:40,120 --> 00:48:43,600
Speaker 1: of like the ants. Yeah, I'm I'm not remembering one

832
00:48:43,680 --> 00:48:46,480
Speaker 1: off hand. They tend to be This kind of alien

833
00:48:46,520 --> 00:48:50,799
Speaker 1: would tend to be the the the the marginally experienced

834
00:48:50,840 --> 00:48:54,600
Speaker 1: alien in a in a rather you know, rich diverse

835
00:48:55,120 --> 00:48:58,719
Speaker 1: pantheon of alien species like this would not be your

836
00:48:58,760 --> 00:49:02,000
Speaker 1: central character because they're so unlike humans. This would be

837
00:49:02,000 --> 00:49:04,759
Speaker 1: like the one character that you go to, uh, you know,

838
00:49:05,200 --> 00:49:08,440
Speaker 1: about halfway through the novel to get a little elder inside.

839
00:49:08,440 --> 00:49:11,959
Speaker 1: I guess, well, it makes me think that there there'd

840
00:49:12,000 --> 00:49:14,920
Speaker 1: be a great creeping menace because imagine you colonize the

841
00:49:14,960 --> 00:49:20,280
Speaker 1: world with some hundred times slower than you, cold cold

842
00:49:20,320 --> 00:49:24,080
Speaker 1: liquid methane, intelligent organisms. And at first it doesn't seem

843
00:49:24,120 --> 00:49:26,080
Speaker 1: like they're bothered by your presence. You can live in

844
00:49:26,120 --> 00:49:28,840
Speaker 1: peaceful harmony. But it just took them a hundred years

845
00:49:28,880 --> 00:49:32,600
Speaker 1: to decide that they were going to destroy you. Yeah,

846
00:49:32,600 --> 00:49:36,040
Speaker 1: they would play a different you know, long term game. Uh.

847
00:49:36,040 --> 00:49:38,960
Speaker 1: And so I certainly have encountered that in fantasy novels before.

848
00:49:39,800 --> 00:49:42,600
Speaker 1: You know, what happens when you have the great threat

849
00:49:43,360 --> 00:49:45,680
Speaker 1: does not have to doesn't have to worry about the

850
00:49:45,920 --> 00:49:47,680
Speaker 1: day to day, even year to year. I can sleep

851
00:49:47,719 --> 00:49:51,480
Speaker 1: for centuries and wait for the game, the game board

852
00:49:51,520 --> 00:49:55,799
Speaker 1: to improve and the situations to favor it once more.

853
00:49:56,200 --> 00:49:58,920
Speaker 1: So you know, you could see a similar model, I guess, uh,

854
00:49:59,120 --> 00:50:05,440
Speaker 1: with you know, interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then a

855
00:50:05,440 --> 00:50:08,480
Speaker 1: great disadvantage we're always at. We gotta go get the groceries. Yeah,

856
00:50:08,600 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 1: so they can say, you know what, we can lose

857
00:50:10,440 --> 00:50:15,520
Speaker 1: the next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us,

858
00:50:15,560 --> 00:50:22,200
Speaker 1: that's just that's just a nap. It's small hyperions. One

859
00:50:22,280 --> 00:50:23,840
Speaker 1: last thing I want to talk about for and we

860
00:50:23,880 --> 00:50:27,279
Speaker 1: mentioned future probes going to Titan. Definitely in favor of

861
00:50:27,320 --> 00:50:31,080
Speaker 1: that Titan last I heard was not the top priority

862
00:50:31,200 --> 00:50:34,880
Speaker 1: for for future missions, but it's you know, it's something

863
00:50:34,920 --> 00:50:38,120
Speaker 1: that's being discussed and and there are some proposals. But

864
00:50:38,280 --> 00:50:42,239
Speaker 1: one proposal for future exploration of Titans surface is the

865
00:50:42,360 --> 00:50:44,759
Speaker 1: use of a type of robot that I think is

866
00:50:44,760 --> 00:50:47,560
Speaker 1: really interesting. It's been referred to in the press as

867
00:50:47,600 --> 00:50:51,400
Speaker 1: the super ballbot, but I like the design of this.

868
00:50:51,480 --> 00:50:53,400
Speaker 1: I've talked about it on the other podcast I be

869
00:50:53,480 --> 00:50:57,040
Speaker 1: forward thinking before. But the robot design is a rover

870
00:50:57,600 --> 00:51:00,320
Speaker 1: that is based on what's called tin Segreti architect picture,

871
00:51:00,719 --> 00:51:03,600
Speaker 1: and essentially it is a mobile robot that looks like

872
00:51:03,640 --> 00:51:06,719
Speaker 1: a jumble of rods and wires. So if you just

873
00:51:06,760 --> 00:51:10,520
Speaker 1: made a tangled ball of sticks and wires connecting them

874
00:51:10,520 --> 00:51:12,759
Speaker 1: at the ends, that's what it would look like. And

875
00:51:12,800 --> 00:51:15,560
Speaker 1: it moves by tensing and relaxing the wires. So it

876
00:51:15,640 --> 00:51:20,520
Speaker 1: kind of tumbles along on the ground rotumbweed exactly, and

877
00:51:20,719 --> 00:51:23,799
Speaker 1: it's resistant to damage from hard landings and stuff, so

878
00:51:23,920 --> 00:51:27,319
Speaker 1: that this makes it an interesting design for a planetary

879
00:51:27,400 --> 00:51:30,600
Speaker 1: rover to explore. But I've also always thought this would

880
00:51:30,600 --> 00:51:32,520
Speaker 1: be a great design for a killer robot in the

881
00:51:32,560 --> 00:51:35,200
Speaker 1: sci fi horror movie, Like just this this tangle of

882
00:51:35,640 --> 00:51:38,200
Speaker 1: rods and wires, and it's kind of cute, it's kind

883
00:51:38,200 --> 00:51:40,000
Speaker 1: of funny. It just kind of tumbles up to you,

884
00:51:40,120 --> 00:51:42,880
Speaker 1: but then it wraps around you and ten tenses the

885
00:51:42,920 --> 00:51:46,440
Speaker 1: wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know what

886
00:51:46,480 --> 00:51:49,080
Speaker 1: makes sense because there's at least one killer robot movie

887
00:51:49,400 --> 00:51:52,120
Speaker 1: that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn three

888
00:51:52,640 --> 00:51:55,879
Speaker 1: um had Kirk Douglas in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk,

889
00:51:56,120 --> 00:51:57,880
Speaker 1: this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too,

890
00:51:58,239 --> 00:52:01,480
Speaker 1: and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking

891
00:52:01,560 --> 00:52:05,279
Speaker 1: very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah,

892
00:52:05,280 --> 00:52:10,040
Speaker 1: he's he's not his least leazy role I think, and

893
00:52:10,239 --> 00:52:13,080
Speaker 1: kind of flash Gordon aesthetic and he actually looks good

894
00:52:13,080 --> 00:52:15,759
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah. Fair Faucet in it as well, and

895
00:52:15,840 --> 00:52:17,760
Speaker 1: that has a killer robot in it not the greatest

896
00:52:17,800 --> 00:52:21,919
Speaker 1: killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars can't

897
00:52:21,920 --> 00:52:24,760
Speaker 1: be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that involve

898
00:52:24,840 --> 00:52:27,919
Speaker 1: the moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're coming

899
00:52:28,000 --> 00:52:31,840
Speaker 1: up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after Titan,

900
00:52:32,000 --> 00:52:34,120
Speaker 1: Raya is going to seem like kind of a letdown

901
00:52:34,560 --> 00:52:38,080
Speaker 1: Raya or Ria, I've seen it, said Ria also, so Ria,

902
00:52:39,320 --> 00:52:42,239
Speaker 1: I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of

903
00:52:42,280 --> 00:52:44,640
Speaker 1: this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon

904
00:52:44,719 --> 00:52:47,920
Speaker 1: of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being

905
00:52:47,920 --> 00:52:51,080
Speaker 1: the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more

906
00:52:51,120 --> 00:52:55,919
Speaker 1: than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh,

907
00:52:55,960 --> 00:52:58,279
Speaker 1: in terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot

908
00:52:58,320 --> 00:53:02,239
Speaker 1: going on here. It's and the sort of almost half

909
00:53:02,360 --> 00:53:07,280
Speaker 1: lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively low density.

910
00:53:07,360 --> 00:53:09,640
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's comparable to the next moon we're

911
00:53:09,680 --> 00:53:14,120
Speaker 1: gonna passone. And as far as surface features go, it's

912
00:53:14,239 --> 00:53:18,520
Speaker 1: got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere

913
00:53:19,080 --> 00:53:22,480
Speaker 1: cratered in silent Okay, and in a far on a

914
00:53:22,520 --> 00:53:26,799
Speaker 1: far lesser note. Apparently the latest Independence Day Independence Day

915
00:53:27,480 --> 00:53:31,880
Speaker 1: resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building

916
00:53:31,920 --> 00:53:34,800
Speaker 1: a defense outpost here. So I don't know why. Maybe

917
00:53:34,840 --> 00:53:37,919
Speaker 1: it just seems like a nice boring place to put

918
00:53:37,920 --> 00:53:41,640
Speaker 1: all those guns. I suppose you know, there's sort of

919
00:53:41,680 --> 00:53:44,400
Speaker 1: like a if you pronounce it ray, Uh, sort of

920
00:53:44,440 --> 00:53:48,080
Speaker 1: like ray sort ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

921
00:53:48,560 --> 00:53:50,920
Speaker 1: That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It

922
00:53:51,000 --> 00:53:54,640
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense.

923
00:53:55,400 --> 00:54:00,000
Speaker 1: Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione,

924
00:54:00,040 --> 00:54:04,040
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of

925
00:54:04,040 --> 00:54:09,200
Speaker 1: about three two kilometers, And what we're looking at here

926
00:54:09,239 --> 00:54:13,400
Speaker 1: is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably

927
00:54:13,520 --> 00:54:17,040
Speaker 1: a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is

928
00:54:17,080 --> 00:54:21,439
Speaker 1: just ice water ice, a very fine ice powder that's

929
00:54:21,600 --> 00:54:27,760
Speaker 1: basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring constantly bombards Dinny.

930
00:54:28,120 --> 00:54:30,920
Speaker 1: And the dust from the ear ring ultimately comes from Enceladus,

931
00:54:31,200 --> 00:54:33,879
Speaker 1: which has prominent geyser activity that we discuss in a bed.

932
00:54:34,960 --> 00:54:40,120
Speaker 1: Great wisps mar the surface of Dione, and uh, these

933
00:54:40,280 --> 00:54:43,960
Speaker 1: turn out these are actually bright canyon ice walls indicating

934
00:54:44,280 --> 00:54:48,719
Speaker 1: pasta tectonic activity, and these ice cliffs could be a

935
00:54:48,719 --> 00:54:52,080
Speaker 1: mature phase of the so called tiger stripes that are

936
00:54:52,160 --> 00:54:54,680
Speaker 1: encountered on Enceladus. Right, So we're gonna talk about the

937
00:54:54,680 --> 00:54:57,320
Speaker 1: surface of Enceladus in a bit, But Enceladus is a

938
00:54:57,320 --> 00:54:59,960
Speaker 1: is a younger, smoother kind of surface, but it does

939
00:55:00,040 --> 00:55:02,839
Speaker 1: have these stripes along it. So you're saying like, if

940
00:55:02,880 --> 00:55:06,440
Speaker 1: if Enceladus were allowed to mature millions more years, it

941
00:55:06,520 --> 00:55:08,800
Speaker 1: could end up looking more like some of the surface

942
00:55:08,800 --> 00:55:11,600
Speaker 1: features of Dione. Yeah, this is essentially the old boring

943
00:55:11,840 --> 00:55:15,080
Speaker 1: uh Enceladus. But nothing nothing in the sphere of Saturn

944
00:55:15,200 --> 00:55:19,560
Speaker 1: is boring. No, no, not boring, but the the less

945
00:55:19,600 --> 00:55:23,160
Speaker 1: interesting version of the same lunar idea. I guess we

946
00:55:23,200 --> 00:55:26,279
Speaker 1: are spiraling in faster and it's something we've got to

947
00:55:26,320 --> 00:55:29,000
Speaker 1: acknowledge now. The next one is going to be the

948
00:55:29,040 --> 00:55:33,760
Speaker 1: moon Tethus or Tethis uh so teeth. This is about

949
00:55:34,040 --> 00:55:37,120
Speaker 1: sixty five of the mass of the dwarf planet series.

950
00:55:37,160 --> 00:55:41,359
Speaker 1: It's pretty small, roughly thirty of the width of Earth's moon,

951
00:55:41,560 --> 00:55:45,160
Speaker 1: Roughly spherical, there's not a lot of suspected potential for

952
00:55:45,280 --> 00:55:48,520
Speaker 1: endogenous life on Tethus uh and and teeth. This is

953
00:55:48,560 --> 00:55:52,440
Speaker 1: composed mostly of water ice with no real atmosphere. Is

954
00:55:52,480 --> 00:55:56,200
Speaker 1: this frozen ice ball tidally locked in orbit around Saturn.

955
00:55:56,880 --> 00:56:00,239
Speaker 1: But the coolest feature of teeth This is some thing

956
00:56:00,280 --> 00:56:04,319
Speaker 1: that I came across, I think last year. I was

957
00:56:04,360 --> 00:56:07,520
Speaker 1: reading about this and I just love it. I'm not

958
00:56:07,600 --> 00:56:11,000
Speaker 1: quite sure why. It's just a surface coloration feature, but

959
00:56:11,080 --> 00:56:16,359
Speaker 1: in July, NASA reported that in enhanced color images from

960
00:56:16,400 --> 00:56:19,719
Speaker 1: the Cassini spacecraft there were a series of these arc

961
00:56:19,800 --> 00:56:23,160
Speaker 1: shaped red streaks that could be seen side by side

962
00:56:23,239 --> 00:56:27,799
Speaker 1: parallel on the surface of Teethus, and it looks like

963
00:56:27,880 --> 00:56:31,560
Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger slashed the moon with his glove. It wasn't

964
00:56:31,600 --> 00:56:33,400
Speaker 1: the first time the arcs had been seen. They've been

965
00:56:33,400 --> 00:56:36,759
Speaker 1: spotted faintly visibly as early as two thousand four, I think,

966
00:56:37,239 --> 00:56:39,640
Speaker 1: but this was the first time they were imaged really clearly.

967
00:56:40,360 --> 00:56:44,520
Speaker 1: And it's fascinating because we were not positive what causes them,

968
00:56:44,520 --> 00:56:46,200
Speaker 1: at least as far as I could find. And maybe

969
00:56:46,200 --> 00:56:48,720
Speaker 1: somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't

970
00:56:48,760 --> 00:56:52,839
Speaker 1: find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young,

971
00:56:53,040 --> 00:56:57,440
Speaker 1: these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters.

972
00:56:58,280 --> 00:57:01,480
Speaker 1: But what created them and why are they red in color?

973
00:57:01,800 --> 00:57:04,600
Speaker 1: Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press

974
00:57:04,640 --> 00:57:09,000
Speaker 1: release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be

975
00:57:09,040 --> 00:57:12,719
Speaker 1: maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities, or

976
00:57:12,800 --> 00:57:15,480
Speaker 1: they could be out gassing from inside teeth this but

977
00:57:15,640 --> 00:57:18,680
Speaker 1: ultimately we don't know yet. All right, Well, let's leave

978
00:57:18,720 --> 00:57:21,200
Speaker 1: this moon behind us and move on to uh one

979
00:57:21,200 --> 00:57:23,960
Speaker 1: of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that

980
00:57:24,120 --> 00:57:29,160
Speaker 1: is Enceladus, a moon about the size of Arizona. Yes,

981
00:57:29,240 --> 00:57:32,280
Speaker 1: could fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to

982
00:57:32,280 --> 00:57:35,800
Speaker 1: to imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not

983
00:57:35,960 --> 00:57:38,200
Speaker 1: very large, is that if you were to punch a

984
00:57:38,240 --> 00:57:40,320
Speaker 1: hole in the Earth along the borders of the state

985
00:57:40,360 --> 00:57:42,360
Speaker 1: of Texas, you could drop And why would you want

986
00:57:42,400 --> 00:57:45,240
Speaker 1: to do that, But just if you were to do it,

987
00:57:45,320 --> 00:57:48,520
Speaker 1: take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter punched out

988
00:57:48,560 --> 00:57:52,440
Speaker 1: that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus through the whole. So,

989
00:57:52,560 --> 00:57:55,120
Speaker 1: coming after some of the giants we've seen like Titan

990
00:57:55,360 --> 00:57:58,520
Speaker 1: and and Rhea, you might be kind of underwhelmed by

991
00:57:58,520 --> 00:58:02,640
Speaker 1: its size, But do not be underwhelmed because Enceladus is

992
00:58:02,720 --> 00:58:05,560
Speaker 1: quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy features here is

993
00:58:05,640 --> 00:58:10,240
Speaker 1: that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor, and

994
00:58:10,360 --> 00:58:14,240
Speaker 1: ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust

995
00:58:14,280 --> 00:58:19,440
Speaker 1: of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds, volatile gases,

996
00:58:19,480 --> 00:58:23,280
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica. And it's all

997
00:58:23,320 --> 00:58:26,840
Speaker 1: expelled out to a distance three times the radius of

998
00:58:26,880 --> 00:58:29,960
Speaker 1: Enceladus and at a speed of approximately eight hundred miles

999
00:58:29,960 --> 00:58:33,000
Speaker 1: per hour or four d per second. It's a continuous

1000
00:58:33,160 --> 00:58:37,640
Speaker 1: eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh. And it

1001
00:58:37,720 --> 00:58:41,120
Speaker 1: cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo of fine

1002
00:58:41,240 --> 00:58:44,680
Speaker 1: ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's ear ring,

1003
00:58:44,760 --> 00:58:47,400
Speaker 1: which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear ring is

1004
00:58:47,480 --> 00:58:51,560
Speaker 1: this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those concentrated inner rings.

1005
00:58:51,600 --> 00:58:55,080
Speaker 1: That the ear ring is more this great vast haze

1006
00:58:55,360 --> 00:59:01,200
Speaker 1: expend extending outward, uh from Saturn. And it's uh oh, oh,

1007
00:59:01,280 --> 00:59:03,680
Speaker 1: it's cool. I love the jets coming out of the

1008
00:59:03,720 --> 00:59:06,640
Speaker 1: south pole of this planet feeding this. And there's an

1009
00:59:06,640 --> 00:59:08,960
Speaker 1: even cooler implication I want to mention in a bit.

1010
00:59:09,560 --> 00:59:13,360
Speaker 1: But there's another striking feature of Enceladus that you would

1011
00:59:13,360 --> 00:59:16,440
Speaker 1: notice long before your spacecraft sets down if you're landing

1012
00:59:16,480 --> 00:59:20,560
Speaker 1: on the planet. Enceladus is the most reflective large object

1013
00:59:20,720 --> 00:59:24,240
Speaker 1: in the entire Solar System. It's like a bright mirror

1014
00:59:24,320 --> 00:59:29,000
Speaker 1: reflecting the sun straight into your eyes. And Enceladus may

1015
00:59:29,040 --> 00:59:33,080
Speaker 1: be alive, not the planet itself, as we discussed with

1016
00:59:33,200 --> 00:59:37,360
Speaker 1: the Appetus, but but something within the planet. So Enceladus

1017
00:59:37,480 --> 00:59:41,439
Speaker 1: is believed to have a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high,

1018
00:59:41,760 --> 00:59:46,080
Speaker 1: highly reflective ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates

1019
00:59:46,120 --> 00:59:49,680
Speaker 1: the presence of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we

1020
00:59:49,720 --> 00:59:53,400
Speaker 1: observed around Jupiter. Now I've seen claims of both global

1021
00:59:53,480 --> 00:59:58,200
Speaker 1: subterranean oceans and regional regional subterranean seas positioned under the

1022
00:59:58,200 --> 01:00:02,040
Speaker 1: South Pole um. But the way the ocean has started

1023
01:00:02,080 --> 01:00:07,640
Speaker 1: to become intensely interesting to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now, why

1024
01:00:07,800 --> 01:00:11,080
Speaker 1: is that, Well, we've seen examples before where these where

1025
01:00:11,120 --> 01:00:14,800
Speaker 1: these subworld oceans. I mean, we have liquid water, and

1026
01:00:14,960 --> 01:00:16,920
Speaker 1: clearly we have we have jets of it, we have

1027
01:00:17,120 --> 01:00:20,680
Speaker 1: we have activity going on here. There's energy taking place,

1028
01:00:20,800 --> 01:00:23,880
Speaker 1: there's warmth, and there's liquid and there and there are

1029
01:00:23,920 --> 01:00:26,920
Speaker 1: important compounds. As you mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes

1030
01:00:26,920 --> 01:00:30,840
Speaker 1: coming out of the southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again,

1031
01:00:30,880 --> 01:00:37,280
Speaker 1: the Cassini spacecraft detected organic compounds, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica,

1032
01:00:37,680 --> 01:00:42,000
Speaker 1: volatile gases. Uh, that's good stuff if you look in Live,

1033
01:00:42,160 --> 01:00:44,360
Speaker 1: going right down the list, checking off many of the

1034
01:00:45,080 --> 01:00:49,960
Speaker 1: key factors necessary for life as we know it. But

1035
01:00:50,680 --> 01:00:53,720
Speaker 1: do we know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing.

1036
01:00:53,800 --> 01:00:57,520
Speaker 1: The Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander.

1037
01:00:57,560 --> 01:01:01,200
Speaker 1: It's not equipped to detect to the presence of life,

1038
01:01:01,200 --> 01:01:04,360
Speaker 1: but it can, it can look for clues. Uh. So

1039
01:01:04,520 --> 01:01:07,720
Speaker 1: the material and these plumes go all over the place,

1040
01:01:08,360 --> 01:01:11,880
Speaker 1: sometimes it falls back down to Enceladus. Forms this filmy

1041
01:01:11,960 --> 01:01:15,160
Speaker 1: mist in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's

1042
01:01:15,200 --> 01:01:17,760
Speaker 1: e ring. And I'd just like to point out that

1043
01:01:17,840 --> 01:01:20,560
Speaker 1: if I understand this correctly, if it turns out there

1044
01:01:20,680 --> 01:01:25,280
Speaker 1: is life in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably

1045
01:01:25,280 --> 01:01:29,040
Speaker 1: being sprayed out in these jets. And if the jets

1046
01:01:29,080 --> 01:01:33,280
Speaker 1: become Saturn's ring, one of the rings of Saturn is

1047
01:01:33,320 --> 01:01:37,960
Speaker 1: a graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of

1048
01:01:38,000 --> 01:01:41,280
Speaker 1: miles into space. That is crazy to think of it

1049
01:01:41,280 --> 01:01:45,920
Speaker 1: that way. It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy.

1050
01:01:45,960 --> 01:01:49,640
Speaker 1: Either way, I think that's great. So much like Titan

1051
01:01:50,120 --> 01:01:54,280
Speaker 1: to do the real exploration and discovery work about the

1052
01:01:54,320 --> 01:01:58,280
Speaker 1: potential for life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got

1053
01:01:58,280 --> 01:02:01,640
Speaker 1: to get back there. And I actually just recently read

1054
01:02:01,760 --> 01:02:05,160
Speaker 1: a piece in Scientific American that was talking about one

1055
01:02:05,200 --> 01:02:07,439
Speaker 1: of the people who's working on trying to plan such

1056
01:02:07,440 --> 01:02:11,520
Speaker 1: a mission, the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of

1057
01:02:11,600 --> 01:02:14,880
Speaker 1: mission obviously is not easy to devise or or too

1058
01:02:14,920 --> 01:02:18,480
Speaker 1: fund but best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe,

1059
01:02:18,520 --> 01:02:21,120
Speaker 1: as we as we leave this moon and make our

1060
01:02:21,120 --> 01:02:25,240
Speaker 1: way towards our our next and final destination here our

1061
01:02:25,320 --> 01:02:28,080
Speaker 1: final object of study, I do want to stress what

1062
01:02:28,200 --> 01:02:31,040
Speaker 1: you're about to look at is not a death star.

1063
01:02:31,200 --> 01:02:34,520
Speaker 1: It's a moon. It's not space station. It's a moon. Um,

1064
01:02:34,560 --> 01:02:37,040
Speaker 1: I'm talking of course about Minus. Then why are we

1065
01:02:37,080 --> 01:02:41,440
Speaker 1: called an astractor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions

1066
01:02:41,440 --> 01:02:45,720
Speaker 1: then for for Minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus

1067
01:02:45,800 --> 01:02:49,200
Speaker 1: is big claim to fame is it's just a frozen

1068
01:02:49,240 --> 01:02:51,880
Speaker 1: moon that looks a lot like the Death Star from

1069
01:02:51,920 --> 01:02:54,600
Speaker 1: Star Wars. It's got this big crater that looks a

1070
01:02:54,640 --> 01:02:57,080
Speaker 1: lot like the weapon that what would you call it?

1071
01:02:57,120 --> 01:02:59,440
Speaker 1: The crater in the Death Star from which the planet

1072
01:02:59,480 --> 01:03:03,760
Speaker 1: destroying em comes out? Yeah? Yeah. An enormous crater uh,

1073
01:03:03,960 --> 01:03:06,480
Speaker 1: known as the Herschel Crater. It is a hundred thirty

1074
01:03:06,520 --> 01:03:10,760
Speaker 1: kilometers or eighty miles while it dominates the landscape, giving

1075
01:03:10,760 --> 01:03:14,200
Speaker 1: the world's appearance, the world an appearance of a great eye. Uh.

1076
01:03:14,280 --> 01:03:18,280
Speaker 1: The crater covered moon is less than one miles and

1077
01:03:18,320 --> 01:03:21,959
Speaker 1: on komes in mean radius, it has roughly the land

1078
01:03:22,000 --> 01:03:25,760
Speaker 1: area of Spain. Not very big, not very big, And again,

1079
01:03:26,760 --> 01:03:29,840
Speaker 1: most of this visible side is crater. It's not perfectly

1080
01:03:29,960 --> 01:03:32,880
Speaker 1: round either, more of an an ovoid. The shape and

1081
01:03:32,920 --> 01:03:36,080
Speaker 1: it's a low density suggests that it's consists almost entirely

1082
01:03:36,160 --> 01:03:39,600
Speaker 1: of water ice, which is the the only substance we've

1083
01:03:39,600 --> 01:03:44,080
Speaker 1: ever detected on Mimus. It's tidily locked. And this is crazy.

1084
01:03:44,120 --> 01:03:47,360
Speaker 1: It's it's believed that the impact that created the Herschel

1085
01:03:47,400 --> 01:03:52,360
Speaker 1: Crater probably came close to just shattering it entirely. That's

1086
01:03:52,360 --> 01:03:54,200
Speaker 1: how because you know, a crater that big on a

1087
01:03:54,280 --> 01:03:56,760
Speaker 1: world this small, uh, you know, it was just a

1088
01:03:56,760 --> 01:03:59,720
Speaker 1: hair away from just breaking it into pieces. So should

1089
01:03:59,760 --> 01:04:05,920
Speaker 1: that have happened, would it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah,

1090
01:04:06,800 --> 01:04:09,400
Speaker 1: And I don't know exactly how the ring formation works,

1091
01:04:09,480 --> 01:04:13,400
Speaker 1: so we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else,

1092
01:04:13,400 --> 01:04:16,040
Speaker 1: it might end up resembling, you know, one of like

1093
01:04:16,080 --> 01:04:19,040
Speaker 1: the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we

1094
01:04:19,120 --> 01:04:22,040
Speaker 1: might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be

1095
01:04:22,040 --> 01:04:23,840
Speaker 1: a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh,

1096
01:04:23,960 --> 01:04:27,360
Speaker 1: those other lump moons that we are not discussing in

1097
01:04:27,360 --> 01:04:30,120
Speaker 1: this episode, you know, among the among the fifty three

1098
01:04:30,560 --> 01:04:33,480
Speaker 1: named moons of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things

1099
01:04:33,520 --> 01:04:38,440
Speaker 1: about Mimus, though, is that it should experience more tidal

1100
01:04:38,520 --> 01:04:42,560
Speaker 1: heating than Enceladusts. And yet while that frozen world as

1101
01:04:42,560 --> 01:04:46,320
Speaker 1: we discussed both geysers and uh and and clearly experiences

1102
01:04:46,360 --> 01:04:50,120
Speaker 1: internal heat, Mimus is just an unchanging waste land of ice.

1103
01:04:50,240 --> 01:04:52,480
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we should have mentioned about Enceladusts. I think

1104
01:04:52,520 --> 01:04:55,160
Speaker 1: I forgot to mention that the the what is the

1105
01:04:55,280 --> 01:04:57,720
Speaker 1: energy source? You know, why is there? Well, it's some

1106
01:04:57,800 --> 01:04:59,760
Speaker 1: of the same explanations that we saw in some of

1107
01:04:59,760 --> 01:05:03,760
Speaker 1: the moon of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by

1108
01:05:03,840 --> 01:05:07,360
Speaker 1: the orbit and gravitational influence around it. So it's got

1109
01:05:07,360 --> 01:05:12,120
Speaker 1: a not perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields

1110
01:05:12,160 --> 01:05:15,520
Speaker 1: and this causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads

1111
01:05:15,560 --> 01:05:18,360
Speaker 1: to heat. Yeah, a lot of kinds of comparisons are

1112
01:05:18,360 --> 01:05:21,160
Speaker 1: often made between what we know about Enceladus and what

1113
01:05:21,200 --> 01:05:24,600
Speaker 1: we know about Mimus, to the degree that some have

1114
01:05:24,720 --> 01:05:27,960
Speaker 1: speculated on the possibility of a liquid ocean in Mimus.

1115
01:05:28,760 --> 01:05:32,480
Speaker 1: But it's such a small moon again, the size of Spain.

1116
01:05:33,040 --> 01:05:37,120
Speaker 1: It's it's hardly the best candidate. But yeah, you could

1117
01:05:37,120 --> 01:05:40,800
Speaker 1: say there's there's still an outside chance, and that's the case. Okay,

1118
01:05:40,800 --> 01:05:43,280
Speaker 1: we seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I

1119
01:05:43,280 --> 01:05:47,320
Speaker 1: guess we were not trapped in attractor beam. However, we

1120
01:05:47,400 --> 01:05:51,720
Speaker 1: do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface

1121
01:05:51,760 --> 01:05:54,840
Speaker 1: of Saturn. Now, Joe, oh, No, Saturn, which once seemed

1122
01:05:54,960 --> 01:05:59,560
Speaker 1: quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons, and

1123
01:05:59,600 --> 01:06:03,280
Speaker 1: it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black

1124
01:06:03,320 --> 01:06:07,840
Speaker 1: white harmony plant lunar body here. But yeah, I know

1125
01:06:07,960 --> 01:06:10,360
Speaker 1: it's able to escape. If you notice that as we

1126
01:06:10,400 --> 01:06:13,120
Speaker 1: get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that?

1127
01:06:13,160 --> 01:06:15,720
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, uh in Raiders of the Lost Dark,

1128
01:06:15,800 --> 01:06:17,920
Speaker 1: that scene where they zoom in on the box with

1129
01:06:17,960 --> 01:06:21,360
Speaker 1: the arc in it, and it's making that satanic miallmami allenoise.

1130
01:06:21,880 --> 01:06:25,360
Speaker 1: I can't quite hear that over the two thousand and

1131
01:06:25,400 --> 01:06:29,880
Speaker 1: one space honestly, monolith coral arrangement. But but that's because

1132
01:06:29,920 --> 01:06:32,280
Speaker 1: I have headphones in and listening to that. I always

1133
01:06:32,320 --> 01:06:35,400
Speaker 1: listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer

1134
01:06:35,440 --> 01:06:39,000
Speaker 1: to a large, scary planetary object. Folks, I should let

1135
01:06:39,040 --> 01:06:40,880
Speaker 1: you know that while we were working on this episode,

1136
01:06:40,960 --> 01:06:45,440
Speaker 1: Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of

1137
01:06:45,480 --> 01:06:49,400
Speaker 1: like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've

1138
01:06:49,400 --> 01:06:51,040
Speaker 1: got to share this on the lane. Oh yeah, I will.

1139
01:06:51,080 --> 01:06:52,240
Speaker 1: I will make sure that there's a link to this

1140
01:06:52,280 --> 01:06:53,800
Speaker 1: in the landing page. I believe it came from the

1141
01:06:53,800 --> 01:06:57,400
Speaker 1: the record label A Caci A uh. Definitely worth checking out.

1142
01:06:57,440 --> 01:07:00,360
Speaker 1: They put out a number of cool, cool acts and

1143
01:07:00,360 --> 01:07:03,280
Speaker 1: cool releases over the years, including some stuff from the

1144
01:07:03,320 --> 01:07:05,680
Speaker 1: Weirding Module, which is one of my one of my

1145
01:07:05,760 --> 01:07:10,000
Speaker 1: favorite musical acts out there. This thing definitely made me

1146
01:07:10,040 --> 01:07:12,680
Speaker 1: wish that there was a good John Carpenter movie taking

1147
01:07:12,680 --> 01:07:15,720
Speaker 1: place on a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need

1148
01:07:16,400 --> 01:07:19,160
Speaker 1: perhaps we need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what

1149
01:07:19,200 --> 01:07:22,200
Speaker 1: you're saying. More like Ghosts of Mars is what I'm saying,

1150
01:07:22,200 --> 01:07:26,000
Speaker 1: ghosts of Mimus, ghosts of Titans, one for each world.

1151
01:07:26,520 --> 01:07:31,920
Speaker 1: Get to get ice Cube on the phone and Jason Statham.

1152
01:07:32,040 --> 01:07:35,880
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it, the moons of Saturn. Now.

1153
01:07:36,000 --> 01:07:38,000
Speaker 1: So now you have both both the moons of Saturn

1154
01:07:38,040 --> 01:07:40,919
Speaker 1: and the moons of Jupiter covered on stuff to blow

1155
01:07:40,960 --> 01:07:43,840
Speaker 1: your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were

1156
01:07:43,840 --> 01:07:46,800
Speaker 1: going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons.

1157
01:07:46,800 --> 01:07:48,960
Speaker 1: So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're

1158
01:07:48,960 --> 01:07:52,200
Speaker 1: constantly learning more. Yeah yeah, So so feel free to

1159
01:07:52,680 --> 01:07:54,760
Speaker 1: look into this and research it yourself. You know, you

1160
01:07:54,800 --> 01:07:57,360
Speaker 1: should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that

1161
01:07:57,440 --> 01:08:00,480
Speaker 1: you can't learn about saturny on your own, but away. Yeah,

1162
01:08:00,520 --> 01:08:02,200
Speaker 1: we we do encourage you to do that because it

1163
01:08:02,280 --> 01:08:05,040
Speaker 1: is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are

1164
01:08:05,080 --> 01:08:07,880
Speaker 1: great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could

1165
01:08:07,920 --> 01:08:09,960
Speaker 1: have gotten into even more about the rings somememb We

1166
01:08:09,960 --> 01:08:12,120
Speaker 1: could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,

1167
01:08:12,160 --> 01:08:15,120
Speaker 1: the ring, moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed just

1168
01:08:15,240 --> 01:08:18,439
Speaker 1: rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on

1169
01:08:18,520 --> 01:08:22,240
Speaker 1: other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if

1170
01:08:22,240 --> 01:08:23,920
Speaker 1: you will have feedback you want to share with us

1171
01:08:23,920 --> 01:08:26,479
Speaker 1: about this, you can go to all the normal places

1172
01:08:26,479 --> 01:08:28,639
Speaker 1: to do it. Head on over to our various social

1173
01:08:28,640 --> 01:08:32,000
Speaker 1: media accounts. Were on Facebook, we're blow the mind there though,

1174
01:08:32,000 --> 01:08:34,280
Speaker 1: if you follow us on Facebook, make sure you're fault.

1175
01:08:34,360 --> 01:08:36,680
Speaker 1: Not only are you following us, but they make it

1176
01:08:36,920 --> 01:08:39,439
Speaker 1: make sure you check off the right boxes so that

1177
01:08:39,479 --> 01:08:41,599
Speaker 1: we are showing up, you know, right at the top

1178
01:08:41,640 --> 01:08:44,040
Speaker 1: of your your timeline, that you can stay on top

1179
01:08:44,080 --> 01:08:46,160
Speaker 1: of all the stuff that we're putting out, all the

1180
01:08:46,160 --> 01:08:49,120
Speaker 1: stuff we think is cool and worth looking at without

1181
01:08:49,200 --> 01:08:53,960
Speaker 1: having to depend on Facebook's tyrannical algorithm. Um, we're also

1182
01:08:54,000 --> 01:08:56,960
Speaker 1: on Twitter, We're on Instagram, we're on Tumbler, and of

1183
01:08:57,000 --> 01:08:59,160
Speaker 1: course stuff to blow your mind. Dot com is the

1184
01:08:59,200 --> 01:09:02,200
Speaker 1: Mothership should be getting a facelift in the very near future,

1185
01:09:02,560 --> 01:09:04,599
Speaker 1: and we have all sorts of great content. They're including

1186
01:09:04,600 --> 01:09:06,960
Speaker 1: all of the podcasts that we've ever done. And if

1187
01:09:07,040 --> 01:09:08,840
Speaker 1: you'd like to get in touch with this directly. To

1188
01:09:08,920 --> 01:09:11,360
Speaker 1: let us know feedback about this episode or any others,

1189
01:09:11,479 --> 01:09:13,280
Speaker 1: or to let us know topics you'd like us to

1190
01:09:13,320 --> 01:09:15,559
Speaker 1: cover in the future, you can email us at blow

1191
01:09:15,600 --> 01:09:27,320
Speaker 1: the Mind at how stuff works dot com. Well more

1192
01:09:27,360 --> 01:09:29,640
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is that how

1193
01:09:29,720 --> 01:09:53,479
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com.