Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the Vault. That's right. And since
Speaker 1: the last Vault episode was about the moons of Jupiter,
Speaker 1: we figured what we should also revisit our episode about
Speaker 1: the moons of Saturn. Right. So this originally aired on
Speaker 1: August four, two thousand sixteen, and it's an episode called
Speaker 1: Saturn's Brood Beyond the Outer Ring, which, man, that would
Speaker 1: have been a good B movie title. I don't know
Speaker 1: if we say the same thing in the episode. I
Speaker 1: think we do get into a little bit into films
Speaker 1: that take place on or around Saturn. I think we
Speaker 1: talk a little bit about Outland. Do we talk about Ali?
Speaker 1: I think we did, yeah, and uh. And then also
Speaker 1: I think Silent Running comes up as well, the classic
Speaker 1: Brewster and film where he sort of hides out in
Speaker 1: your Saturn man, what is wrong with our brains? The
Speaker 1: main thing we remember about every episode we do is
Speaker 1: what Sean Connery sci fi movie we talked about. These
Speaker 1: are the Sean Connery based guide posts that are just
Speaker 1: kind of tacked into the ground so we can revisit
Speaker 1: these episodes in the future coming soon on Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind The Science of Czardas. Okay, well, we
Speaker 1: shouldn't take any more time at the beginning here have
Speaker 1: fun with Saturn's brood. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. There's peace in
Speaker 1: those rings. As we spiraled into Jupiter, our orbit decaying
Speaker 1: rapidly inside the path of the sulfurous io we assumed
Speaker 1: that we and our forest ste bio arc were headed
Speaker 1: for the same fate as the old Galileo probe, through
Speaker 1: the fierce radiation ELTs, through the crushing gravity, into the
Speaker 1: Jovian atmosphere, and all the way down. But then something happened.
Speaker 1: It was as if a hand of a silent god
Speaker 1: reached out from the darkness of space and just plucked
Speaker 1: us gently from the depths of the gas giant's gravity
Speaker 1: well and lifted us up up to freedom. We still
Speaker 1: don't know what happened. Our navigational computers have no explanation,
Speaker 1: but our orbits ceased its decay, and with the slow
Speaker 1: gradual acceleration, driven from some source totally foreign to the
Speaker 1: ship itself, we were on our way, but not on
Speaker 1: our way home, something out there, some unknown forces urging
Speaker 1: us in the other direction. Despite the long journey, our
Speaker 1: ever dwindling share of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath
Speaker 1: we just endured, the plants that once struggled for life
Speaker 1: in our forest dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if
Speaker 1: more of the Solar system great moons want to be seen,
Speaker 1: want to be understood, and some hidden intelligence is helping them.
Speaker 1: And now the cold golden wheel of Saturn looms in
Speaker 1: the foreground, with its major moons appearing as tiny points
Speaker 1: of light in the darkness, growing ever closer as our
Speaker 1: spiral begins again. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and my name is Joe McCormick,
Speaker 1: and backed by popular demand, we are now going to
Speaker 1: explore the moons of Saturn. So this will be, I guess,
Speaker 1: a sequel of sorts to the episode we did a
Speaker 1: while back about the moons of Jupiter or the major
Speaker 1: moons of Jupiter. In both cases, these are large gas giants.
Speaker 1: They have lots of moons, so we have to uh,
Speaker 1: I would say, pick our battles, but they're not battles.
Speaker 1: Their missions of peace and exploration, that's right. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the case of Saturn here, there are currently fifty three
Speaker 1: known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, So that's a lot
Speaker 1: of moons. But we are gonna, indeed going to stick
Speaker 1: to just the the key items of interest here, the
Speaker 1: ones indeed that you've likely heard of in science fiction,
Speaker 1: that you've certainly heard of h in science journalism. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna, we're gonna. We've picked up some good destinations
Speaker 1: here for our trip. So Robert, Saturn is a kind
Speaker 1: of different beast than Jupiter, isn't it. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's easy to lump them together. They're the two biggest
Speaker 1: objects in our Solar system, the biggest objects to enormous
Speaker 1: gas giants, easily the two jazziest planets as well. Like
Speaker 1: my my son who's four, I haven't really been pushing
Speaker 1: the space agenda as much as I have like the
Speaker 1: Earth sciences agenda, But even he instantly knows Saturn and
Speaker 1: he knows Jupiter. Well. Saturn, I would say, is the
Speaker 1: iconic image of a planet. Now, if you go to
Speaker 1: if you're looking for clip art or vector images or
Speaker 1: something like that of images of planets, you're gonna see Saturn.
Speaker 1: Because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings. It's
Speaker 1: the planet that's not just different in terms of coloring
Speaker 1: and uh and what you might see about its atmosphere
Speaker 1: or lack thereof, or cratering and stuff like that, its
Speaker 1: whole profile is different. It's like a different animal altogether. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's kind of the pin up model of
Speaker 1: the Solar System. It is the one that you see
Speaker 1: the most just really gleaning, elegant, just crisp images. And
Speaker 1: if you have just a row of globes, a row
Speaker 1: of circles, the presence of Saturn, perhaps more so than
Speaker 1: any of the others, is going to queue you in.
Speaker 1: Oh I'm looking at a model of the Solar System.
Speaker 1: Oh right, Yeah. It's the difference between a bunch of
Speaker 1: balls and planets. But it's also different than Jupiter in
Speaker 1: that Jupiter was this very intense experience. Now Saturn also
Speaker 1: is very large, it has a deep gravity. Well you know,
Speaker 1: it's got those same things going forward. But Saturn, i
Speaker 1: would say, is a more peaceful and colder thing to experience,
Speaker 1: unlike the intense radiation bath of Jupiter. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: little more serene. Those we'll discuss here. It itself is
Speaker 1: a very hostile world, and its moons are pretty hostile
Speaker 1: as well, at least two beings like at least too,
Speaker 1: you know, weak fragile beings like us, so we can
Speaker 1: scarcely survive outside of a slim portion of our own
Speaker 1: planets environment. Reading reading up for this episode, I was
Speaker 1: astonished to discover how excited scientists are about the possibility
Speaker 1: for life and a couple of Saturn's moons. Because when
Speaker 1: you think about life in our Solar system beyond Earth,
Speaker 1: everybody always mentions Europa that that's the one that comes
Speaker 1: to mind, and for a good reason. There's a lot
Speaker 1: of reason to want to study Europa from an astrobiological perspective.
Speaker 1: But Saturn has some really good moons going for it,
Speaker 1: and we're going to explore what's going on on those
Speaker 1: moons today. All right. Before we get into that, though,
Speaker 1: let's let's just roll through some of the basics about Saturn,
Speaker 1: just to give everyone a grounding in the planet that
Speaker 1: plays host to all of these wonderful spheres and ovals
Speaker 1: in occasion, just lumps of rock, uh, and the potatoes,
Speaker 1: the spongey potato. So again, it's the second largest planet
Speaker 1: in our Solar system. It's a gas giant without solid
Speaker 1: substance save it's dense, hot, pressurized core of rock, ice, water,
Speaker 1: and other compounds, and all of this is enveloped by
Speaker 1: liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen.
Speaker 1: So it's located nine point five astronomical units away from
Speaker 1: the Sun six planet in our Solar system, as the
Speaker 1: posters tell us, and has seven icy rings that encircle it,
Speaker 1: spanning up to one seventy five thousand miles or two
Speaker 1: two thousand kilometers. So what are the rings consist of? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've always wondered this. Yeah, the contrary to what bugs
Speaker 1: Bunny may have taught you, if I remember correctly, they
Speaker 1: are not the solid rings that you can run around on.
Speaker 1: They're not like a treadmill or anything. But scientists haven't
Speaker 1: always known that that's true. They have not always been
Speaker 1: aware of that. We know now that it's it's mostly
Speaker 1: water ice. The planet's ring system extend hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of kilometers out from the planet, but the vertical height
Speaker 1: is typically about ten meters or thirty feet in the
Speaker 1: main rings. Are you serious? But but but but there's
Speaker 1: there's there's a key butt coming up. They can grow
Speaker 1: far larger. During Saturn's autumn two thousand nine equinox, the
Speaker 1: Cassini spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations and some
Speaker 1: of the rings had piled the particles up, but in
Speaker 1: ridges more than three kilometers or two miles tall. And
Speaker 1: there's some fascinating structures and behaviors that you can see
Speaker 1: within the rings to including these like a propeller shaped
Speaker 1: objects that can form. It's crazy now light Jupiter. Saturn
Speaker 1: is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and in the
Speaker 1: upper atmosphere, wind speeds can reach five hundred meters or
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred feet per second in the equatorial region. These
Speaker 1: winds fast. It's pretty fast, so it looks more peaceful
Speaker 1: than it is. Just because it doesn't have a big
Speaker 1: red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger to it. Uh.
Speaker 1: These winds, combined with heat rising from the planet's interior,
Speaker 1: cause the yellow gold bands that we see visible in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. But they're not as visible as the bands
Speaker 1: we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah, it's not. It's not
Speaker 1: as angry. It's not. It doesn't look like somebody just
Speaker 1: poured a bunch of like red liquid into you know,
Speaker 1: a swirling mixer bowl of pancake batter and blood. That
Speaker 1: is a great way to describe it. That's how I
Speaker 1: think of Jupiter. Yeah, this one is more just like
Speaker 1: pancake batter with some with some honeyead. You know. There's
Speaker 1: a wonderful coincidence with the other episode that we recorded
Speaker 1: this week, Robert, which was the episode on the Library
Speaker 1: of Babel. And now I'm not sure what the publishing
Speaker 1: schedule is going to be, but in the episode on
Speaker 1: the in the Library of Babble, we discussed how people
Speaker 1: in the Library of Babel seek out the Crimson hexagon.
Speaker 1: That's right, and indeed there is a hexagon on Saturn.
Speaker 1: It's it does not contain any books. It is not
Speaker 1: a room per se. Well, you don't know that, I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure, but yes, if you look at you I'm
Speaker 1: sure I'm number of people have seen seen images of
Speaker 1: this here. But if you if you look at various
Speaker 1: images of Saturn, there appears to be a hexagon at
Speaker 1: the top, almost as if it has a little hexagonal hat,
Speaker 1: a little skull cap on um. And it's weird to
Speaker 1: look at because you're seeing this in nature. This is
Speaker 1: not obviously an object designed by anybody on purpose. But
Speaker 1: it's not circular. It's got these clear corners. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not the kind of shape that you would necessarily expect.
Speaker 1: But there is, of course a very natural reason for this.
Speaker 1: This is caused by jet streams uh in the in
Speaker 1: the wind systems of Saturn. Basically you have a region
Speaker 1: here that's bound on each side by different editing edditing storms.
Speaker 1: So it's uh, it's the kind of thing if you've
Speaker 1: ever met somebody who's playing with a lot of bubbles,
Speaker 1: you know, like doing a lot of bubble art and
Speaker 1: not sure what you mean bubble bubble, like blowing bubbles
Speaker 1: and then sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke into those bubbles. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm not very familiar with this art form. Oh you're not.
Speaker 1: Oh it was big medicine on like Sesame Street and
Speaker 1: and um Mr Rogers neighborhood and back in the day,
Speaker 1: I really completely lost touch with my inner child. Well,
Speaker 1: blowing big bubbles is a lot of fun, but blowing
Speaker 1: small bubbles too, because you can join them together and
Speaker 1: if you really know what you're doing, you can form
Speaker 1: geometric shapes at the center where these bubbles bubbles border
Speaker 1: other bubbles and kind of force different shapes towards the center.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, okay, I think I know what you're talking about.
Speaker 1: So I I tried to think of that when I
Speaker 1: think of this particular scenario, to try and remind myself
Speaker 1: that yes, uh, non spherical shapes are possible within nature
Speaker 1: given the right circumstances. Now, another quick fact about Saturn.
Speaker 1: Here a day last ten hours and a year. The
Speaker 1: time it takes for the body to orbit its central
Speaker 1: star last twenty nine earth years, and the planet's magnetic
Speaker 1: field is smaller than Jupiter's, but still five seventy eight
Speaker 1: times as powerful as Earth's, shielding Saturn and many of
Speaker 1: its moons from the solar wind. Okay, well that's going
Speaker 1: to be important if we're talking about, I don't know,
Speaker 1: putting a colony there or something very important. So on
Speaker 1: that note, let's start talking about the discovery of Saturn,
Speaker 1: the discovery of Saturn's moons. Saturn, of course, is a
Speaker 1: very We've known about Saturn for a very long time. Right,
Speaker 1: nobody knows who discovered Saturn, because the ancients knew about Saturn.
Speaker 1: We've known about Saturn as long as we've had history.
Speaker 1: You know, naked eye astronomers could peer up into the
Speaker 1: night sky and see Saturn. So uh so, what we're
Speaker 1: really going to be talking about is the first telescopic
Speaker 1: studies of Saturn. And you might recall from the last
Speaker 1: episode that the person usually credited with discovering the largest
Speaker 1: moons of Jupiter, the four Galilean Moons, was the Italian
Speaker 1: astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos also given credit for discovering
Speaker 1: the rings of Saturn, though he didn't really understand what
Speaker 1: he was looking at. Now, Like we said, everybody already
Speaker 1: knew about Saturn, but they knew it as a point
Speaker 1: of light in the sky. And when gali Leo looked
Speaker 1: at Saturn, he saw something very odd, a triple star.
Speaker 1: It looks like one enormous star with two tiny stars
Speaker 1: attached to it on either side, like little side cars
Speaker 1: riding along with it. Now. Fun fact, Galileo wanted to
Speaker 1: get credit for being the first person to discover this
Speaker 1: triple star, but he wasn't ready to publish his findings yet,
Speaker 1: so he used a method that I thought was pretty clever.
Speaker 1: He instead disseminated an anagram and by the way, when
Speaker 1: this came up, I had to look up anagrams of
Speaker 1: our names for fun. I have no good ones, not really.
Speaker 1: My name is. I've got comic jock rim and that's
Speaker 1: about it. But Robert, you've got some awesome anagrams in
Speaker 1: case you've never looked him up before. You've got Mr
Speaker 1: babele Rot. That's pretty good. You've also got barrel tomb,
Speaker 1: barrel to m okay. But anyway, uh So, anagram jumbled
Speaker 1: around letters, you know, jumbled up, and then you can
Speaker 1: you can un jumble them to spell the original message
Speaker 1: and show if it's a sufficiently short number of letters,
Speaker 1: you know, you can show that you had this idea
Speaker 1: all along, and that that was Galileo's idea. So the
Speaker 1: antagram that Galileo spread around could be un jumbled to
Speaker 1: read something along the lines of I've discovered the triform planet,
Speaker 1: and if anybody tried to scoop him, he could just
Speaker 1: unscramble it and show that he had seen it first.
Speaker 1: But we now know that Saturn is not a triform planet.
Speaker 1: So who figured that out? Well? In sixteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: around six fifty six, the Dutch astronomer mathematician and all
Speaker 1: around science guy Christian Hygans made a study of Saturn
Speaker 1: through a more powerful telescope, and he made his own discoveries.
Speaker 1: So by observing how the side stars of Saturn could
Speaker 1: disappear and then reappear. And this is something other observers
Speaker 1: hadn't noticed too, Hygans realized that he was actually looking
Speaker 1: at a planet surrounded by a flat disc of rings.
Speaker 1: It could disappear because of what you mentioned about how
Speaker 1: flat it is, right, so it could be very bright
Speaker 1: when we're looking at it at an angle where the
Speaker 1: rings are reflecting up toward us. But when the rings
Speaker 1: suddenly turned to where they're pretty much perpendicular with our view,
Speaker 1: they completely disappear. There's not enough surface to reflect anything.
Speaker 1: It's like a It's like a lady in a hat
Speaker 1: with a wide brim. Depending on how she is holding
Speaker 1: her head, the positioning of her neck, you may or
Speaker 1: may not see the brim of the hat, and you'll
Speaker 1: see at a very degree. Yeah, so she tilts her
Speaker 1: head towards you, you see the brim. She tilts her
Speaker 1: head flat relative to your perspective, you don't really see much.
Speaker 1: And so Hyggan's observed that but Hygan's didn't know what
Speaker 1: the rings were made of. I think he actually thought
Speaker 1: they might be some kind of solid structure, maybe more
Speaker 1: like the bugs money example, And just try to imagine
Speaker 1: that in reality. Again, I love thinking about like when
Speaker 1: you had less information and and just we're trying to
Speaker 1: conceive of what the universe was like solid rings around
Speaker 1: the planet. Yeah, I mean they based on the information
Speaker 1: avaiable at the time. Yeah, why not fascinating. But of
Speaker 1: course subsequently we learned more about the rings of Saturn. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, Hygan's discovered something else while studying Saturn, a moon.
Speaker 1: Nobody had seen any of the moons of Saturn up
Speaker 1: until this time, and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn,
Speaker 1: which is Titan, which is going to be a fascinating
Speaker 1: thing to explore in a little bit here. But then
Speaker 1: subsequently other moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like
Speaker 1: Giovanni Cassini and William Herschel, And we're still learning more
Speaker 1: about Saturn's smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there
Speaker 1: is to know about Saturn's moons, and especially it's smallest moons. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: like I mentioned earlier, fifty three known moons, nine currently
Speaker 1: awaiting confirmations, so we're still figuring it all out. Now.
Speaker 1: We have actually sent exploration missions to Saturn, so there
Speaker 1: were several fly bys Pioneer eleven, Voyager one and two
Speaker 1: that they did fly bys of Saturn, did a little
Speaker 1: bit of observation. But the big one, the real hero
Speaker 1: for for planetary science and discovery and the Saturn sphere
Speaker 1: is Cassini. The Cassini Hoygien's mission. So the Cassini orbiter
Speaker 1: entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand four during Saturn's northern winter,
Speaker 1: and it's been conducting research on Saturn and its moons
Speaker 1: ever since, and it has sent back some awesome photos.
Speaker 1: One of the coolest thing about the Cassini photos I've
Speaker 1: always thought is how real photos that are taken by Cassini. Now,
Speaker 1: of course they're usually like color enhanced or enhanced in
Speaker 1: some way, but real photos taken by this probe look
Speaker 1: like illustrations. They often they just don't look like a
Speaker 1: picture that somebody took with a real camera, but they
Speaker 1: are with of course some enhancements. I don't know. I
Speaker 1: love that. I love it when reality can't pass for real. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the thing that you're photographing is so utterly unreal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we
Speaker 1: have evolved a view here on this world. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: of course another part of the Cassini mission was the
Speaker 1: Huygens probe, which went down landed on Titan in two
Speaker 1: thousand five after Cassini reached Saturn in two thousand four,
Speaker 1: and that also sent back some amazing imagery and made
Speaker 1: some fascinating discoveries that we will talk about in a
Speaker 1: bit when it's time to speak of Titan. So now
Speaker 1: it's time to take a quick break. But when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning
Speaker 1: with the outermost moons and working our way in. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back, Robert. It it seems like we're coming up
Speaker 1: on a on a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact,
Speaker 1: we're coming up on the largest of the outer moons.
Speaker 1: Iappodus Appetus. Yes, it didn't that sound lovecraft. I in
Speaker 1: like something they would worship. A chanted name I appatus.
Speaker 1: You just want to invoke it. Yeah, named, by the
Speaker 1: way for a Tartarus bound Titan. So it's nice and
Speaker 1: has a nice gloomy feel to it. Iopodus is not
Speaker 1: unlike the Yen Yang of Chinese philosophy. Just to prepare
Speaker 1: everyone for what you're gonna see here. Uh, it's leading
Speaker 1: hemisphere is dark, while it's trailing hemisphere is significantly brighter.
Speaker 1: It's a tidally locked world, like a number of moons,
Speaker 1: meaning that one side always faces Saturn and the other
Speaker 1: side always faces the void. It essentially looks like the
Speaker 1: yen Yang. It essentially looks like the black and white
Speaker 1: cookie from that episode of Signfeld. It's like that the
Speaker 1: two face of Saturn's moons, and it's it's crazy to behold,
Speaker 1: and it's been crazy for scientists to try and figure
Speaker 1: out exactly why this is. We'll get into shortly and
Speaker 1: mentioning two face. It's it's monstrous in more than one
Speaker 1: way in appearance, that's right. It also has an equatorial ridge,
Speaker 1: which is a chain of six mile or ten kilometer
Speaker 1: high mountains. And this is wonderful. It it might have
Speaker 1: formed that during a high speed rotation period or most
Speaker 1: exciting abot all of it might be a collapsed ring. No,
Speaker 1: you're making that up. No, that's one of the theories.
Speaker 1: Collapsed ring. Yeah, these are essentially like the collapsed ring mountains,
Speaker 1: which sounds like a perfect It sounds like something out
Speaker 1: of a Jack Vance novel, you know. So it could
Speaker 1: have had a ring that was drawn into the planet
Speaker 1: by gravity, collapsed into it and became this planet wide
Speaker 1: ridge of mountains that looks like a horror movie monster
Speaker 1: backbones sticking up out of the planet's flesh. Yeah, it's crazy,
Speaker 1: a killer now. It It orbits at about a little
Speaker 1: over two million miles or three million kilometers away from Saturn,
Speaker 1: and it has probably and this has probably protected it
Speaker 1: from tidal forces and melting episodes that would have resurfaced it.
Speaker 1: So it's far enough away from Saturn that it Saturn's
Speaker 1: gravity is not warping it too much. It's not heating
Speaker 1: it and causing the geological activity exactly. But you do
Speaker 1: have the strange dark and white side. And there have
Speaker 1: been three major theories over the years as to why
Speaker 1: one side is black and the other is white. Hit
Speaker 1: me all right. So one theory is that i Appetus
Speaker 1: maybe sweeping up particles from the more distant dark moon
Speaker 1: phobe and steadily renewing this dusting to cover up all
Speaker 1: but the newest craters. Okay, so that's one possibility. Another
Speaker 1: one is that I saw a volcanism may be distributing
Speaker 1: the dark materials. We're talking of volcano like eruptions of hydrocarbons,
Speaker 1: perhaps to due to chemical reactions that are in turn
Speaker 1: caused by solar radiation. Oh nice, so you've got a
Speaker 1: planet that's half covered in soot sort of. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: the third theory, then, this is the one that's that
Speaker 1: is backed up by a lot of data from two
Speaker 1: thousand seven's uh Cassini fly by, and that is that
Speaker 1: thermal segregation is going on. So what is that? So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the salad works. It takes the Moon as long as
Speaker 1: seventy nine days to rotate around Saturn, and it's some
Speaker 1: dark material areal made its way to the Moon at
Speaker 1: some point in the past. Perhaps dude tying into one
Speaker 1: and to the first theory, um, then the long periods
Speaker 1: of solar exposure on the dark side would have caused
Speaker 1: the dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials
Speaker 1: within the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions.
Speaker 1: The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get dark. Okay,
Speaker 1: so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay, so a
Speaker 1: Yapodus is a fairly small world, right, it's about one
Speaker 1: seven the mass of Pluto, about the width of Earth's moon.
Speaker 1: But what is the life potential? I want to know?
Speaker 1: That's our main question with all these right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's certainly, that's the one thing we want to know
Speaker 1: on each of these. Is it possible that there's some
Speaker 1: sort of life clinging to this little moon? Now we
Speaker 1: know that the planet itself is probably alive and it's
Speaker 1: a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurl with
Speaker 1: its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back
Speaker 1: out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case,
Speaker 1: and it's just a rock in space, what we are
Speaker 1: what's the hope that there's life on it? Very very little,
Speaker 1: very little hope for life here? Despite the insistence by
Speaker 1: various UFO groups that there are domed cities or other
Speaker 1: such constructions here, well, if you look closely enough and
Speaker 1: you want it enough, you can find dumb cities. Not
Speaker 1: just about any world, Ain't that always the case? Uh?
Speaker 1: Could we put a colony there though, if it were
Speaker 1: entirely self contained and we had the you know, in
Speaker 1: the necessary technology, of course, possibly, but you get down
Speaker 1: to the fact that there are worse and better places
Speaker 1: to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't be like
Speaker 1: trying to put a colony on Io or something. No,
Speaker 1: it means like you could do it, but they're better places.
Speaker 1: Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the monolith
Speaker 1: in the original novel two thousand one of Space Odyssey.
Speaker 1: Oh so not wait, hold on the monolith the monolith
Speaker 1: on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit
Speaker 1: around Jupiter. Right in the movie it's in orbit around Jupiter,
Speaker 1: but in the book it was Saturn. But in making
Speaker 1: two thousand and one space honestly, they couldn't get the
Speaker 1: models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they changed
Speaker 1: it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Um.
Speaker 1: It's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional
Speaker 1: attention that has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and I
Speaker 1: feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn is
Speaker 1: the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our future
Speaker 1: Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter, or
Speaker 1: at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiter is where the
Speaker 1: Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases and weird
Speaker 1: weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn. For
Speaker 1: the most part, it seems like there's a lot of
Speaker 1: dreamy or stuff going on there, or maybe that's just me.
Speaker 1: That's my my read on some of the examples I
Speaker 1: was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're exactly right.
Speaker 1: I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the saturn An
Speaker 1: imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's very serene,
Speaker 1: very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver light in
Speaker 1: the background of space. Now we're gonna do a quick
Speaker 1: fly by of the next moon because it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like there's a whole lot to see there, but it
Speaker 1: is worth pointing out as a strange landmark in the
Speaker 1: sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion,
Speaker 1: despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect
Speaker 1: of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would,
Speaker 1: by the way, do not take place on this hyperiond
Speaker 1: I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion
Speaker 1: is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to
Speaker 1: hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things, because
Speaker 1: hyperion in our Solar system, as it orbits around Saturn,
Speaker 1: is essentially a giant potato. Yeah. It's an irregular shaped
Speaker 1: and it's very small, about one point one times the
Speaker 1: mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere, about ten percent percent the width of Earth's moon.
Speaker 1: It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like
Speaker 1: a like a spongy, low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've
Speaker 1: seen it described as a large frozen rubble pile. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons,
Speaker 1: and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that
Speaker 1: was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just
Speaker 1: a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not
Speaker 1: gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of worth the point out as we
Speaker 1: continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think
Speaker 1: we're coming in now. What is that sound? It's signaling
Speaker 1: the Titans. So Titan Titan is about the mass of
Speaker 1: murk Cury, about one point eight times the mass of
Speaker 1: Earth's Moon, about a hundred and fifty of the width
Speaker 1: of the Moon, the Earth's moon. It's spherical, obviously, and
Speaker 1: it Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury. And
Speaker 1: this is the only moon that we're discussing today that
Speaker 1: has been explored by a lander, by a human made lander,
Speaker 1: the Hygan's Tightened Lander, a beast of planetary exploration. There
Speaker 1: are videos available online that show the landing imagery sent
Speaker 1: back by the Hygan's probe. You should watch them, but
Speaker 1: try to imagine a tighten landing. What this world is like.
Speaker 1: Unlike so many of the moon's that we've surveyed before,
Speaker 1: this approach is very unique in the Solar System. On Titan,
Speaker 1: we descend from orbit through a thick, cold atmosphere and
Speaker 1: everything below is shrouded from our view from space by
Speaker 1: this murky haze, and you descend through the freezing fog
Speaker 1: and strong winds shake your ending craft. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the only moon in our Solar System that has clouds
Speaker 1: in a dense atmosphere mostly nitrogen and methane, and the
Speaker 1: atmospheric pressure is is about six greater than Earth, so
Speaker 1: roughly the same as you would find at the bottom
Speaker 1: of a swimming pool. That's right, but that's actually so
Speaker 1: that's heavy sounding to us, like you wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: spend your life at the bottom of a swimming pool.
Speaker 1: But it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared to almost everywhere else
Speaker 1: in the Solar systems Venus. Yeah, so in Venus you
Speaker 1: might have what like nine atmospheres or something like that.
Speaker 1: It's like a cure. Yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh, And
Speaker 1: then other places there's almost no atmosphere atmospheric pressure to
Speaker 1: speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum. Titan
Speaker 1: is close. Yeah, this is the goldilocks finding the bed
Speaker 1: or the porridge. That is. It's not ideal, but in
Speaker 1: a pinch, little my ears, but I can survive. But
Speaker 1: so you land on Titan, you land in the middle
Speaker 1: of a net puatorial desert, and there's a strange sound
Speaker 1: and tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry
Speaker 1: thud like hitting rock, but a splat the sound of
Speaker 1: the soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to
Speaker 1: bog World. Now, it's maybe not exact exactly fair to
Speaker 1: say bog world, because the soil isn't as wet as
Speaker 1: the mud you'd find in many bogs on Earth. But
Speaker 1: relative to the rest of the Solar System, it's bog world.
Speaker 1: Titan is bog world. And as far as we know,
Speaker 1: Titan is the only place in the Solar System other
Speaker 1: than Earth that has beaches. Some planets have subterranean oceans
Speaker 1: covered in ice a rock, right, We've talked about that,
Speaker 1: Some have frozen polar water ice or frozen ice surfaces entirely,
Speaker 1: But Titan has liquid lakes on a terrestrial surface. However,
Speaker 1: those lakes are not the water lakes we know love.
Speaker 1: Titan has a hydrocarbon hydrological system, which translates to seas
Speaker 1: and rivers of liquid methane. So in the equatorial region
Speaker 1: there's this vast desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds,
Speaker 1: and dried up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come
Speaker 1: across clouds and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself
Speaker 1: is uh It's it's mass is composed mainly of water
Speaker 1: in the form of ice and rocky material in fact
Speaker 1: Titan is so cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius
Speaker 1: that water essentially acts like rock and lava too on
Speaker 1: our world. So the ground you walk on, I guess
Speaker 1: it's ice mostly, but it is water water ice that
Speaker 1: acts like rock. Yeah, so it's it's crazy to think
Speaker 1: about that that it's this this It sounds like an
Speaker 1: alternate dimension where everything is a little skewed instead of
Speaker 1: instead of motions of water, it is. It's it's this
Speaker 1: of substance. And uh. And and the rock is actually water.
Speaker 1: It's like everything's turned on its head in topsy turvy.
Speaker 1: Totally true. And that's actually something that's covered in a
Speaker 1: fantastic lecture that I listened to given in two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven by the NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay about the
Speaker 1: possibility of life on Titan. And Uh. I listened to
Speaker 1: this lecture. I thought it was great, and I just
Speaker 1: wanted to cover some of the things he talks about
Speaker 1: and and maybe we can have a discussion about what
Speaker 1: they mean. But so in this Christopher McKay lecture, he
Speaker 1: begins by noting a curious fact. So several years back,
Speaker 1: we had detected that titans atmosphere features a hydrogen flux
Speaker 1: towards the surface. That means there's hydrogen in the atmosphere
Speaker 1: and it appears to flow down to the ground and
Speaker 1: then not come back up. So what's happening to the
Speaker 1: hydrogen on the surface of Titan. We will come back
Speaker 1: to that question. So McKay talks about how all forms
Speaker 1: of life needs some way of harnessing energy. So on
Speaker 1: Earth there are two primary strategies. You've got like photosynthesis, right,
Speaker 1: capturing sunlight energy, and then you've got chemical energy redox
Speaker 1: chemical energy. So life also needs several other things. It
Speaker 1: needs carbon, you know, organic molecules to make its tissues
Speaker 1: out of for food and stuff like that. And it
Speaker 1: needs liquid water. I've already discussed why that's a little
Speaker 1: problematic here exactly. So there is gonna be no liquid water,
Speaker 1: and the main constraint on an environment being able to
Speaker 1: host life on Earth is the absence of liquid water.
Speaker 1: You can mess with all the other variables, and as
Speaker 1: long as there's liquid water there, there's still probably going
Speaker 1: to be something alive. This is why world's with some
Speaker 1: form of liquid water, sort of the hot spots of
Speaker 1: solar system astrobiology investigation like Europa Enceladus, another moon of
Speaker 1: Saturn will get to in a bit. And the recently
Speaker 1: discovered spongy wet spot that appear seasonally on Martian soil.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've read about that, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty cool, uh that they found that. You know that
Speaker 1: there's some parts of the soil on Mars that seemed
Speaker 1: to thaw seasonally. So even if there's just occasionally liquid water,
Speaker 1: there's more hope than in this world of Titan, which
Speaker 1: seems to just be ever in the freezer. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: McKay points out something interesting. It's not necessarily the compound
Speaker 1: H two O itself. That's important because there are plenty
Speaker 1: of worlds full of completely frozen water ice that that
Speaker 1: don't seem to be good candidates for for life. Life
Speaker 1: is ultimately a subset of chemistry. It's biochemistry, and that
Speaker 1: chemistry needs a liquid medium to take place in Liquid
Speaker 1: is sort of like the canvas on which you you know,
Speaker 1: paint the wonderful artistry of complex chemistry. So maybe it's
Speaker 1: not water that's the key. It's just liquid. It's the
Speaker 1: liquid phase of matter. So how about those methane lakes
Speaker 1: on Titan. In many ways, Titan is analogous to Earth.
Speaker 1: So Christopher McKay points out that, like Earth, that has
Speaker 1: a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if you're saying, wait a second,
Speaker 1: I thought we had an oxygen atmosphere. Oxygen is only
Speaker 1: about our atmospheric composition. About seventy eight percent of our
Speaker 1: atmosphere is nitrogen, and if our atmosphere were entirely oxygen,
Speaker 1: this would be a problem for you at high concentrations
Speaker 1: at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy
Speaker 1: your lungs. As we mentioned, it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure.
Speaker 1: Mackay compares it to being under fifteen feet of water.
Speaker 1: That sounds about right compared to what you said, right
Speaker 1: being at the bottom. So it's not like Venus, it's
Speaker 1: not like Mars. It's it's not you know, it's not
Speaker 1: the nicest place to be compared to what we're used
Speaker 1: to on Earth, but it's closer to Earth than anything
Speaker 1: else we're aware of. It has a hydrological cycle with
Speaker 1: clouds and rain storms. Now this is crazy. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: I don't usually think of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and here we're talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane,
Speaker 1: of course, so the methane is going to be H
Speaker 1: four raining down from the sky. And speaking of methane,
Speaker 1: Titan is rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean
Speaker 1: stuff that we know to be alive or organic compounds
Speaker 1: are just a sort of group name for carbon based
Speaker 1: compounds like methane that are very often associated with life,
Speaker 1: but they exist independent of life. You don't have to
Speaker 1: have life to make them. But if you want carbon
Speaker 1: based life to exist, these compounds need to be around.
Speaker 1: But the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth
Speaker 1: temperature is almost two hundred degrees cintegrade more than average
Speaker 1: Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth.
Speaker 1: All this stuff that you see going on on Earth,
Speaker 1: you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin
Speaker 1: that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin, the
Speaker 1: much colder cousin, And that kind of makes you wonder
Speaker 1: if one of Earth's main features life also has a
Speaker 1: cold cousin. Uh So, this is a situation where we're
Speaker 1: forced to to not dream of an entirely different form
Speaker 1: of life, but to say life as we know it
Speaker 1: existing on a slightly different world like but basically all
Speaker 1: things being equal, If the parameters were skewed a little bit,
Speaker 1: could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd
Speaker 1: be life as we know it in one way, but
Speaker 1: not in another. So it would be carbon based life.
Speaker 1: So it's life as we know it in that sense,
Speaker 1: and we don't know of any other way that you
Speaker 1: could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it
Speaker 1: could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it
Speaker 1: is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life
Speaker 1: is water based, and this would be methane based, so
Speaker 1: it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in
Speaker 1: that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still
Speaker 1: have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is
Speaker 1: the only chemical basis we can think of for building
Speaker 1: up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life.
Speaker 1: So what did the Hygan's probe find when it landed
Speaker 1: on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no,
Speaker 1: because we would have heard about that. But it wasn't
Speaker 1: equipped to find microbes, so there could have been microbes
Speaker 1: there and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it
Speaker 1: came back so exactly. Um, and that might be a
Speaker 1: problem if it did, because as as we now know,
Speaker 1: it's very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But
Speaker 1: a little bit about the science behind the Hygans probe.
Speaker 1: So we when we sent the Hyggans probe to UH
Speaker 1: to Titan, we built it sort of like a raft,
Speaker 1: as a floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that
Speaker 1: Titan was going to be covered in a in a
Speaker 1: surface wide liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for
Speaker 1: this is because they were able to detect previously that
Speaker 1: the app sphere was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane
Speaker 1: doesn't last forever. It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from
Speaker 1: the Sun and transformed into other compounds. So you can't
Speaker 1: have a methane atmosphere that just hangs around for the
Speaker 1: entire lifetime of a planet, you know, four billion years
Speaker 1: or however old it is since Titan was formed, so
Speaker 1: there has to be something on the surface to replenish it.
Speaker 1: And from this they reasoned it looks like there's liquid
Speaker 1: methane on the surface of Titan. Which is slowly evaporating
Speaker 1: being processed turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay,
Speaker 1: we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll
Speaker 1: see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it
Speaker 1: dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something
Speaker 1: more like a desert. But the probe was able to
Speaker 1: detect that it was not as totally desert like as
Speaker 1: it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft,
Speaker 1: and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able
Speaker 1: to notice that methane steam was coming out of the
Speaker 1: soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay,
Speaker 1: so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid
Speaker 1: methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an
Speaker 1: analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much
Speaker 1: anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.
Speaker 1: By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan,
Speaker 1: we should be able to find it all over the place,
Speaker 1: even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because
Speaker 1: even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's
Speaker 1: any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some
Speaker 1: kind of life. So in his lecture, mackay asks, Okay,
Speaker 1: so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives
Speaker 1: in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we
Speaker 1: be able to look for clues of this? And one
Speaker 1: one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably
Speaker 1: read about how in looking for exo planets, they've theorized
Speaker 1: that one way we could look for life on exo
Speaker 1: planets is by looking for oxygen, right, because the pred
Speaker 1: sense of anomalous oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms,
Speaker 1: Like our atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics
Speaker 1: of planetary formation. That wasn't it wasn't like that when
Speaker 1: Earth was formed. Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full
Speaker 1: of critters like plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere
Speaker 1: of our planet exactly. It's their waste, it's their waste product,
Speaker 1: it's their poop, you know, So they there or I
Speaker 1: guess they're they're breathing out, I don't know, however you
Speaker 1: want to phrase it. They take in sunlight and CEO two.
Speaker 1: They use the energy from the sunlight to split up
Speaker 1: the COO two, make body parts out of the carbon,
Speaker 1: and then spit out the oxygen as a waste product.
Speaker 1: And so you could look at the original oxygenation of
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere. Is this mass poisoning event? Uh? We just
Speaker 1: happened to be the kinds of animals that evolved to
Speaker 1: thrive amidst this mass poisoning and to work well with it.
Speaker 1: So how could we look for similar clues on Titan? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: you would have to imagine what an organism that gets
Speaker 1: along in liquid nitrogen to do to make a living.
Speaker 1: So you imagine a carbon based life form that lives
Speaker 1: in liquid methane and imagine how does it eat? What
Speaker 1: does it do? Well? Titan has tons of compounds on
Speaker 1: it that make perfectly good food. One one example would
Speaker 1: be acetylene, or another would be ethane. So if you're
Speaker 1: an organism on Titan, food is just all over the place.
Speaker 1: In McKay's words, food is quote falling from the sky.
Speaker 1: It's not not hard to get a meal there. But
Speaker 1: organisms like us get energy by a combination of eating food.
Speaker 1: So taking in these carbon based compounds and then breathing
Speaker 1: taking an oxygen and then reacting that carbon and oxygen
Speaker 1: to create usable energy and the molecules we need and
Speaker 1: the waste product of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on
Speaker 1: Titan could perform a pretty much analogous process by reacting
Speaker 1: carbon based compounds and food with instead out of oxygen hydrogen,
Speaker 1: and that would create usable energy and then a waste
Speaker 1: product containing carbon and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So,
Speaker 1: if there's life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted
Speaker 1: that it would probably alter the chemistry of the surface
Speaker 1: by depleting it of the compounds it eats and breathes,
Speaker 1: like acetylene, ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with
Speaker 1: that missing hydrogen, so that there's hydrogen flowing down to
Speaker 1: the surface and then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility
Speaker 1: is that some kind of organism at the surface is
Speaker 1: consuming hydrogen spitting out methane as part of its metabolism
Speaker 1: and respiration, and that's how it gets along. Now we
Speaker 1: don't know. This isn't proof, right, we don't know that
Speaker 1: there's something alive on Titan, but but it definitely makes
Speaker 1: Titan worth a closer look. I think we should send
Speaker 1: more probes right, Oh, most definitely, we definitely, we should
Speaker 1: definitely send more probes because one reason is always more
Speaker 1: problem One reason, of course, is that you know, if
Speaker 1: we find and this is something that McKay points out,
Speaker 1: is that if we find life on Mars or Europa,
Speaker 1: current life, past life, etcetera, there's a chance that it's
Speaker 1: related to us. Right, but when in contemplating Titan, this
Speaker 1: would be an entirely different form. It would be it
Speaker 1: would be unconnected to us because it would be based
Speaker 1: on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean there's no liquid
Speaker 1: methane based biochemistry on that then, and there probably couldn't
Speaker 1: be because Earth is just not cold enough. Like we
Speaker 1: look at at Titan and say, how could you live
Speaker 1: on a world that cold? But any life form on
Speaker 1: Titan would look at Earth as like like we look
Speaker 1: at Venus. You know, it's just this unbearable hell of
Speaker 1: intense heat where you know, the stuff you need to live,
Speaker 1: the liquid methane you need it just it boils. You know,
Speaker 1: you can't you can't sustain it. So anyway, we mentioned
Speaker 1: sending those probes, what what would they look for if
Speaker 1: we did send probes? Well, McKay suggests one thing look
Speaker 1: for evidence of the chemistry of life there. So uh.
Speaker 1: The example he gives is that organisms on Earth we
Speaker 1: get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult for us to
Speaker 1: come by, so we have enzymes that have to bust
Speaker 1: up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere and make them
Speaker 1: into ammonia in H three. Now, on a world like Titan,
Speaker 1: the problem wouldn't be getting uh, getting nitrogen making ammonia.
Speaker 1: It would be getting oxygen because there's no oxygen available
Speaker 1: except that which is locked up in the frozen H two. Oh,
Speaker 1: the water ice that makes the rocky ground of this planet.
Speaker 1: So you'd see organisms with enzymes for melting water ice
Speaker 1: and getting that oxygen out of it. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: another thing he finally suggests, is to scoop up organic
Speaker 1: material from Titan and then look for biases in the
Speaker 1: distribution of organic materials. You know, so looking for molecules
Speaker 1: that are appearing an anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained
Speaker 1: by inorganic chemistry, but would be explained if you're looking
Speaker 1: at a place where the chemistry of the surface is
Speaker 1: being processed constantly by life forms. But the idea of
Speaker 1: life on Titan is interesting to me because of how
Speaker 1: cold it is, So we know there's a basic correlation
Speaker 1: between heat and metabolism, right, So a life form that
Speaker 1: lives on Titan is probably a very slow moving form
Speaker 1: of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle, slow evolution. And
Speaker 1: this kind of makes me wonder about weird thought experiment
Speaker 1: extending out from this, what would intelligent life that evolved
Speaker 1: on a freezing, liquid methane world look like? Because in
Speaker 1: many ways, I think our idea of intelligence is heavily
Speaker 1: colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine an organism
Speaker 1: that has as much technological and problem solving intelligence as
Speaker 1: a human but does everything literally one hundred times slower
Speaker 1: mm hmm, but but but potentially living a lot longer
Speaker 1: as well. So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative.
Speaker 1: Then I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate,
Speaker 1: Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not
Speaker 1: a like whale sloth in this scenario and then wondering
Speaker 1: and then it's even a greater leap for me to
Speaker 1: try to imagine this alien methane based whale sloth even
Speaker 1: developing crude technology on this world, Like, yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean
Speaker 1: sirens obviously. Oh yeah, well let us not speak of
Speaker 1: the sirens of Titan. But I I I agree with
Speaker 1: you about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale
Speaker 1: sloth Like. Um, I just tried to do some math here, like,
Speaker 1: if a development happened in humans one million years after
Speaker 1: the emergence of the species, did you expect a hypothetical
Speaker 1: liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred times
Speaker 1: slower to reach the same development in a hundred million years. Well,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't be ruled out by the age of the universe.
Speaker 1: But then that sort of introduces questions about like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, I mean, how would you even get
Speaker 1: a complex nervous system. Because it took life on Earth
Speaker 1: what like four billion years to evolve from the first
Speaker 1: self replicating molecules to technological intelligence. So would it take
Speaker 1: life on a cold planet four hundred billion years? Uh?
Speaker 1: And again, I'm just using a hundred times faster or
Speaker 1: a hundred times slower as a hypothetical. I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly how slower it would be, but if it would
Speaker 1: take something like that long, we've got a lot of
Speaker 1: a long time to wait before we meet these slow
Speaker 1: moving organisms, because that's much older than the universe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and again to say nothing of the various cataclysms and
Speaker 1: extinction events that are likely to to occur in the
Speaker 1: history of any life sustaining, life evolving world. So it
Speaker 1: might very well be on the path towards creating this
Speaker 1: and then whammouh, some some body in Saturn's um gravitational
Speaker 1: system just crashes into you and wipes everything out. But
Speaker 1: then again, I also think of a very slow organism
Speaker 1: as a very resilient organism. You know, it's just hard
Speaker 1: to put them down. Yeah, but you know, the right commets,
Speaker 1: commet strike, the right the right medior can certainly do that.
Speaker 1: Has anybody ever created a sci fi alien like that?
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think of one, Like an alien that's
Speaker 1: just amazingly slow. M hm. The nts sort of sort
Speaker 1: of like the ants. Yeah, I'm I'm not remembering one
Speaker 1: off hand. They tend to be This kind of alien
Speaker 1: would tend to be the the the the marginally experienced
Speaker 1: alien in a in a rather you know, rich diverse
Speaker 1: pantheon of alien species like this would not be your
Speaker 1: central character because they're so unlike humans. This would be
Speaker 1: like the one character that you go to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: about halfway through the novel to get a little elder inside.
Speaker 1: I guess, well, it makes me think that there there'd
Speaker 1: be a great creeping menace because imagine you colonize the
Speaker 1: world with some hundred times slower than you, cold cold
Speaker 1: liquid methane, intelligent organisms. And at first it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: like they're bothered by your presence. You can live in
Speaker 1: peaceful harmony. But it just took them a hundred years
Speaker 1: to decide that they were going to destroy you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they would play a different you know, long term game. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so I certainly have encountered that in fantasy novels before.
Speaker 1: You know, what happens when you have the great threat
Speaker 1: does not have to doesn't have to worry about the
Speaker 1: day to day, even year to year. I can sleep
Speaker 1: for centuries and wait for the game, the game board
Speaker 1: to improve and the situations to favor it once more.
Speaker 1: So you know, you could see a similar model, I guess, uh,
Speaker 1: with you know, interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then a
Speaker 1: great disadvantage we're always at. We gotta go get the groceries. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so they can say, you know what, we can lose
Speaker 1: the next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us,
Speaker 1: that's just that's just a nap. It's small hyperions. One
Speaker 1: last thing I want to talk about for and we
Speaker 1: mentioned future probes going to Titan. Definitely in favor of
Speaker 1: that Titan last I heard was not the top priority
Speaker 1: for for future missions, but it's you know, it's something
Speaker 1: that's being discussed and and there are some proposals. But
Speaker 1: one proposal for future exploration of Titans surface is the
Speaker 1: use of a type of robot that I think is
Speaker 1: really interesting. It's been referred to in the press as
Speaker 1: the super ballbot, but I like the design of this.
Speaker 1: I've talked about it on the other podcast I be
Speaker 1: forward thinking before. But the robot design is a rover
Speaker 1: that is based on what's called tin Segreti architect picture,
Speaker 1: and essentially it is a mobile robot that looks like
Speaker 1: a jumble of rods and wires. So if you just
Speaker 1: made a tangled ball of sticks and wires connecting them
Speaker 1: at the ends, that's what it would look like. And
Speaker 1: it moves by tensing and relaxing the wires. So it
Speaker 1: kind of tumbles along on the ground rotumbweed exactly, and
Speaker 1: it's resistant to damage from hard landings and stuff, so
Speaker 1: that this makes it an interesting design for a planetary
Speaker 1: rover to explore. But I've also always thought this would
Speaker 1: be a great design for a killer robot in the
Speaker 1: sci fi horror movie, Like just this this tangle of
Speaker 1: rods and wires, and it's kind of cute, it's kind
Speaker 1: of funny. It just kind of tumbles up to you,
Speaker 1: but then it wraps around you and ten tenses the
Speaker 1: wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know what
Speaker 1: makes sense because there's at least one killer robot movie
Speaker 1: that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn three
Speaker 1: um had Kirk Douglas in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk,
Speaker 1: this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too,
Speaker 1: and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking
Speaker 1: very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's he's not his least leazy role I think, and
Speaker 1: kind of flash Gordon aesthetic and he actually looks good
Speaker 1: in it. Yeah. Fair Faucet in it as well, and
Speaker 1: that has a killer robot in it not the greatest
Speaker 1: killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars can't
Speaker 1: be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that involve
Speaker 1: the moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're coming
Speaker 1: up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after Titan,
Speaker 1: Raya is going to seem like kind of a letdown
Speaker 1: Raya or Ria, I've seen it, said Ria also, so Ria,
Speaker 1: I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of
Speaker 1: this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon
Speaker 1: of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being
Speaker 1: the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more
Speaker 1: than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh,
Speaker 1: in terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot
Speaker 1: going on here. It's and the sort of almost half
Speaker 1: lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively low density.
Speaker 1: In many ways, it's comparable to the next moon we're
Speaker 1: gonna passone. And as far as surface features go, it's
Speaker 1: got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere
Speaker 1: cratered in silent Okay, and in a far on a
Speaker 1: far lesser note. Apparently the latest Independence Day Independence Day
Speaker 1: resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building
Speaker 1: a defense outpost here. So I don't know why. Maybe
Speaker 1: it just seems like a nice boring place to put
Speaker 1: all those guns. I suppose you know, there's sort of
Speaker 1: like a if you pronounce it ray, Uh, sort of
Speaker 1: like ray sort ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense.
Speaker 1: Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione,
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of
Speaker 1: about three two kilometers, And what we're looking at here
Speaker 1: is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably
Speaker 1: a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is
Speaker 1: just ice water ice, a very fine ice powder that's
Speaker 1: basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring constantly bombards Dinny.
Speaker 1: And the dust from the ear ring ultimately comes from Enceladus,
Speaker 1: which has prominent geyser activity that we discuss in a bed.
Speaker 1: Great wisps mar the surface of Dione, and uh, these
Speaker 1: turn out these are actually bright canyon ice walls indicating
Speaker 1: pasta tectonic activity, and these ice cliffs could be a
Speaker 1: mature phase of the so called tiger stripes that are
Speaker 1: encountered on Enceladus. Right, So we're gonna talk about the
Speaker 1: surface of Enceladus in a bit, But Enceladus is a
Speaker 1: is a younger, smoother kind of surface, but it does
Speaker 1: have these stripes along it. So you're saying like, if
Speaker 1: if Enceladus were allowed to mature millions more years, it
Speaker 1: could end up looking more like some of the surface
Speaker 1: features of Dione. Yeah, this is essentially the old boring
Speaker 1: uh Enceladus. But nothing nothing in the sphere of Saturn
Speaker 1: is boring. No, no, not boring, but the the less
Speaker 1: interesting version of the same lunar idea. I guess we
Speaker 1: are spiraling in faster and it's something we've got to
Speaker 1: acknowledge now. The next one is going to be the
Speaker 1: moon Tethus or Tethis uh so teeth. This is about
Speaker 1: sixty five of the mass of the dwarf planet series.
Speaker 1: It's pretty small, roughly thirty of the width of Earth's moon,
Speaker 1: Roughly spherical, there's not a lot of suspected potential for
Speaker 1: endogenous life on Tethus uh and and teeth. This is
Speaker 1: composed mostly of water ice with no real atmosphere. Is
Speaker 1: this frozen ice ball tidally locked in orbit around Saturn.
Speaker 1: But the coolest feature of teeth This is some thing
Speaker 1: that I came across, I think last year. I was
Speaker 1: reading about this and I just love it. I'm not
Speaker 1: quite sure why. It's just a surface coloration feature, but
Speaker 1: in July, NASA reported that in enhanced color images from
Speaker 1: the Cassini spacecraft there were a series of these arc
Speaker 1: shaped red streaks that could be seen side by side
Speaker 1: parallel on the surface of Teethus, and it looks like
Speaker 1: Freddy Krueger slashed the moon with his glove. It wasn't
Speaker 1: the first time the arcs had been seen. They've been
Speaker 1: spotted faintly visibly as early as two thousand four, I think,
Speaker 1: but this was the first time they were imaged really clearly.
Speaker 1: And it's fascinating because we were not positive what causes them,
Speaker 1: at least as far as I could find. And maybe
Speaker 1: somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't
Speaker 1: find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young,
Speaker 1: these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters.
Speaker 1: But what created them and why are they red in color?
Speaker 1: Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press
Speaker 1: release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be
Speaker 1: maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities, or
Speaker 1: they could be out gassing from inside teeth this but
Speaker 1: ultimately we don't know yet. All right, Well, let's leave
Speaker 1: this moon behind us and move on to uh one
Speaker 1: of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that
Speaker 1: is Enceladus, a moon about the size of Arizona. Yes,
Speaker 1: could fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to
Speaker 1: to imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not
Speaker 1: very large, is that if you were to punch a
Speaker 1: hole in the Earth along the borders of the state
Speaker 1: of Texas, you could drop And why would you want
Speaker 1: to do that, But just if you were to do it,
Speaker 1: take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter punched out
Speaker 1: that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus through the whole. So,
Speaker 1: coming after some of the giants we've seen like Titan
Speaker 1: and and Rhea, you might be kind of underwhelmed by
Speaker 1: its size, But do not be underwhelmed because Enceladus is
Speaker 1: quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy features here is
Speaker 1: that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor, and
Speaker 1: ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust
Speaker 1: of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds, volatile gases,
Speaker 1: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica. And it's all
Speaker 1: expelled out to a distance three times the radius of
Speaker 1: Enceladus and at a speed of approximately eight hundred miles
Speaker 1: per hour or four d per second. It's a continuous
Speaker 1: eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo of fine
Speaker 1: ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's ear ring,
Speaker 1: which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear ring is
Speaker 1: this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those concentrated inner rings.
Speaker 1: That the ear ring is more this great vast haze
Speaker 1: expend extending outward, uh from Saturn. And it's uh oh, oh,
Speaker 1: it's cool. I love the jets coming out of the
Speaker 1: south pole of this planet feeding this. And there's an
Speaker 1: even cooler implication I want to mention in a bit.
Speaker 1: But there's another striking feature of Enceladus that you would
Speaker 1: notice long before your spacecraft sets down if you're landing
Speaker 1: on the planet. Enceladus is the most reflective large object
Speaker 1: in the entire Solar System. It's like a bright mirror
Speaker 1: reflecting the sun straight into your eyes. And Enceladus may
Speaker 1: be alive, not the planet itself, as we discussed with
Speaker 1: the Appetus, but but something within the planet. So Enceladus
Speaker 1: is believed to have a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high,
Speaker 1: highly reflective ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates
Speaker 1: the presence of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we
Speaker 1: observed around Jupiter. Now I've seen claims of both global
Speaker 1: subterranean oceans and regional regional subterranean seas positioned under the
Speaker 1: South Pole um. But the way the ocean has started
Speaker 1: to become intensely interesting to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now, why
Speaker 1: is that, Well, we've seen examples before where these where
Speaker 1: these subworld oceans. I mean, we have liquid water, and
Speaker 1: clearly we have we have jets of it, we have
Speaker 1: we have activity going on here. There's energy taking place,
Speaker 1: there's warmth, and there's liquid and there and there are
Speaker 1: important compounds. As you mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes
Speaker 1: coming out of the southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again,
Speaker 1: the Cassini spacecraft detected organic compounds, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica,
Speaker 1: volatile gases. Uh, that's good stuff if you look in Live,
Speaker 1: going right down the list, checking off many of the
Speaker 1: key factors necessary for life as we know it. But
Speaker 1: do we know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing.
Speaker 1: The Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander.
Speaker 1: It's not equipped to detect to the presence of life,
Speaker 1: but it can, it can look for clues. Uh. So
Speaker 1: the material and these plumes go all over the place,
Speaker 1: sometimes it falls back down to Enceladus. Forms this filmy
Speaker 1: mist in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's
Speaker 1: e ring. And I'd just like to point out that
Speaker 1: if I understand this correctly, if it turns out there
Speaker 1: is life in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably
Speaker 1: being sprayed out in these jets. And if the jets
Speaker 1: become Saturn's ring, one of the rings of Saturn is
Speaker 1: a graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of
Speaker 1: miles into space. That is crazy to think of it
Speaker 1: that way. It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy.
Speaker 1: Either way, I think that's great. So much like Titan
Speaker 1: to do the real exploration and discovery work about the
Speaker 1: potential for life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got
Speaker 1: to get back there. And I actually just recently read
Speaker 1: a piece in Scientific American that was talking about one
Speaker 1: of the people who's working on trying to plan such
Speaker 1: a mission, the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of
Speaker 1: mission obviously is not easy to devise or or too
Speaker 1: fund but best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe,
Speaker 1: as we as we leave this moon and make our
Speaker 1: way towards our our next and final destination here our
Speaker 1: final object of study, I do want to stress what
Speaker 1: you're about to look at is not a death star.
Speaker 1: It's a moon. It's not space station. It's a moon. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm talking of course about Minus. Then why are we
Speaker 1: called an astractor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions
Speaker 1: then for for Minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus
Speaker 1: is big claim to fame is it's just a frozen
Speaker 1: moon that looks a lot like the Death Star from
Speaker 1: Star Wars. It's got this big crater that looks a
Speaker 1: lot like the weapon that what would you call it?
Speaker 1: The crater in the Death Star from which the planet
Speaker 1: destroying em comes out? Yeah? Yeah. An enormous crater uh,
Speaker 1: known as the Herschel Crater. It is a hundred thirty
Speaker 1: kilometers or eighty miles while it dominates the landscape, giving
Speaker 1: the world's appearance, the world an appearance of a great eye. Uh.
Speaker 1: The crater covered moon is less than one miles and
Speaker 1: on komes in mean radius, it has roughly the land
Speaker 1: area of Spain. Not very big, not very big, And again,
Speaker 1: most of this visible side is crater. It's not perfectly
Speaker 1: round either, more of an an ovoid. The shape and
Speaker 1: it's a low density suggests that it's consists almost entirely
Speaker 1: of water ice, which is the the only substance we've
Speaker 1: ever detected on Mimus. It's tidily locked. And this is crazy.
Speaker 1: It's it's believed that the impact that created the Herschel
Speaker 1: Crater probably came close to just shattering it entirely. That's
Speaker 1: how because you know, a crater that big on a
Speaker 1: world this small, uh, you know, it was just a
Speaker 1: hair away from just breaking it into pieces. So should
Speaker 1: that have happened, would it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I don't know exactly how the ring formation works,
Speaker 1: so we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else,
Speaker 1: it might end up resembling, you know, one of like
Speaker 1: the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we
Speaker 1: might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be
Speaker 1: a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh,
Speaker 1: those other lump moons that we are not discussing in
Speaker 1: this episode, you know, among the among the fifty three
Speaker 1: named moons of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things
Speaker 1: about Mimus, though, is that it should experience more tidal
Speaker 1: heating than Enceladusts. And yet while that frozen world as
Speaker 1: we discussed both geysers and uh and and clearly experiences
Speaker 1: internal heat, Mimus is just an unchanging waste land of ice.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we should have mentioned about Enceladusts. I think
Speaker 1: I forgot to mention that the the what is the
Speaker 1: energy source? You know, why is there? Well, it's some
Speaker 1: of the same explanations that we saw in some of
Speaker 1: the moon of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by
Speaker 1: the orbit and gravitational influence around it. So it's got
Speaker 1: a not perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields
Speaker 1: and this causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads
Speaker 1: to heat. Yeah, a lot of kinds of comparisons are
Speaker 1: often made between what we know about Enceladus and what
Speaker 1: we know about Mimus, to the degree that some have
Speaker 1: speculated on the possibility of a liquid ocean in Mimus.
Speaker 1: But it's such a small moon again, the size of Spain.
Speaker 1: It's it's hardly the best candidate. But yeah, you could
Speaker 1: say there's there's still an outside chance, and that's the case. Okay,
Speaker 1: we seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I
Speaker 1: guess we were not trapped in attractor beam. However, we
Speaker 1: do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface
Speaker 1: of Saturn. Now, Joe, oh, No, Saturn, which once seemed
Speaker 1: quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons, and
Speaker 1: it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black
Speaker 1: white harmony plant lunar body here. But yeah, I know
Speaker 1: it's able to escape. If you notice that as we
Speaker 1: get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that?
Speaker 1: It's kind of like, uh in Raiders of the Lost Dark,
Speaker 1: that scene where they zoom in on the box with
Speaker 1: the arc in it, and it's making that satanic miallmami allenoise.
Speaker 1: I can't quite hear that over the two thousand and
Speaker 1: one space honestly, monolith coral arrangement. But but that's because
Speaker 1: I have headphones in and listening to that. I always
Speaker 1: listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer
Speaker 1: to a large, scary planetary object. Folks, I should let
Speaker 1: you know that while we were working on this episode,
Speaker 1: Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of
Speaker 1: like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've
Speaker 1: got to share this on the lane. Oh yeah, I will.
Speaker 1: I will make sure that there's a link to this
Speaker 1: in the landing page. I believe it came from the
Speaker 1: the record label A Caci A uh. Definitely worth checking out.
Speaker 1: They put out a number of cool, cool acts and
Speaker 1: cool releases over the years, including some stuff from the
Speaker 1: Weirding Module, which is one of my one of my
Speaker 1: favorite musical acts out there. This thing definitely made me
Speaker 1: wish that there was a good John Carpenter movie taking
Speaker 1: place on a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need
Speaker 1: perhaps we need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what
Speaker 1: you're saying. More like Ghosts of Mars is what I'm saying,
Speaker 1: ghosts of Mimus, ghosts of Titans, one for each world.
Speaker 1: Get to get ice Cube on the phone and Jason Statham.
Speaker 1: All right, So there you have it, the moons of Saturn. Now.
Speaker 1: So now you have both both the moons of Saturn
Speaker 1: and the moons of Jupiter covered on stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were
Speaker 1: going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons.
Speaker 1: So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're
Speaker 1: constantly learning more. Yeah yeah, So so feel free to
Speaker 1: look into this and research it yourself. You know, you
Speaker 1: should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that
Speaker 1: you can't learn about saturny on your own, but away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we we do encourage you to do that because it
Speaker 1: is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are
Speaker 1: great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could
Speaker 1: have gotten into even more about the rings somememb We
Speaker 1: could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,
Speaker 1: the ring, moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed just
Speaker 1: rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on
Speaker 1: other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if
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