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Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how stop

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Speaker 1: works dot com. There's peace in those rings. As we

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Speaker 1: spiraled into Jupiter, our orbit decaying rapidly inside the path

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Speaker 1: of the sulfurous io we assumed that we and our

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Speaker 1: forest stone bio arc were headed for the same fate

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Speaker 1: as the old Galileo probe, through the fierce radiation belts,

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Speaker 1: through the crushing gravity, into the Jovian atmosphere, and all

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Speaker 1: the way down. But then something happened. It was as

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Speaker 1: if a hand of a silent god reached out from

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Speaker 1: the darkness of space and just plucked us gently from

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Speaker 1: the depths of the gas giant's gravity well lifted us

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Speaker 1: up up to freedom. We still don't know what happened.

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Speaker 1: Our navigational computers have no explanation, but our orbit ceased

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Speaker 1: its decay, and with the slow gradual acceleration, driven from

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Speaker 1: some source totally foreign to the ship itself, we were

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Speaker 1: on our way, but not on our way home. Something

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Speaker 1: out there, some unknown force, is urging us in the

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Speaker 1: other direction. Despite the long journey, our ever dwindling share

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Speaker 1: of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath, we just endured.

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Speaker 1: The plants that once struggled for life in our forest

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Speaker 1: dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if more of the

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Speaker 1: Solar System's great moons want to be seen, want to

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

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

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Speaker 1: with its major moons appearing as tiny points of light

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Speaker 1: in the darkness, growing ever closer as our spiral begins again. Hey,

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Speaker 1: welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is

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Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and my name is Joe McCormick, and backed

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Speaker 1: by popular demand, we are now going to explore the

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: 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. In

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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're gonna, indeed going to stick to

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Speaker 1: just the 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, uh 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 beasts 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 going to

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Speaker 1: see Saturn because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings.

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: Its 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 gleaming lt 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. Oh,

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

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Speaker 1: it's the difference between a bunch of balls and planets.

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Speaker 1: But it's also different than Jupiter in that Jupiter was

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Speaker 1: this very intense experience. Now Saturn also is very large,

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Speaker 1: it has a deep gravity. Well you know, it's got

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Speaker 1: those same things going for it. But Saturn, i would say,

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: at least to beings like at least two, you know,

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Speaker 1: weak fragile beings like us. We can scarcely survive outside

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Speaker 1: of a slim portion of our own planets environment. Reading

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Speaker 1: reading up for this episode, I was astonished to discover

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Speaker 1: how excited scientists are about the possibility for life and

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Speaker 1: a couple of Saturn's moons, Because when you think about

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Speaker 1: life in our Solar System beyond Earth, everybody always mentions Europa.

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Speaker 1: That that's the one that comes to mind, and for

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Speaker 1: good reason. There's a lot of reason to want to

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Speaker 1: study Europa from an astrobiological perspective. But Saturn has some

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Speaker 1: really good moons going for it, and we're gonna explore

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Speaker 1: what's going on on those moons today, all right. Before

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Speaker 1: we get into that, though, let's let's just roll through

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Speaker 1: some of the basics about Saturn just to give everyone

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Speaker 1: a grounding in the planet that plays host all of

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Speaker 1: these wonderful spheres and and ovals in a case of

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Speaker 1: alf just lumps of rock uh and the potatoes spongey potato.

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Speaker 1: So again, it's the second largest plane in our Solar system.

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Speaker 1: It's a gas giant without solid substance save it's dense, hot,

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Speaker 1: pressurized core of rock, ice, water and other compounds. And

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Speaker 1: all of this is an enveloped by liquid metallic hid

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Speaker 1: gen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen. Okay, so

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Speaker 1: it's located nine point five astronomical units away from the Sun,

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Speaker 1: six planet in our solar system, as the posters tell us,

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Speaker 1: and has seven icy rings that encircle it, spanning up

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Speaker 1: to one and seventy five thousand miles or two two

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

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Speaker 1: they are not the solid rings that you can run

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Speaker 1: around on. They're not like a treadmill or anything. But

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Speaker 1: scientists haven't always known that that's true. They have not

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

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Speaker 1: it's mostly water ice. The planet's ring system extends hundreds

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Speaker 1: of thousands of kilometers out from the planet, but the

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Speaker 1: vertical height is typically about ten meters or thirty feet

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Speaker 1: in the wine rings. Are you serious? But but but

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

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

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Speaker 1: the Casine Any spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations

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Speaker 1: and some of the rings had piled the particles up,

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: shaped objects you can form. It's crazy now. Light Jupiter

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: peaceful than it is. Just because it doesn't have the

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Speaker 1: big red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger

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Speaker 1: to it. Uh. These winds combined with heat rising from

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Speaker 1: the planet's in tier cause the yellow gold bands that

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Speaker 1: we see visible in the atmosphere. But they're not as

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Speaker 1: visible as the bands we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's not. It's not as angry. It's not. It doesn't

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Speaker 1: look like somebody just poured a bunch of like red

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Speaker 1: liquid into you know, a swirling mixer bowl of pancake

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Speaker 1: batter in blood. That is a great way to describe it.

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Speaker 1: That's how I think of Jupitery. Yeah, this one is

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Speaker 1: more just like pancake batter with some with some honey

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Speaker 1: at you know, there's a wonderful coincidence with the other

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Speaker 1: episode that we recorded this week, Robert, which was the

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Speaker 1: episode on the Library of Babel. And now I'm not

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Speaker 1: sure what the publishing schedule is going to be, but

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Speaker 1: in the episode on the in the Library of Babble,

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Speaker 1: we discussed how people in the Library of Babel seek

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Speaker 1: out the Crimson hexagon. That's right, and indeed there is

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Speaker 1: a hexagon on Saturn. It's it does not contain any books.

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Speaker 1: It is not a room per se. Well you don't

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

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Speaker 1: at you I'm sure a number of people have seen

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Speaker 1: seen images of this here. But if you if you

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Speaker 1: look at various images of Saturn, there appears to be

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Speaker 1: a hexagon at the top, almost as if it has

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Speaker 1: a little hexagonal hat, a little skull cap on um.

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Speaker 1: And it's weird to look at because you're seeing this

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Speaker 1: in nature. This is not obviously an object designed by

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Speaker 1: anybody on purpose. But it's not circular. It's got these

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Speaker 1: clear corners. Yeah, it's not the kind of shape that

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Speaker 1: you would necessarily expect. But there is, of course a

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Speaker 1: very natural reason for this. This is caused by jet

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Speaker 1: streams uh in the in the wind systems of Saturn. Basically,

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Speaker 1: you have a region here that's bound on each side

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Speaker 1: by different editing editing storms. So it's uh, it's the

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Speaker 1: kind of thing if you've ever met somebody who's playing

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Speaker 1: with a lot of bubbles, you know, like doing a

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Speaker 1: lot of bubble art, and not sure what you mean bubble,

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Speaker 1: like blowing bubbles and sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke

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Speaker 1: into those bubbles. Okay, I'm not very familiar with this

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Speaker 1: art form. Oh you're not. Oh it was Big Medicine

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Speaker 1: on like Sesame Street and and um Mr Rogers neighborhood

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Speaker 1: and back in the day, I completely lost touch with

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Speaker 1: my inner child. Well, blowing big bubbles is a lot

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Speaker 1: of fun, but blowing small bubbles too, because you can

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Speaker 1: join them together, and if you really know what you're doing,

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Speaker 1: you can form geometric shapes at the center where these

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Speaker 1: bubbles bubbles border other bubbles and kind of force different

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Speaker 1: shapes towards the center. Oh yeah, okay, I think I

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Speaker 1: know what you're talking about. So I try to think

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Speaker 1: of that when I think of this particular scenario to

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Speaker 1: try and remind myself that yes, uh, non spherical shapes

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Speaker 1: are possible within nature given the right circumstances. Now, another

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Speaker 1: quick fact about Saturn. Here a day last ten hours

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Speaker 1: and a year. The time it takes through the body

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Speaker 1: to orbit its central star last twenty nine earth years,

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Speaker 1: and the planet's a magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's,

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Speaker 1: but still five seventy eight times as powerful as Earth's,

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Speaker 1: shielding Saturn and many of its moons from the solar wind. Okay,

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Speaker 1: well that's going to be important if we're talking about

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Speaker 1: I don't know, putting a colony there, yea very important.

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Speaker 1: So on that note, let's start talking about the discovery

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

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Speaker 1: is a very We've known about Saturn for a very

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Speaker 1: long time. Right, nobody knows who discovered sat turned because

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Speaker 1: the ancients knew about Saturn. We've known about Saturn as

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Speaker 1: long as we've had history. You know, naked eye astronomers

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Speaker 1: could peer up into the night sky and see Saturn.

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Speaker 1: So uh so, what we're really going to be talking

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Speaker 1: about is the first telescopic studies of Saturn. And you

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Speaker 1: might recall from the last episode that the person usually

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Speaker 1: credited with discovering the largest moons of Jupiter, the four

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Speaker 1: Galilean Moons, was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos

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Speaker 1: also given credit for discovering the rings of Saturn, though

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Speaker 1: he didn't really understand what he was looking at. Now,

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Speaker 1: like we said, everybody already knew about Saturn, but they

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Speaker 1: knew it as a point of light in the sky.

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Speaker 1: And when Galileo looked at Saturn, he saw something very odd,

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Speaker 1: a triple star. It looked like one enormous star with

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Speaker 1: two tiny stars attached to it on either side, like

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Speaker 1: little side cars riding along with it. Now fun fact,

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Speaker 1: Galileo wanted to get credit for being the first person

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Speaker 1: to discover this triple star, but he wasn't ready to

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Speaker 1: publish his findings yet, so he used a method that

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Speaker 1: I thought was pretty clever. He instead disseminated an anagram.

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Speaker 1: And by the way, when this came up, I had

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Speaker 1: to look up anagrams of our names for fun. I

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Speaker 1: have no good ones, not really. My name is I've

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Speaker 1: got comic Jock rim and that's got it. But Robert,

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Speaker 1: You've got some awesome anagrams in case you've never looked

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Speaker 1: him up before. You've got Mr babel rot that's pretty good.

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Speaker 1: You've also got barrel tomb, barrel to m okay. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: uh So, anagram jumbled around letters, you know, jumbled up,

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Speaker 1: and then you can you can und jumble them to

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Speaker 1: spell the original message and show if it's a sufficiently

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Speaker 1: short number of letters, you know, you can show that

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Speaker 1: you had this idea all along, and that that was

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Speaker 1: Galileo's idea. So the anagram that Galileo spread around could

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Speaker 1: be unjumbled to read something along the lines of I've

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Speaker 1: discovered the triform planet, and if anybody tried to scoop him,

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Speaker 1: he could just unscrambled it and show that he had

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Speaker 1: seen it first. But we now know that Saturn is

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Speaker 1: not a triform planet. So who figured that out? Well?

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Speaker 1: In sixteen fifty five. Around sixteen fifty six, the Dutch astronomer, mathematician,

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Speaker 1: and all around science guy Christian Hygans made a study

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Speaker 1: of Saturn through a more powerful telescope, and he made

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Speaker 1: his own discoveries so by observing how the side stars

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Speaker 1: of Saturn could disappear and then reappear. And this is

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Speaker 1: something other observers had noticed too. Hygans realized that he

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Speaker 1: was actually looking at a planet surrounded by a flat

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Speaker 1: disc of rings. It could disappear because of what you

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Speaker 1: mentioned about how flat it is, right, so it could

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Speaker 1: be very bright when we're looking at it at an

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

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Speaker 1: when the rings suddenly turned to where they're pretty much

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Speaker 1: perpendicular with our view, they completely disappear. There's not enough

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Speaker 1: surface to reflect anything. It's like a It's like a

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Speaker 1: lady in a hat with a wide brim. Depending on

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Speaker 1: how she is hold in her head, the positioning of

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Speaker 1: her neck, you may or may not see the brim

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Speaker 1: of the hat, and you'll see at a very degree y.

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Speaker 1: So she tilts her head towards you, you see the brim,

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Speaker 1: she tilts her head flat relative to your perspective, you

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Speaker 1: don't really see much. And so Hyggan's observed that. But

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Speaker 1: Hygan's didn't know what the rings were made of. I

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Speaker 1: think he actually thought they might be some kind of

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Speaker 1: solid structure, maybe more like the bugs money example, And

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Speaker 1: just try to imagine that in reality. Again. I love

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Speaker 1: thinking about like when you had less information and and

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Speaker 1: we just we're trying to conceive of what the universe

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Speaker 1: was like solid rings around the planet. Yeah, I mean

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Speaker 1: they based on the information available at the time. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: why not fascinating. But of course subsequently we learned more

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Speaker 1: about the rings of Saturn. Now, of course, Hygan's discovered

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Speaker 1: something else while studying Saturn, a moon. Nobody had seen

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Speaker 1: any of the moons of Saturn up until this time,

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Speaker 1: and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn, which is Titan,

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Speaker 1: which is going to be a fascinating thing to explore

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Speaker 1: in the little little bit here. But then subsequently other

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Speaker 1: moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini

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Speaker 1: and William Herschel. And we're still learning more about Saturn's

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Speaker 1: smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there is to

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Speaker 1: 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 confirmation, 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 Seni 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: to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we have evolved

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Speaker 1: a view here on this world. Yeah. And of course,

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Speaker 1: another part of the Cassini mission was the Huygens probe,

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Speaker 1: which went down landed on Titan in two thousand five

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

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

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Speaker 1: discoveries that we will talk about in a bit when

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

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Speaker 1: to take a quick break. But when we come back,

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Speaker 1: we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning with the

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Speaker 1: outermost moons and working our way in. All right, we're back, Robert.

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Speaker 1: It it seems like we're coming up on a on

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Speaker 1: a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact, we're coming

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Speaker 1: up on the largest of the outer moons. Iapus APUs, Yes,

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Speaker 1: it didn't that sound Lovecraft. I in like something they

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Speaker 1: would worship. A chanted name appatus. You just want to

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Speaker 1: invoke it. Yeah, named, by the way for a Tartarus

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Speaker 1: bound Titan. So it's nice and it has a nice

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Speaker 1: gloomy feel to it. Ioppotus is not unlike the yenyang

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Speaker 1: of Chinese philosophy, to to prepare everyone for what you're

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Speaker 1: gonna see here. Uh, it's leading hemisphere is dark while

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Speaker 1: it's trailing himisphere is significantly brighter. It's a tidally locked

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Speaker 1: world like a number of moons, meaning that one side

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Speaker 1: always faces Saturn and the other side always faces the void.

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Speaker 1: It essentially looks like the en Yang. It essentially looks

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Speaker 1: like the black and white cookie from that episode of Seinfeld.

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Speaker 1: It's like the two face of Saturn's moons, and it's

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Speaker 1: it's crazy to behold, and it's been crazy for scientists

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Speaker 1: to try and figure out exactly why this is getting

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Speaker 1: too shortly. Mentioning two face, It's it's monstrous in more

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Speaker 1: than one way in appearance. Yeah, that's right. It also

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Speaker 1: has an equatorial ridge, which is a chain of six

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Speaker 1: mile or ten kilometer high mountains, and this is wonderful.

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Speaker 1: It it might have formed during a high speed rotation

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Speaker 1: period or most exciting at all of all, it might

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Speaker 1: be a collapsed ring. No, you're making that up. No,

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Speaker 1: that's one of the theories, collapsed ring. Yeah. These are

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Speaker 1: essentially like the collapsed ring mountains, which sounds like a

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Speaker 1: perfect It sounds like something out of a Jack Vance novel,

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Speaker 1: you know. So it could have had a ring that

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Speaker 1: was drawn into the planet by gravity, collapse into it

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Speaker 1: and became this planet wide ridge of mountains that looks

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Speaker 1: like a horror movie monster backbones sticking up out of

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Speaker 1: the planet's flesh. It's crazy, a killer now it it

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Speaker 1: orbits at a little over two million miles or three

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Speaker 1: million kilometers away from Saturn, and it has probably and

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Speaker 1: this has probably protected it from tidal forces and melting

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Speaker 1: episodes that would have resurfaced it. So it's far enough

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Speaker 1: away from Saturn that that Saturn's gravity is not warping

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Speaker 1: it too much. It's not heating it and causing the

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Speaker 1: geological activity exactly. But you do have the strange dark

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Speaker 1: and white side, and um there have been three major

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Speaker 1: theories over the years as to why one side is

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Speaker 1: black and the other is white. Hit me all right.

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Speaker 1: So one theory is that i Appetus maybe sweeping up

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Speaker 1: particles from the more distant dark moon phobe and steadily

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Speaker 1: renewing this dusting to cover up all but the newest craters. Okay,

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Speaker 1: it's one sability. Another one is that I saw volcanism

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Speaker 1: may be distributing the dark materials. We're talking of volcano

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Speaker 1: like eruptions of hydrocarbons, perhaps to due to chemical reactions

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Speaker 1: that are in turn caused by solar radiation. So you've

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

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

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

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

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Speaker 1: that 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 made its way to the Moon at some

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Speaker 1: point in the past, perhaps dude tying into one and

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Speaker 1: to the first theory, Um, then the long periods of

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

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Speaker 1: dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials within

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Speaker 1: the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions.

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Speaker 1: The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get darker. Okay,

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00:21:04,119 --> 00:21:07,879
Speaker 1: so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay. So Yeapitus

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

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Speaker 1: 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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Speaker 1: That's our main question with all these right, Yeah, yeah,

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00:21:20,560 --> 00:21:23,080
Speaker 1: that's certainly that's the one thing we want to know

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Speaker 1: on each of these, is it possible that there's some

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Speaker 1: sort of life clinging to this little moon. Now we

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Speaker 1: know that the planet itself is probably alive, and it's

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Speaker 1: a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurled with

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Speaker 1: its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back

376
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Speaker 1: out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case,

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Speaker 1: and it's just a rock in space, what we Yeah,

378
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Speaker 1: what's the hope that there's life on it? A very

379
00:21:46,640 --> 00:21:49,760
Speaker 1: very little, very little hope for life here. Despite the

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Speaker 1: insistence by various UFO groups that there are domed cities

381
00:21:53,640 --> 00:21:56,360
Speaker 1: or other such constructions here. But well, if you look

382
00:21:56,400 --> 00:21:58,720
Speaker 1: closely enough and you want it enough, you can find

383
00:21:58,800 --> 00:22:01,320
Speaker 1: dumb cities and just about any world. Ain't that always

384
00:22:01,359 --> 00:22:04,800
Speaker 1: the case? Uh? Could we put a colony there though,

385
00:22:05,720 --> 00:22:08,520
Speaker 1: if it were entirely self contained and we had the

386
00:22:08,600 --> 00:22:12,359
Speaker 1: you know, the necessary technology, of course, possibly, But you

387
00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:14,239
Speaker 1: get down to the fact that there are worse and

388
00:22:14,359 --> 00:22:17,919
Speaker 1: better places to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't

389
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Speaker 1: be like trying to put a colony on Io or something.

390
00:22:20,560 --> 00:22:22,640
Speaker 1: No items like you could do it, but they're better

391
00:22:22,680 --> 00:22:27,080
Speaker 1: places Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the

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

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00:22:30,680 --> 00:22:34,520
Speaker 1: Oh so not wait, hold on the modelith the monolith

394
00:22:34,600 --> 00:22:37,960
Speaker 1: on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit

395
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Speaker 1: around Jupiter. Right in the movie that it's in orbit

396
00:22:40,600 --> 00:22:43,359
Speaker 1: around Jupiter, but in the book it was Saturn. But

397
00:22:43,440 --> 00:22:46,480
Speaker 1: in making two dozen one Space odyestly they couldn't get

398
00:22:46,520 --> 00:22:50,199
Speaker 1: the models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they

399
00:22:50,280 --> 00:22:55,240
Speaker 1: changed it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Uh,

400
00:22:55,520 --> 00:22:58,919
Speaker 1: it's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional

401
00:22:58,960 --> 00:23:02,280
Speaker 1: attention that had has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and

402
00:23:02,320 --> 00:23:05,400
Speaker 1: I feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn

403
00:23:05,520 --> 00:23:10,680
Speaker 1: is the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our

404
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Speaker 1: future Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter,

405
00:23:14,200 --> 00:23:17,480
Speaker 1: or at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiters, where you

406
00:23:17,720 --> 00:23:21,160
Speaker 1: have the Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases

407
00:23:21,160 --> 00:23:26,400
Speaker 1: and weird weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn,

408
00:23:26,480 --> 00:23:28,120
Speaker 1: for the most part, it seems like there's a lot

409
00:23:28,160 --> 00:23:32,560
Speaker 1: of dreamy or stuff going on there. Yeah, maybe that's

410
00:23:32,560 --> 00:23:34,280
Speaker 1: just me that's my my read on some of the

411
00:23:34,320 --> 00:23:36,560
Speaker 1: examples I was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're

412
00:23:36,560 --> 00:23:38,760
Speaker 1: exactly right. I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the

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Speaker 1: Saturn imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's

414
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Speaker 1: very serene, very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver

415
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Speaker 1: light in the background of space. Now we're gonna do

416
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Speaker 1: a quick fly by of the next moon because it

417
00:23:55,600 --> 00:23:57,680
Speaker 1: doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to see there,

418
00:23:57,680 --> 00:24:00,600
Speaker 1: but it is worth pointing out as a strange landmark

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00:24:00,720 --> 00:24:05,160
Speaker 1: in the sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion,

420
00:24:05,240 --> 00:24:09,680
Speaker 1: despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect

421
00:24:09,800 --> 00:24:14,840
Speaker 1: of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would,

422
00:24:14,840 --> 00:24:17,320
Speaker 1: by the way, do not take place on this Hyperion.

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Speaker 1: I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion

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Speaker 1: is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to

425
00:24:26,160 --> 00:24:29,560
Speaker 1: Hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things. Because

426
00:24:29,680 --> 00:24:34,160
Speaker 1: Hyperion in our Solar System, as it orbits around Saturn,

427
00:24:34,480 --> 00:24:38,600
Speaker 1: is essentially a giant potato. Yeah, it's an irregular shaped

428
00:24:38,720 --> 00:24:41,399
Speaker 1: and it's very small, about a one point one times

429
00:24:41,440 --> 00:24:44,800
Speaker 1: the mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas

430
00:24:44,800 --> 00:24:49,240
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere, about ten percent the width of Earth's moon.

431
00:24:49,400 --> 00:24:53,119
Speaker 1: It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like

432
00:24:53,160 --> 00:24:57,840
Speaker 1: a like a spongy low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've

433
00:24:57,880 --> 00:25:01,359
Speaker 1: seen it described as a large frozen double pile. Uh.

434
00:25:01,359 --> 00:25:05,080
Speaker 1: It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons,

435
00:25:05,359 --> 00:25:09,399
Speaker 1: and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that

436
00:25:09,520 --> 00:25:12,320
Speaker 1: was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just

437
00:25:12,359 --> 00:25:14,520
Speaker 1: a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not

438
00:25:14,560 --> 00:25:19,000
Speaker 1: gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here,

439
00:25:19,240 --> 00:25:21,000
Speaker 1: but it's kind of worth the point out as we

440
00:25:21,040 --> 00:25:27,720
Speaker 1: continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah.

441
00:25:27,760 --> 00:25:30,160
Speaker 1: Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think

442
00:25:30,160 --> 00:25:34,240
Speaker 1: we're coming in. Now, what is that sound? It's signaling

443
00:25:34,240 --> 00:25:39,400
Speaker 1: the Titans there. So Titan Titan is about the mass

444
00:25:39,440 --> 00:25:42,320
Speaker 1: of Mercury, about one point eight times the mass of

445
00:25:42,400 --> 00:25:45,200
Speaker 1: Earth's moon, about a hundred and fifty percent of the

446
00:25:45,240 --> 00:25:50,040
Speaker 1: width of the moon, the Earth's moon. Uh, it's spherical, obviously,

447
00:25:50,240 --> 00:25:54,240
Speaker 1: and it's Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury

448
00:25:54,800 --> 00:25:57,399
Speaker 1: and this is the only moon that we're discussing today

449
00:25:57,480 --> 00:26:00,920
Speaker 1: that has been explored by a land ender, by a

450
00:26:01,000 --> 00:26:04,320
Speaker 1: human made lander, the Hohygan's Heightened Lander, a beast of

451
00:26:04,320 --> 00:26:08,320
Speaker 1: planetary exploration. There are videos available online that show the

452
00:26:08,400 --> 00:26:11,639
Speaker 1: landing imagery sent back by the Hygan's probe. You should

453
00:26:11,640 --> 00:26:16,119
Speaker 1: watch them, but try to imagine a tighten landing what

454
00:26:16,240 --> 00:26:19,520
Speaker 1: this world is like. Unlike so many of the moons

455
00:26:19,600 --> 00:26:22,919
Speaker 1: that we've surveyed before, this approach is very unique in

456
00:26:22,920 --> 00:26:26,760
Speaker 1: the Solar System. On Titan, we descend from orbit through

457
00:26:26,800 --> 00:26:31,719
Speaker 1: a thick, cold atmosphere and everything below is shrouded from

458
00:26:31,760 --> 00:26:35,879
Speaker 1: our view from space by this murky haze, and you

459
00:26:35,960 --> 00:26:39,639
Speaker 1: descend through the freezing fog and strong winds shake your

460
00:26:39,720 --> 00:26:42,640
Speaker 1: landing craft. Yeah, this is the only moon in our

461
00:26:42,640 --> 00:26:45,880
Speaker 1: Solar System that has clouds in a dense atmosphere, mostly

462
00:26:46,000 --> 00:26:49,720
Speaker 1: nitrogen and methane. And the atmospheric pressure is is about

463
00:26:50,800 --> 00:26:53,480
Speaker 1: greater than Earth, so roughly the same as you would

464
00:26:53,520 --> 00:26:55,720
Speaker 1: find at the bottom of a swimming pool. That's right,

465
00:26:55,800 --> 00:26:59,840
Speaker 1: But that's actually so that's heavy sounding to us like you.

466
00:27:00,000 --> 00:27:01,679
Speaker 1: You wouldn't want to spend your life at the bottom

467
00:27:01,680 --> 00:27:06,000
Speaker 1: of a swimming pool, but it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared

468
00:27:06,040 --> 00:27:10,280
Speaker 1: to almost everywhere else in the Solar System. Venus. Yeah,

469
00:27:10,320 --> 00:27:13,640
Speaker 1: so in Venus you might have what like nine atmospheres

470
00:27:13,760 --> 00:27:17,800
Speaker 1: or something like that. It's yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh.

471
00:27:17,840 --> 00:27:21,960
Speaker 1: And then other places there's almost no atmosphere, atmosphere pressure

472
00:27:22,000 --> 00:27:24,360
Speaker 1: to speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum.

473
00:27:24,680 --> 00:27:27,760
Speaker 1: Titan is close. Yeah, this is the Goldilocks finding the

474
00:27:27,840 --> 00:27:31,159
Speaker 1: bed or the porridge that is. It's not ideal, but

475
00:27:31,640 --> 00:27:36,280
Speaker 1: in a pinch my ears, but I can survive. But

476
00:27:36,400 --> 00:27:38,879
Speaker 1: so you land on Titan, You land in the middle

477
00:27:39,119 --> 00:27:43,040
Speaker 1: of an equatorial desert, and there's a strange sound and

478
00:27:43,160 --> 00:27:48,320
Speaker 1: tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry thud

479
00:27:48,480 --> 00:27:53,880
Speaker 1: like hitting rock, but a splat, the sound of the

480
00:27:53,960 --> 00:27:59,920
Speaker 1: soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to bog World. Now,

481
00:28:00,160 --> 00:28:03,480
Speaker 1: it's maybe not exactly fair to say bog world, because

482
00:28:03,480 --> 00:28:05,879
Speaker 1: the soil isn't as wet as the mud you'd find

483
00:28:05,880 --> 00:28:08,920
Speaker 1: in many bogs on Earth, but relative to the rest

484
00:28:09,000 --> 00:28:12,359
Speaker 1: of the Solar System, it's bog world. Titan is bog world,

485
00:28:12,800 --> 00:28:15,280
Speaker 1: and as far as we know, Titan is the only

486
00:28:15,280 --> 00:28:19,040
Speaker 1: place in the Solar System other than Earth that has beaches.

487
00:28:20,280 --> 00:28:24,480
Speaker 1: Some planets have subterranean oceans covered in ice a rock, right,

488
00:28:24,560 --> 00:28:28,800
Speaker 1: We've talked about that. Some have frozen polar water ice

489
00:28:28,920 --> 00:28:34,280
Speaker 1: or frozen ice surfaces entirely, But Titan has liquid lakes

490
00:28:34,320 --> 00:28:38,680
Speaker 1: on a terrestrial surface. However, those lakes are not the

491
00:28:38,720 --> 00:28:41,800
Speaker 1: water lakes we know and love. Titan has a hydro

492
00:28:42,000 --> 00:28:47,200
Speaker 1: carbon hydrological system, which translates to seas and rivers of

493
00:28:47,360 --> 00:28:51,760
Speaker 1: liquid methane. So in the equatorial region there's this vast

494
00:28:51,920 --> 00:28:55,880
Speaker 1: desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds, and dried

495
00:28:55,960 --> 00:29:00,240
Speaker 1: up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come across clouds

496
00:29:00,280 --> 00:29:04,920
Speaker 1: and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself is it's

497
00:29:05,000 --> 00:29:07,920
Speaker 1: it's mass is composed mainly of water in the form

498
00:29:08,000 --> 00:29:11,120
Speaker 1: of ice and rocky material. In fact, Titan is so

499
00:29:11,200 --> 00:29:17,720
Speaker 1: cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius that water essentially

500
00:29:17,760 --> 00:29:21,320
Speaker 1: acts like rock and lava too on our world. So

501
00:29:21,480 --> 00:29:24,520
Speaker 1: the ground you walk on, I guess it's ice mostly,

502
00:29:24,720 --> 00:29:28,720
Speaker 1: but it is water water ice that acts like rock. Yeah,

503
00:29:28,880 --> 00:29:31,240
Speaker 1: So it's it's crazy to think about that that it's

504
00:29:31,280 --> 00:29:34,080
Speaker 1: this this it sounds like an alternate dimension where everything

505
00:29:34,160 --> 00:29:37,960
Speaker 1: is a little skewed instead of instead of motions of water,

506
00:29:38,400 --> 00:29:41,160
Speaker 1: it is it's it's this other substance. And uh and

507
00:29:41,160 --> 00:29:44,080
Speaker 1: and the rock is actually water. It's like everything's turned

508
00:29:44,080 --> 00:29:46,920
Speaker 1: on its head in topsy turvy. Totally true. And that's

509
00:29:46,920 --> 00:29:51,080
Speaker 1: actually something that's covered in a fantastic lecture that I

510
00:29:51,160 --> 00:29:54,240
Speaker 1: listened to given in two thousand eleven by the Nasive

511
00:29:54,280 --> 00:29:59,600
Speaker 1: planetary scientists Christopher McKay about the possibility of life on Titan.

512
00:30:00,040 --> 00:30:02,240
Speaker 1: And Uh. I listened to this lecture. I thought it

513
00:30:02,320 --> 00:30:04,880
Speaker 1: was great, and I just wanted to cover some of

514
00:30:04,880 --> 00:30:07,160
Speaker 1: the things he talks about and maybe we can have

515
00:30:07,160 --> 00:30:09,920
Speaker 1: a discussion about what they mean. But so in this

516
00:30:10,080 --> 00:30:14,280
Speaker 1: Christopher McKay lecture, he begins by noting a curious fact.

517
00:30:14,840 --> 00:30:18,920
Speaker 1: So several years back, we had detected that titans atmosphere

518
00:30:18,920 --> 00:30:23,240
Speaker 1: features a hydrogen flux towards the surface. That means there's

519
00:30:23,320 --> 00:30:26,920
Speaker 1: hydrogen in the atmosphere and it appears to flow down

520
00:30:26,960 --> 00:30:30,640
Speaker 1: to the ground and then not come back up. So

521
00:30:30,720 --> 00:30:34,280
Speaker 1: what's happening to the hydrogen on the surface of Titan.

522
00:30:35,360 --> 00:30:38,240
Speaker 1: We will come back to that question. So McKay talks

523
00:30:38,240 --> 00:30:41,560
Speaker 1: about how all forms of life needs some way of

524
00:30:41,640 --> 00:30:45,520
Speaker 1: harnessing energy. So on Earth there are two primary strategies.

525
00:30:45,520 --> 00:30:49,760
Speaker 1: You've got like photosynthesis, right, capturing sunlight energy, and then

526
00:30:49,800 --> 00:30:55,520
Speaker 1: you've got chemical energy redox chemical energy. So life also

527
00:30:55,560 --> 00:30:58,560
Speaker 1: needs several other things. It needs carbon, you know, organic

528
00:30:58,640 --> 00:31:01,840
Speaker 1: molecules to make it tissues out of for food and

529
00:31:01,840 --> 00:31:05,360
Speaker 1: stuff like that. And it needs liquid water. I've already

530
00:31:05,360 --> 00:31:09,040
Speaker 1: discussed why that's a little problematic here exactly. So there

531
00:31:09,160 --> 00:31:12,320
Speaker 1: is gonna be no liquid water, and the main constraint

532
00:31:12,360 --> 00:31:15,360
Speaker 1: on an environment being able to host life on Earth

533
00:31:15,720 --> 00:31:18,200
Speaker 1: is the absence of liquid water. You can mess with

534
00:31:18,240 --> 00:31:21,440
Speaker 1: all the other variables, and as long as there's liquid

535
00:31:21,520 --> 00:31:24,920
Speaker 1: water there, there's still probably going to be something alive.

536
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:27,440
Speaker 1: This is why world's with some form of liquid water.

537
00:31:27,600 --> 00:31:31,480
Speaker 1: Sort of. The hot spots of Solar system astrobiology investigation

538
00:31:31,840 --> 00:31:35,640
Speaker 1: like Europa Enceladus, another moon of Saturn will get to

539
00:31:35,760 --> 00:31:39,800
Speaker 1: in a bid, and the recently discovered spongy wet spots

540
00:31:39,800 --> 00:31:42,240
Speaker 1: that appear seasonally on Martian soil. I don't know if

541
00:31:42,280 --> 00:31:44,520
Speaker 1: you've read about that, but it's pretty cool, uh that

542
00:31:44,800 --> 00:31:46,840
Speaker 1: they found that, you know, there's some parts of the

543
00:31:46,920 --> 00:31:50,360
Speaker 1: soil on Mars that seemed to thaw seasonally. So even

544
00:31:50,360 --> 00:31:53,800
Speaker 1: if there's just occasionally liquid water, there's more hope than

545
00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:56,880
Speaker 1: than this world of Titan, which seems to just be

546
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:01,000
Speaker 1: ever in the freezer. Yeah, but McKay point out something interesting.

547
00:32:01,080 --> 00:32:05,680
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily the compound H two O itself. That's

548
00:32:05,720 --> 00:32:09,280
Speaker 1: important because there are plenty of worlds full of completely

549
00:32:09,400 --> 00:32:12,320
Speaker 1: frozen water ice that that don't seem to be good

550
00:32:12,360 --> 00:32:16,360
Speaker 1: candidates for for life. Life is ultimately a subset of chemistry.

551
00:32:16,360 --> 00:32:20,480
Speaker 1: It's biochemistry, and that chemistry needs a liquid medium to

552
00:32:20,560 --> 00:32:23,240
Speaker 1: take place in. Liquid is sort of like the canvas

553
00:32:23,280 --> 00:32:26,840
Speaker 1: on which you you know, paint the wonderful artistry of

554
00:32:26,920 --> 00:32:30,840
Speaker 1: complex chemistry. So maybe it's not water that's the key.

555
00:32:31,000 --> 00:32:35,400
Speaker 1: It's just liquid. It's the liquid phase of matter. So

556
00:32:35,440 --> 00:32:39,719
Speaker 1: how about those methane lakes on Titan. In many ways,

557
00:32:39,800 --> 00:32:44,240
Speaker 1: Titan is analogous to Earth. So Christopher McKay points out that,

558
00:32:44,360 --> 00:32:47,120
Speaker 1: like Earth, that has a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if

559
00:32:47,160 --> 00:32:48,640
Speaker 1: you're saying, wait a second, I thought we had an

560
00:32:48,640 --> 00:32:53,520
Speaker 1: oxygen atmosphere, oxygen is only about our atmospheric composition, about

561
00:32:53,600 --> 00:32:57,160
Speaker 1: seventy eight percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and if

562
00:32:57,200 --> 00:33:00,400
Speaker 1: our atmosphere were entirely oxygen, this would be a problem

563
00:33:00,480 --> 00:33:04,640
Speaker 1: for you at high concentrations at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen

564
00:33:04,680 --> 00:33:08,800
Speaker 1: pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy your lungs. As we mentioned,

565
00:33:09,240 --> 00:33:12,880
Speaker 1: it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure. Mackay compares it to

566
00:33:12,920 --> 00:33:15,479
Speaker 1: being under fifteen feet of water. That sounds about right,

567
00:33:15,520 --> 00:33:17,480
Speaker 1: compared to what you said right being at the bottoms.

568
00:33:19,200 --> 00:33:22,240
Speaker 1: So it's not like Venus, it's not like Mars. It's

569
00:33:22,280 --> 00:33:25,440
Speaker 1: it's not you know, it's not the nicest place to

570
00:33:25,480 --> 00:33:27,360
Speaker 1: be compared to what we're used to on Earth, but

571
00:33:27,520 --> 00:33:30,440
Speaker 1: it's closer to Earth than anything else we're aware of.

572
00:33:31,040 --> 00:33:35,160
Speaker 1: It has a hydrological cycle with clouds and rain storms.

573
00:33:35,200 --> 00:33:39,040
Speaker 1: Now this is crazy. Yeah, I I don't usually think

574
00:33:39,080 --> 00:33:42,000
Speaker 1: of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah, and here we're

575
00:33:42,000 --> 00:33:45,320
Speaker 1: talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane, of course,

576
00:33:45,560 --> 00:33:47,920
Speaker 1: So the methane is going to be H four raining

577
00:33:47,960 --> 00:33:51,520
Speaker 1: down from the sky. And speaking of methane, Titan is

578
00:33:51,640 --> 00:33:54,600
Speaker 1: rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean stuff that

579
00:33:54,640 --> 00:33:57,360
Speaker 1: we know to be alive or organic compounds are just

580
00:33:57,520 --> 00:34:00,320
Speaker 1: a sort of group name for carbon based com pounds

581
00:34:00,400 --> 00:34:03,960
Speaker 1: like methane that are very often associated with life, but

582
00:34:04,000 --> 00:34:06,320
Speaker 1: they exist independent of life. You don't have to have

583
00:34:06,480 --> 00:34:09,760
Speaker 1: life to make them, but if you want carbon based

584
00:34:09,760 --> 00:34:12,880
Speaker 1: life to exist, these compounds need to be around. But

585
00:34:12,920 --> 00:34:17,200
Speaker 1: the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth temperature

586
00:34:17,200 --> 00:34:20,520
Speaker 1: is almost two hundred degrees c integrated more than average

587
00:34:20,600 --> 00:34:25,920
Speaker 1: Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth.

588
00:34:26,000 --> 00:34:29,000
Speaker 1: All this stuff that you see going on on Earth,

589
00:34:29,719 --> 00:34:33,360
Speaker 1: you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere,

590
00:34:33,400 --> 00:34:36,400
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin

591
00:34:36,520 --> 00:34:39,839
Speaker 1: that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin. It's

592
00:34:39,880 --> 00:34:43,440
Speaker 1: the much colder cousin. And that kind of makes you

593
00:34:43,440 --> 00:34:47,480
Speaker 1: wonder if one of Earth's main features, life also has

594
00:34:47,520 --> 00:34:52,239
Speaker 1: a cold cousin. So this is a situation where we're

595
00:34:52,239 --> 00:34:54,919
Speaker 1: forced to to not dream of an entirely different form

596
00:34:54,960 --> 00:34:59,000
Speaker 1: of life, but to say life as we know it

597
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:03,399
Speaker 1: existing a slightly different world like but basically all things

598
00:35:03,440 --> 00:35:06,000
Speaker 1: being equal, if the parameters were skewed a little bit,

599
00:35:06,080 --> 00:35:09,960
Speaker 1: could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd

600
00:35:09,960 --> 00:35:11,680
Speaker 1: be life as we know it in one way but

601
00:35:11,760 --> 00:35:15,000
Speaker 1: not in another. So it would be carbon based life.

602
00:35:15,000 --> 00:35:17,280
Speaker 1: So it's life as we know it in that sense,

603
00:35:17,320 --> 00:35:19,319
Speaker 1: and we don't know of any other way that you

604
00:35:19,320 --> 00:35:22,800
Speaker 1: could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it

605
00:35:22,840 --> 00:35:26,239
Speaker 1: could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it

606
00:35:26,360 --> 00:35:29,479
Speaker 1: is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life

607
00:35:29,520 --> 00:35:34,080
Speaker 1: is water based, and this would be methane based, so

608
00:35:34,200 --> 00:35:38,359
Speaker 1: it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in

609
00:35:38,400 --> 00:35:40,960
Speaker 1: that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still

610
00:35:40,960 --> 00:35:43,440
Speaker 1: have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is

611
00:35:43,480 --> 00:35:46,480
Speaker 1: the only chemical basis we can think of for building

612
00:35:46,520 --> 00:35:49,680
Speaker 1: up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life.

613
00:35:50,040 --> 00:35:52,480
Speaker 1: So what did the the Huygens probe find when it

614
00:35:52,600 --> 00:35:56,120
Speaker 1: landed on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no,

615
00:35:56,360 --> 00:35:58,279
Speaker 1: because we would have heard about that, But it wasn't

616
00:35:58,280 --> 00:36:01,439
Speaker 1: equipped to find microbes. There could have been microbes there

617
00:36:01,440 --> 00:36:04,279
Speaker 1: and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it came

618
00:36:04,320 --> 00:36:08,400
Speaker 1: back so exactly. Um. And that might be a problem

619
00:36:08,440 --> 00:36:11,319
Speaker 1: if it did, because as as we now know, it's

620
00:36:11,400 --> 00:36:16,120
Speaker 1: very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But a

621
00:36:16,160 --> 00:36:18,920
Speaker 1: little bit about the science behind the Huygens probe. So

622
00:36:19,680 --> 00:36:23,320
Speaker 1: we when we sent the Huyggans probe to uh to Titan,

623
00:36:23,440 --> 00:36:26,200
Speaker 1: we built it sort of like a raft, as a

624
00:36:26,320 --> 00:36:30,800
Speaker 1: floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that Titan was

625
00:36:30,840 --> 00:36:33,760
Speaker 1: going to be covered in a in a surface wide

626
00:36:33,800 --> 00:36:36,799
Speaker 1: liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for this is

627
00:36:36,840 --> 00:36:40,160
Speaker 1: because they were able to detect previously that the atmosphere

628
00:36:40,360 --> 00:36:44,600
Speaker 1: was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane doesn't last forever.

629
00:36:44,680 --> 00:36:48,200
Speaker 1: It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from the Sun and

630
00:36:48,239 --> 00:36:51,640
Speaker 1: transformed into other compounds. So you can't have a methane

631
00:36:51,640 --> 00:36:54,400
Speaker 1: atmosphere that just hangs around for the entire lifetime of

632
00:36:54,440 --> 00:36:56,719
Speaker 1: a planet, you know, four billion years or however old

633
00:36:56,760 --> 00:37:00,080
Speaker 1: it is since Titan was formed, so there has to

634
00:37:00,120 --> 00:37:02,879
Speaker 1: be something on the surface to replenish it. And from

635
00:37:02,920 --> 00:37:05,799
Speaker 1: this they reasoned, it looks like there's liquid methane on

636
00:37:05,840 --> 00:37:09,080
Speaker 1: the surface of Titan which is slowly evaporating being processed

637
00:37:09,080 --> 00:37:13,279
Speaker 1: turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay,

638
00:37:13,320 --> 00:37:15,799
Speaker 1: we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll

639
00:37:15,800 --> 00:37:19,040
Speaker 1: see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it

640
00:37:19,120 --> 00:37:22,040
Speaker 1: dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something

641
00:37:22,080 --> 00:37:25,480
Speaker 1: more like a desert, but the probe was able to

642
00:37:25,520 --> 00:37:28,120
Speaker 1: detect that it was not as totally desert like as

643
00:37:28,160 --> 00:37:31,480
Speaker 1: it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft,

644
00:37:31,520 --> 00:37:35,040
Speaker 1: and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able

645
00:37:35,080 --> 00:37:38,359
Speaker 1: to notice that methane steam was coming out of the

646
00:37:38,400 --> 00:37:44,600
Speaker 1: soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay,

647
00:37:44,640 --> 00:37:49,360
Speaker 1: so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid

648
00:37:49,400 --> 00:37:53,200
Speaker 1: methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an

649
00:37:53,200 --> 00:37:56,120
Speaker 1: analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much

650
00:37:56,160 --> 00:37:59,680
Speaker 1: anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.

651
00:38:00,360 --> 00:38:03,280
Speaker 1: By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan,

652
00:38:03,400 --> 00:38:05,920
Speaker 1: we should be able to find it all over the place,

653
00:38:06,800 --> 00:38:09,200
Speaker 1: even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because

654
00:38:09,239 --> 00:38:11,919
Speaker 1: even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's

655
00:38:12,000 --> 00:38:14,920
Speaker 1: any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some

656
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:18,320
Speaker 1: kind of life. So in his lecture, Mackay asks, Okay,

657
00:38:18,360 --> 00:38:21,000
Speaker 1: so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives

658
00:38:21,000 --> 00:38:24,319
Speaker 1: in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we

659
00:38:24,400 --> 00:38:27,359
Speaker 1: be able to look for clues of this? And one

660
00:38:27,480 --> 00:38:30,280
Speaker 1: one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably

661
00:38:30,280 --> 00:38:33,800
Speaker 1: read about how in looking for exoplanets, they've theorized that

662
00:38:33,840 --> 00:38:36,239
Speaker 1: one way we could look for life on exoplanets is

663
00:38:36,320 --> 00:38:40,600
Speaker 1: by looking for oxygen, right, because the presence of anomalous

664
00:38:40,680 --> 00:38:44,080
Speaker 1: oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms, Like our

665
00:38:44,120 --> 00:38:49,280
Speaker 1: atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics of planetary formation.

666
00:38:49,360 --> 00:38:52,759
Speaker 1: That wasn't it wasn't like that when Earth was formed. Uh,

667
00:38:52,840 --> 00:38:56,319
Speaker 1: Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full of critters like

668
00:38:56,400 --> 00:39:02,040
Speaker 1: plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere of our planet exactly.

669
00:39:02,239 --> 00:39:05,000
Speaker 1: It's their waste, it's their waste products, their poop, you know.

670
00:39:05,239 --> 00:39:08,239
Speaker 1: So they there or I guess they're they're breathing out.

671
00:39:08,239 --> 00:39:09,879
Speaker 1: I don't know, however you want to phrase it. They

672
00:39:09,920 --> 00:39:12,520
Speaker 1: take in sunlight and CEO two. They use the energy

673
00:39:12,560 --> 00:39:14,560
Speaker 1: from the sunlight to split up the CEO two, make

674
00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:17,120
Speaker 1: body parts out of the carbon, and then spit out

675
00:39:17,160 --> 00:39:19,799
Speaker 1: the oxygen as a waste product. And so you could

676
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:23,200
Speaker 1: look at the original oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. Is this

677
00:39:23,440 --> 00:39:27,640
Speaker 1: mass poisoning event We just happen to be the kinds

678
00:39:27,680 --> 00:39:31,719
Speaker 1: of animals that evolved to thrive amidst this mass poisoning

679
00:39:31,880 --> 00:39:35,560
Speaker 1: and to work well with it. So how can we

680
00:39:35,600 --> 00:39:39,239
Speaker 1: look for similar clues on Titan. Well, you would have

681
00:39:39,320 --> 00:39:42,680
Speaker 1: to imagine what an organism that gets along in liquid

682
00:39:42,760 --> 00:39:46,560
Speaker 1: nitrogen to do to make a living. So you imagine

683
00:39:47,000 --> 00:39:49,640
Speaker 1: a carbon based life form that lives in liquid methane

684
00:39:49,680 --> 00:39:52,680
Speaker 1: and imagine how does it eat? What does it do? Well?

685
00:39:53,120 --> 00:39:56,000
Speaker 1: Titan has tons of compounds on it that make perfectly

686
00:39:56,040 --> 00:39:59,040
Speaker 1: good food. One one example would be acetylene, or another

687
00:39:59,040 --> 00:40:01,760
Speaker 1: would be ethane. So if you're an organism on Titan,

688
00:40:01,880 --> 00:40:04,480
Speaker 1: food is just all over the place. In McKay's words,

689
00:40:04,520 --> 00:40:08,120
Speaker 1: food is quote falling from the sky. It's not not

690
00:40:08,239 --> 00:40:11,080
Speaker 1: hard to get a meal there. But organisms like us

691
00:40:11,160 --> 00:40:14,040
Speaker 1: get energy by a combination of eating food. So taking

692
00:40:14,080 --> 00:40:17,640
Speaker 1: in these carbon based compounds and then breathing, taking an oxygen,

693
00:40:18,080 --> 00:40:21,280
Speaker 1: and then reacting that carbon and oxygen to create usable

694
00:40:21,400 --> 00:40:24,480
Speaker 1: energy and the molecules we need and the waste product

695
00:40:24,480 --> 00:40:28,960
Speaker 1: of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on Titan could perform

696
00:40:28,960 --> 00:40:32,600
Speaker 1: a pretty much analogous process by reacting carbon based compounds

697
00:40:32,600 --> 00:40:38,080
Speaker 1: and food with instead of oxygen hydrogen, and that would

698
00:40:38,080 --> 00:40:41,360
Speaker 1: create usable energy and then a waste product containing carbon

699
00:40:41,520 --> 00:40:46,560
Speaker 1: and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So, if there's

700
00:40:46,640 --> 00:40:49,200
Speaker 1: life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted that it

701
00:40:49,200 --> 00:40:52,279
Speaker 1: would probably alter the chemistry of the surface by depleting

702
00:40:52,320 --> 00:40:56,400
Speaker 1: it of the compounds it eats and breathes, like acetylene,

703
00:40:56,680 --> 00:41:00,960
Speaker 1: ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with that missing hydrogen,

704
00:41:01,040 --> 00:41:03,480
Speaker 1: so that there's hydrogen flowing down to the surface and

705
00:41:03,480 --> 00:41:07,719
Speaker 1: then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility is that some

706
00:41:07,840 --> 00:41:11,240
Speaker 1: kind of organism at the surface is consuming hydrogen spitting

707
00:41:11,280 --> 00:41:14,560
Speaker 1: out methane as part of its metabolism and respiration, and

708
00:41:14,600 --> 00:41:17,040
Speaker 1: that's how it gets along. Now we don't know. This

709
00:41:17,120 --> 00:41:19,520
Speaker 1: isn't proof, right, we don't know that there's something alive

710
00:41:19,560 --> 00:41:23,560
Speaker 1: on Titan, but but it definitely makes Titan worth a

711
00:41:23,560 --> 00:41:26,080
Speaker 1: closer look. I think we should send more probes, right

712
00:41:26,680 --> 00:41:29,440
Speaker 1: most definitely, we definitely we should definitely send more probes

713
00:41:29,719 --> 00:41:35,000
Speaker 1: because one reason is always more problem. One reason, of course,

714
00:41:35,120 --> 00:41:37,440
Speaker 1: is that you know, if we find and this is

715
00:41:37,440 --> 00:41:39,720
Speaker 1: something that McKay points out, is that if we find

716
00:41:39,960 --> 00:41:43,440
Speaker 1: life on Mars or Europe, current life, pass life, etcetera,

717
00:41:43,600 --> 00:41:46,080
Speaker 1: there's a chance that it's related to us, right, But

718
00:41:46,360 --> 00:41:50,920
Speaker 1: when in contemplating Titan, this would be an entirely different form,

719
00:41:50,960 --> 00:41:52,799
Speaker 1: it would be it would be unconnected to us because

720
00:41:52,800 --> 00:41:55,400
Speaker 1: it would be based on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean,

721
00:41:55,440 --> 00:41:59,000
Speaker 1: there's no liquid methane based biochemistry on that and then

722
00:41:59,000 --> 00:42:01,279
Speaker 1: and there probably couldn't be because Earth is just not

723
00:42:01,400 --> 00:42:04,399
Speaker 1: cold enough. Like we look at at Titan and say,

724
00:42:04,400 --> 00:42:06,840
Speaker 1: how could you live on a world that cold? But

725
00:42:07,239 --> 00:42:09,879
Speaker 1: any life form on Titan would look at Earth as

726
00:42:10,160 --> 00:42:12,480
Speaker 1: like like we look at Venus. You know, it's just

727
00:42:12,520 --> 00:42:16,759
Speaker 1: this unbearable hell of intense heat where you know, the

728
00:42:17,040 --> 00:42:19,279
Speaker 1: stuff you need to live, the liquid methane you need,

729
00:42:19,520 --> 00:42:22,440
Speaker 1: just it boils. You know, you can't you can't sustain it.

730
00:42:22,680 --> 00:42:25,600
Speaker 1: So anyway, we mentioned sending those probes, what what would

731
00:42:25,600 --> 00:42:28,040
Speaker 1: they look for if we did send probes, Well, McKay

732
00:42:28,080 --> 00:42:33,120
Speaker 1: suggests one thing, look for evidence of the chemistry of

733
00:42:33,239 --> 00:42:37,960
Speaker 1: life there. So the example he gives is that organisms

734
00:42:38,000 --> 00:42:41,280
Speaker 1: on Earth we get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult

735
00:42:41,280 --> 00:42:44,080
Speaker 1: for us to come by. So we have enzymes that

736
00:42:44,239 --> 00:42:48,960
Speaker 1: have to bust up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere

737
00:42:49,040 --> 00:42:52,319
Speaker 1: and make them into ammonia in h three. Now, on

738
00:42:52,320 --> 00:42:55,480
Speaker 1: a world like Titan, the problem wouldn't be getting uh,

739
00:42:56,040 --> 00:42:59,319
Speaker 1: getting nitrogen making ammonia. It would be getting oxygen because

740
00:42:59,360 --> 00:43:03,080
Speaker 1: there's no sygen available except that which is locked up

741
00:43:03,080 --> 00:43:05,319
Speaker 1: in the frozen H two oh, the water ice that

742
00:43:05,400 --> 00:43:09,480
Speaker 1: makes the rocky ground of this planet. So you'd see

743
00:43:09,560 --> 00:43:12,880
Speaker 1: organisms with enzymes for melting water ice and getting that

744
00:43:13,000 --> 00:43:15,759
Speaker 1: oxygen out of it. Uh. And then another thing he

745
00:43:15,800 --> 00:43:20,640
Speaker 1: finally suggests is to scoop up organic material from Titan

746
00:43:20,840 --> 00:43:25,200
Speaker 1: and then look for biases in the distribution of organic materials,

747
00:43:25,320 --> 00:43:29,560
Speaker 1: you know, so looking for molecules that are appearing and

748
00:43:29,719 --> 00:43:33,880
Speaker 1: anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained by inorganic chemistry, but

749
00:43:33,960 --> 00:43:36,160
Speaker 1: would be explained if you're looking at a place where

750
00:43:36,200 --> 00:43:41,040
Speaker 1: the chemistry of the surfaces being processed constantly by life forms.

751
00:43:42,160 --> 00:43:44,759
Speaker 1: But the idea of life on Titan is interesting to

752
00:43:44,800 --> 00:43:48,640
Speaker 1: me because of how cold it is, So we know

753
00:43:48,719 --> 00:43:52,319
Speaker 1: there's a basic correlation between heat and metabolism, right, so

754
00:43:52,719 --> 00:43:55,719
Speaker 1: a life form that lives on Titan is probably a

755
00:43:55,920 --> 00:44:01,880
Speaker 1: very slow moving form of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle,

756
00:44:02,000 --> 00:44:05,279
Speaker 1: slow evolution. And this kind of makes me wonder about

757
00:44:05,360 --> 00:44:09,640
Speaker 1: weird thought experiment extending out from this, what would intelligent

758
00:44:09,920 --> 00:44:14,000
Speaker 1: life that evolved on a freezing liquid methane world look like?

759
00:44:14,800 --> 00:44:17,839
Speaker 1: Because in many ways, I think our idea of intelligence

760
00:44:17,920 --> 00:44:22,920
Speaker 1: is heavily colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine

761
00:44:22,920 --> 00:44:26,800
Speaker 1: an organism that has as much technological and problem solving

762
00:44:26,840 --> 00:44:30,800
Speaker 1: intelligence as a human but does everything literally one hundred

763
00:44:30,920 --> 00:44:37,319
Speaker 1: times slower, but potentially living a lot longer as well.

764
00:44:38,120 --> 00:44:41,439
Speaker 1: So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative. Then

765
00:44:41,920 --> 00:44:45,360
Speaker 1: I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate,

766
00:44:48,200 --> 00:44:50,879
Speaker 1: Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not

767
00:44:51,239 --> 00:44:54,840
Speaker 1: a like whale sloth in this scenario, and then wondering,

768
00:44:54,880 --> 00:44:57,759
Speaker 1: and then it's even a greater leap for me to

769
00:44:57,800 --> 00:45:02,920
Speaker 1: try to imagine this alien ethane based whale sloth even

770
00:45:03,160 --> 00:45:07,560
Speaker 1: developing crude technology on this world. Like right, It's just

771
00:45:07,640 --> 00:45:11,600
Speaker 1: it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean

772
00:45:11,680 --> 00:45:15,920
Speaker 1: sirens obviously, Oh yeah, well let us not speak of

773
00:45:15,960 --> 00:45:20,200
Speaker 1: the sirens of Titan. But I I agree with you

774
00:45:20,239 --> 00:45:23,400
Speaker 1: about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale sloth

775
00:45:23,520 --> 00:45:27,319
Speaker 1: like um, And I just tried to do some math here,

776
00:45:27,480 --> 00:45:31,640
Speaker 1: like if a development happened in humans one million years

777
00:45:31,680 --> 00:45:35,160
Speaker 1: after the emergence of the species. Could you expect a

778
00:45:35,239 --> 00:45:38,960
Speaker 1: hypothetical liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred

779
00:45:38,960 --> 00:45:42,600
Speaker 1: times slower to reach the same development in a hundred

780
00:45:42,640 --> 00:45:45,920
Speaker 1: million years. Well, that wouldn't be ruled out by the

781
00:45:45,960 --> 00:45:49,480
Speaker 1: age of the universe. But then that sort of introduces

782
00:45:49,560 --> 00:45:51,560
Speaker 1: questions about like, well, wait a minute, I mean, how

783
00:45:51,560 --> 00:45:54,640
Speaker 1: would you even get a complex nervous system. Because it

784
00:45:54,680 --> 00:45:57,040
Speaker 1: took life on Earth what like four billion years to

785
00:45:57,120 --> 00:46:01,239
Speaker 1: evolve from the first self replicating molecules to logical intelligence,

786
00:46:01,560 --> 00:46:04,000
Speaker 1: So would it take life on a cold planet four

787
00:46:04,160 --> 00:46:07,759
Speaker 1: hundred billion years? Uh? And again I'm just using a

788
00:46:07,800 --> 00:46:11,080
Speaker 1: hundred times faster or a hundred times slower as a hypothetical.

789
00:46:11,120 --> 00:46:14,160
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly how slower it would be, but

790
00:46:14,320 --> 00:46:16,480
Speaker 1: if it would take something like that long, we've got

791
00:46:16,480 --> 00:46:18,520
Speaker 1: a lot of a long time to wait before we

792
00:46:18,560 --> 00:46:21,560
Speaker 1: meet these slow moving organisms, because that's much older than

793
00:46:21,600 --> 00:46:24,080
Speaker 1: the universe. Yeah, and again, to say nothing of the

794
00:46:24,160 --> 00:46:27,680
Speaker 1: various cataclysms and extinction events that are likely to out

795
00:46:27,800 --> 00:46:32,400
Speaker 1: to occur in the history of any light sustaining, life

796
00:46:32,440 --> 00:46:35,680
Speaker 1: evolving world. So it might very well be on the

797
00:46:36,000 --> 00:46:40,080
Speaker 1: path towards creating this and then whammouh, some some body

798
00:46:40,320 --> 00:46:45,640
Speaker 1: uh in Saturn's gravitational system just crashes into you and

799
00:46:45,640 --> 00:46:48,759
Speaker 1: wipes everything out. Yeah, but then again, I also think

800
00:46:48,800 --> 00:46:52,360
Speaker 1: of a very slow organism as a very resilient organism,

801
00:46:52,400 --> 00:46:55,440
Speaker 1: you know, which is hard to put them down. Yeah

802
00:46:55,440 --> 00:46:58,839
Speaker 1: that you know the right comments, comments, strike the right

803
00:46:58,920 --> 00:47:04,439
Speaker 1: the right meteor and certainly do that. Has anybody ever

804
00:47:04,480 --> 00:47:06,920
Speaker 1: created a sci fi alien like that? I'm trying to

805
00:47:06,960 --> 00:47:10,400
Speaker 1: think of one, Like an alien that's just amazingly slow.

806
00:47:12,600 --> 00:47:15,359
Speaker 1: The ants sort of sort of like the ants. Yeah,

807
00:47:15,360 --> 00:47:19,719
Speaker 1: I'm I'm not remembering one off hand. They tend to

808
00:47:19,760 --> 00:47:22,280
Speaker 1: be this kind of alien would tend to be the

809
00:47:22,280 --> 00:47:26,360
Speaker 1: the the the marginally experienced alien in a in a

810
00:47:26,440 --> 00:47:32,520
Speaker 1: rather rich diverse pantheon of alien species like this would

811
00:47:32,560 --> 00:47:35,800
Speaker 1: not be your central character because they're so unlike humans.

812
00:47:35,800 --> 00:47:38,759
Speaker 1: This would be like the one character that you go to, uh,

813
00:47:38,800 --> 00:47:41,200
Speaker 1: you know, about halfway through the novel to get a

814
00:47:41,200 --> 00:47:45,200
Speaker 1: little elder inside. I guess, well, it makes me think

815
00:47:45,280 --> 00:47:48,320
Speaker 1: that there there'd be a great creeping menace because imagine

816
00:47:48,360 --> 00:47:52,520
Speaker 1: you colonize the world with some hundred times slower than

817
00:47:52,560 --> 00:47:57,640
Speaker 1: you cold cold liquid methane intelligent organisms, and at first

818
00:47:57,680 --> 00:47:59,799
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem like they're bothered by your presence. You

819
00:47:59,800 --> 00:48:02,200
Speaker 1: can live in peaceful harmony. But it just took them

820
00:48:02,239 --> 00:48:04,560
Speaker 1: a hundred years to decide that they were going to

821
00:48:04,640 --> 00:48:07,960
Speaker 1: destroy you. Yeah, they would play a different you know,

822
00:48:08,040 --> 00:48:11,080
Speaker 1: long term game. Uh. And so I certainly I have

823
00:48:11,160 --> 00:48:15,200
Speaker 1: encountered that in fantasy novels before, or what happens when

824
00:48:15,280 --> 00:48:18,880
Speaker 1: you have the great threat does not have to that

825
00:48:18,920 --> 00:48:20,839
Speaker 1: doesn't have to worry about the day to day, even

826
00:48:20,960 --> 00:48:22,879
Speaker 1: year to year. I can sleep for centuries and wait

827
00:48:22,920 --> 00:48:26,840
Speaker 1: for the game, the game board to improve and the

828
00:48:26,960 --> 00:48:30,960
Speaker 1: situations to favor it once more. So you know, you

829
00:48:30,960 --> 00:48:33,920
Speaker 1: could see a similar model, I guess, uh with you know,

830
00:48:34,200 --> 00:48:40,640
Speaker 1: interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then the great disadvantage we're

831
00:48:40,680 --> 00:48:42,880
Speaker 1: always at we gotta go get the groceries. Yeah, so

832
00:48:43,000 --> 00:48:44,799
Speaker 1: they can say, you know what, we can lose the

833
00:48:44,840 --> 00:48:50,000
Speaker 1: next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us, that's

834
00:48:50,040 --> 00:48:56,719
Speaker 1: just that's just a nap, it's small hyperions. One last

835
00:48:56,719 --> 00:48:58,480
Speaker 1: thing I want to talk about for and we mentioned

836
00:48:58,520 --> 00:49:02,440
Speaker 1: future probes going to Titen. Definitely in favor of that titan.

837
00:49:02,680 --> 00:49:05,799
Speaker 1: Last I heard was not the top priority for for

838
00:49:05,920 --> 00:49:09,560
Speaker 1: future missions, but it's you know, it's something that's being

839
00:49:09,560 --> 00:49:13,400
Speaker 1: discussed and there are some proposals. But one proposal for

840
00:49:13,560 --> 00:49:17,279
Speaker 1: future exploration of Titans surface is the use of a

841
00:49:17,360 --> 00:49:19,920
Speaker 1: type of robot that I think is really interesting. It's

842
00:49:19,920 --> 00:49:22,920
Speaker 1: been referred to in the press as the super ball bot,

843
00:49:23,880 --> 00:49:26,040
Speaker 1: but I I like the design of this. I've talked

844
00:49:26,040 --> 00:49:28,800
Speaker 1: about it on the other podcast I do forward thinking before.

845
00:49:28,880 --> 00:49:32,400
Speaker 1: But the robot design is a rover that's based on

846
00:49:32,440 --> 00:49:36,160
Speaker 1: what's called tin Segreti architecture, and essentially it is a

847
00:49:36,200 --> 00:49:40,359
Speaker 1: mobile robot that looks like a jumble of rods and wires.

848
00:49:40,400 --> 00:49:43,320
Speaker 1: So if you just made a tangled ball of sticks

849
00:49:43,320 --> 00:49:46,239
Speaker 1: and wires connecting them at the ends, that's what it

850
00:49:46,280 --> 00:49:49,120
Speaker 1: would look like. And it moves by tensing and relaxing

851
00:49:49,120 --> 00:49:51,920
Speaker 1: the wires, so it kind of tumbles along on the

852
00:49:51,960 --> 00:49:57,400
Speaker 1: ground exactly. And it's resistant to damage from hard landings

853
00:49:57,400 --> 00:49:59,880
Speaker 1: and stuff, so that this makes it an interesting to

854
00:50:00,080 --> 00:50:03,920
Speaker 1: sign for a planetary rover to explore. But I've also

855
00:50:03,960 --> 00:50:05,759
Speaker 1: always thought this would be a great design for a

856
00:50:05,840 --> 00:50:08,560
Speaker 1: killer robot in the sci fi horror movie, like just this,

857
00:50:08,560 --> 00:50:12,000
Speaker 1: this tangle of rods and wires and it's kind of cute,

858
00:50:12,040 --> 00:50:13,960
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny. It just kind of tumbles up

859
00:50:14,000 --> 00:50:16,720
Speaker 1: to you, but then it wraps around you and tense.

860
00:50:16,760 --> 00:50:20,560
Speaker 1: It's the wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know,

861
00:50:20,600 --> 00:50:22,920
Speaker 1: it makes sense because there's at least one killer robot

862
00:50:22,960 --> 00:50:26,040
Speaker 1: movie that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn

863
00:50:26,080 --> 00:50:30,120
Speaker 1: three Um had Kirk Douglass in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk,

864
00:50:30,320 --> 00:50:32,080
Speaker 1: this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too,

865
00:50:32,480 --> 00:50:35,680
Speaker 1: and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking

866
00:50:35,800 --> 00:50:39,440
Speaker 1: very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah,

867
00:50:39,520 --> 00:50:44,239
Speaker 1: he's he's not his least sleazy roll I think, and

868
00:50:44,280 --> 00:50:47,080
Speaker 1: the kind of Flash Gordon asthetic and he actually looks

869
00:50:47,120 --> 00:50:49,480
Speaker 1: good in it. Yeah, fair Faucet in it as well.

870
00:50:49,840 --> 00:50:51,600
Speaker 1: And that has a killer robot in it, not the

871
00:50:51,600 --> 00:50:55,920
Speaker 1: greatest killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars

872
00:50:55,920 --> 00:50:58,480
Speaker 1: can't be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that

873
00:50:58,560 --> 00:51:01,920
Speaker 1: involve the Moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're

874
00:51:01,920 --> 00:51:05,600
Speaker 1: coming up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after

875
00:51:05,719 --> 00:51:08,360
Speaker 1: Titan Raya is gonna seem like kind of a let down,

876
00:51:08,760 --> 00:51:12,279
Speaker 1: Raya or Rhea. I've seen it, said Ria. Also, so Ria,

877
00:51:13,560 --> 00:51:16,480
Speaker 1: I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of

878
00:51:16,520 --> 00:51:18,879
Speaker 1: this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon

879
00:51:18,920 --> 00:51:22,160
Speaker 1: of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being

880
00:51:22,160 --> 00:51:25,319
Speaker 1: the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more

881
00:51:25,360 --> 00:51:30,120
Speaker 1: than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh.

882
00:51:30,160 --> 00:51:32,480
Speaker 1: In terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot

883
00:51:32,520 --> 00:51:36,200
Speaker 1: going on here. It's it's and the sort of almost

884
00:51:36,239 --> 00:51:40,360
Speaker 1: half lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively

885
00:51:40,440 --> 00:51:43,480
Speaker 1: low density. In many ways, it's comparable to the next

886
00:51:43,520 --> 00:51:47,880
Speaker 1: moon we're gonna passdone. And as far as surface features go,

887
00:51:48,120 --> 00:51:52,720
Speaker 1: it's got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere,

888
00:51:53,280 --> 00:51:56,879
Speaker 1: cratered in silent and in a far on a far

889
00:51:57,000 --> 00:52:00,960
Speaker 1: lesser note, apparently the latest Independence Day and Dependence Day

890
00:52:01,719 --> 00:52:06,120
Speaker 1: resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building

891
00:52:06,120 --> 00:52:08,560
Speaker 1: at the fenced outpost here. So I don't know why.

892
00:52:08,760 --> 00:52:11,880
Speaker 1: Maybe it just seems like a nice boring place to

893
00:52:11,920 --> 00:52:15,759
Speaker 1: put all those guns. I suppose, you know, there's sort

894
00:52:15,760 --> 00:52:18,359
Speaker 1: of like a if you pronounce it ray uh. That's

895
00:52:18,360 --> 00:52:22,280
Speaker 1: sort of like ray ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense.

896
00:52:22,760 --> 00:52:25,160
Speaker 1: That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It

897
00:52:25,200 --> 00:52:28,840
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense.

898
00:52:29,600 --> 00:52:34,320
Speaker 1: Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione,

899
00:52:34,280 --> 00:52:38,239
Speaker 1: as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of

900
00:52:38,239 --> 00:52:43,399
Speaker 1: about three five kilometers, and what we're looking at here

901
00:52:43,480 --> 00:52:47,600
Speaker 1: is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably

902
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:51,239
Speaker 1: a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is

903
00:52:51,320 --> 00:52:55,239
Speaker 1: just ice water ice. Yeah, a very fine ice powder

904
00:52:55,400 --> 00:53:00,400
Speaker 1: that's basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring can instantly

905
00:53:00,520 --> 00:53:03,920
Speaker 1: bombards Diony, and the dust from the e ring ultimately

906
00:53:04,000 --> 00:53:07,200
Speaker 1: comes from Enceladus, which has prominent guys are activity that

907
00:53:07,200 --> 00:53:12,200
Speaker 1: we discuss in a bet. Great wisps mar the surface

908
00:53:12,280 --> 00:53:15,480
Speaker 1: of Dionne and uh, these turn out these are actually

909
00:53:15,520 --> 00:53:21,040
Speaker 1: bright canyon ice walls indicating past tectonic activity, and these

910
00:53:21,080 --> 00:53:24,359
Speaker 1: ice cliffs could be a mature phase of the so

911
00:53:24,440 --> 00:53:28,000
Speaker 1: called tiger stripes that are encountered on Enceladus. Right, So

912
00:53:28,040 --> 00:53:30,200
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about the surface of Enceladus in a bit.

913
00:53:30,200 --> 00:53:33,480
Speaker 1: But Enceladus is a is a younger, smoother kind of

914
00:53:33,480 --> 00:53:36,080
Speaker 1: surface but it does have these stripes along it. So

915
00:53:36,120 --> 00:53:38,840
Speaker 1: you're saying like, if if Enceladus were allowed to mature

916
00:53:39,080 --> 00:53:42,239
Speaker 1: millions more years, it could end up looking more like

917
00:53:42,280 --> 00:53:44,560
Speaker 1: some of the surface features of Dion. Yeah, this is

918
00:53:44,640 --> 00:53:48,480
Speaker 1: essentially the old boring uh inencellatus. But nothing nothing in

919
00:53:48,480 --> 00:53:51,240
Speaker 1: the sphere of Saturn is boring. No, no, not boring,

920
00:53:51,320 --> 00:53:55,640
Speaker 1: but the the the less interesting version of the same

921
00:53:55,840 --> 00:53:58,840
Speaker 1: lunar idea. I guess we are spiraling in faster and

922
00:53:58,840 --> 00:54:02,759
Speaker 1: it's something we've gotta acknowledge. Now. The next one is

923
00:54:02,800 --> 00:54:05,160
Speaker 1: going to be the moon teeth this or teth this

924
00:54:05,520 --> 00:54:09,799
Speaker 1: uh so teeth. This is about sixty five of the

925
00:54:09,840 --> 00:54:13,160
Speaker 1: mass of the dwarf planet series. It's pretty small, roughly

926
00:54:14,040 --> 00:54:17,640
Speaker 1: of the width of Earth's Moon, roughly spherical. There's not

927
00:54:17,719 --> 00:54:20,960
Speaker 1: a lot of suspected potential for endogenous life on teeth this,

928
00:54:21,320 --> 00:54:24,280
Speaker 1: uh and and teeth. This is composed mostly of water

929
00:54:24,400 --> 00:54:28,320
Speaker 1: ice with no real atmosphere. Is this frozen ice ball

930
00:54:28,360 --> 00:54:32,840
Speaker 1: tidally locked in orbit around Saturn. But the coolest feature

931
00:54:33,000 --> 00:54:36,400
Speaker 1: of teeth. This is something that I came across I

932
00:54:36,440 --> 00:54:39,600
Speaker 1: think last year. I was reading about this and I

933
00:54:40,680 --> 00:54:42,799
Speaker 1: I just love it. I'm not quite sure why. It's

934
00:54:42,840 --> 00:54:48,320
Speaker 1: just a surface coloration feature. But in July, NASA reported

935
00:54:48,360 --> 00:54:52,680
Speaker 1: that in enhanced color images from the Cassini spacecraft there

936
00:54:52,719 --> 00:54:55,840
Speaker 1: were a series of these arc shaped red streaks that

937
00:54:55,880 --> 00:54:59,200
Speaker 1: could be seen side by side parallel on the surface

938
00:54:59,280 --> 00:55:03,520
Speaker 1: of teeth Us, and it looks like Freddy Krueger slashed

939
00:55:03,520 --> 00:55:06,319
Speaker 1: the moon with his glove. It wasn't the first time

940
00:55:06,360 --> 00:55:09,000
Speaker 1: the arcs had been seen. They've been spotted faintly visibly

941
00:55:09,080 --> 00:55:11,719
Speaker 1: as early as two thousand four, I think, but this

942
00:55:11,800 --> 00:55:14,719
Speaker 1: was the first time they were imaged really clearly. And

943
00:55:14,800 --> 00:55:18,719
Speaker 1: it's fascinating because we were not positive at what causes them,

944
00:55:18,719 --> 00:55:20,399
Speaker 1: at least as far as I could find, and maybe

945
00:55:20,400 --> 00:55:22,920
Speaker 1: somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't

946
00:55:22,960 --> 00:55:27,080
Speaker 1: find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young,

947
00:55:27,239 --> 00:55:31,640
Speaker 1: these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters,

948
00:55:32,480 --> 00:55:35,640
Speaker 1: But what created them and why are they red in color?

949
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:38,840
Speaker 1: Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press

950
00:55:38,880 --> 00:55:43,200
Speaker 1: release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be

951
00:55:43,239 --> 00:55:46,960
Speaker 1: maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities where

952
00:55:47,000 --> 00:55:49,680
Speaker 1: they could be out gassing from inside teeth This, but

953
00:55:49,840 --> 00:55:52,879
Speaker 1: ultimately we don't know yet. All right, well, let's leave

954
00:55:52,960 --> 00:55:55,399
Speaker 1: this moon behind us and move on to uh one

955
00:55:55,400 --> 00:55:58,160
Speaker 1: of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that

956
00:55:58,320 --> 00:56:03,680
Speaker 1: is Enceladus Une about the size of Arizona. Yes, could

957
00:56:03,680 --> 00:56:06,560
Speaker 1: fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to to

958
00:56:06,719 --> 00:56:10,720
Speaker 1: imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not very large,

959
00:56:11,120 --> 00:56:12,799
Speaker 1: is that if you were to punch a hole in

960
00:56:12,840 --> 00:56:15,160
Speaker 1: the earth along the borders of the state of Texas,

961
00:56:15,280 --> 00:56:17,160
Speaker 1: you could drop And why would you want to do that? Why?

962
00:56:17,280 --> 00:56:19,080
Speaker 1: So down on it. But just if you were to

963
00:56:19,200 --> 00:56:21,880
Speaker 1: do it, take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter

964
00:56:22,000 --> 00:56:24,880
Speaker 1: punched out that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus

965
00:56:24,960 --> 00:56:28,080
Speaker 1: through the whole. So, coming after some of the giants

966
00:56:28,160 --> 00:56:31,560
Speaker 1: we've seen like Titan and and Rhea, you might be

967
00:56:31,640 --> 00:56:35,400
Speaker 1: kind of underwhelmed by its size, But do not be underwhelmed,

968
00:56:35,440 --> 00:56:38,920
Speaker 1: because Enceladus is quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy

969
00:56:38,920 --> 00:56:44,320
Speaker 1: features here is that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor,

970
00:56:44,400 --> 00:56:48,040
Speaker 1: and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy

971
00:56:48,080 --> 00:56:52,520
Speaker 1: crust of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds,

972
00:56:52,640 --> 00:56:57,040
Speaker 1: volatile gases, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica, and

973
00:56:57,040 --> 00:57:00,440
Speaker 1: it's all expelled out to a distance three times the

974
00:57:00,560 --> 00:57:03,279
Speaker 1: radius of insult Us and at a speed of approximately

975
00:57:03,280 --> 00:57:06,440
Speaker 1: eight hundred miles per hour or four per second. It's

976
00:57:06,440 --> 00:57:11,359
Speaker 1: a continuous eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh.

977
00:57:11,400 --> 00:57:14,720
Speaker 1: And it cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo

978
00:57:14,840 --> 00:57:18,480
Speaker 1: of fine ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's

979
00:57:18,480 --> 00:57:21,040
Speaker 1: ear ring, which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear

980
00:57:21,120 --> 00:57:24,280
Speaker 1: ring is this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those

981
00:57:24,280 --> 00:57:27,200
Speaker 1: concentrated inner rings. That the ear ring is more this

982
00:57:27,320 --> 00:57:33,240
Speaker 1: great vast haze extend extending outward, uh from from Saturn.

983
00:57:33,400 --> 00:57:36,320
Speaker 1: And it's uh oh oh, it's cool. I love the

984
00:57:36,640 --> 00:57:39,200
Speaker 1: jets coming out of the south pole of this planet

985
00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:42,320
Speaker 1: feeding this. And there's an even cooler implication I want

986
00:57:42,320 --> 00:57:45,280
Speaker 1: to mention in a bit. But there's another striking feature

987
00:57:45,280 --> 00:57:49,320
Speaker 1: of Insulatus that you would notice long before your spacecraft

988
00:57:49,360 --> 00:57:52,640
Speaker 1: sets down if you're landing on the planet. Enceladus is

989
00:57:52,680 --> 00:57:56,320
Speaker 1: the most reflective large object in the entire Solar System.

990
00:57:56,440 --> 00:58:00,080
Speaker 1: It's like a bright mirror reflecting the sun straight it

991
00:58:00,160 --> 00:58:05,600
Speaker 1: into your eyes, and Enceladus may be alive, not the

992
00:58:05,640 --> 00:58:09,240
Speaker 1: planet itself as we discussed with the Appetus, but but

993
00:58:09,560 --> 00:58:12,240
Speaker 1: something within the planet. So Enceladus is believed to have

994
00:58:12,280 --> 00:58:16,880
Speaker 1: a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high, highly reflective

995
00:58:16,920 --> 00:58:20,880
Speaker 1: ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates the presence

996
00:58:20,920 --> 00:58:26,000
Speaker 1: of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we observed around Jupiter. Now,

997
00:58:26,040 --> 00:58:29,560
Speaker 1: I've seen claims of both global subterranean oceans and regional

998
00:58:29,800 --> 00:58:33,960
Speaker 1: regional subterranean seas positioned under the south pole um. But

999
00:58:34,040 --> 00:58:38,080
Speaker 1: either way, the ocean has started to become intensely interesting

1000
00:58:38,120 --> 00:58:43,440
Speaker 1: to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now why is that, Well, we've

1001
00:58:43,480 --> 00:58:47,080
Speaker 1: seen examples before where these where these subworld oceans. I mean,

1002
00:58:47,560 --> 00:58:49,960
Speaker 1: we have liquid water and then clearly we have we

1003
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:52,360
Speaker 1: have jets of it, we have we have activity going

1004
00:58:52,360 --> 00:58:55,840
Speaker 1: on here, there's energy taking place, there's warmth and with

1005
00:58:56,040 --> 00:58:59,200
Speaker 1: liquid and there, and there are important compounds as you

1006
00:58:59,240 --> 00:59:01,760
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes coming out of the

1007
00:59:01,760 --> 00:59:06,240
Speaker 1: southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again, the Cassini spacecraft

1008
00:59:06,280 --> 00:59:14,080
Speaker 1: detected organic compounds carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica, volatile gases. Uh,

1009
00:59:14,120 --> 00:59:16,760
Speaker 1: that's good stuff. If you look on live, going right

1010
00:59:16,800 --> 00:59:19,960
Speaker 1: down the list, checking off many of the key factors

1011
00:59:20,000 --> 00:59:25,200
Speaker 1: necessary for life as we know it. But do we

1012
00:59:25,280 --> 00:59:28,080
Speaker 1: know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing. The

1013
00:59:28,120 --> 00:59:31,720
Speaker 1: Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander.

1014
00:59:31,760 --> 00:59:35,480
Speaker 1: It's not equipped to detect the presence of life, but

1015
00:59:35,520 --> 00:59:38,800
Speaker 1: it can, it can look for clues. Uh So the

1016
00:59:39,040 --> 00:59:42,960
Speaker 1: material and these plumes go all over the place, sometimes

1017
00:59:43,000 --> 00:59:46,400
Speaker 1: it falls back down to Enceladus forms this filmy mist

1018
00:59:46,480 --> 00:59:49,880
Speaker 1: in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's e ring.

1019
00:59:50,240 --> 00:59:52,280
Speaker 1: And I'd just like to point out that if I

1020
00:59:52,360 --> 00:59:55,440
Speaker 1: understand this correctly, if it turns out there is life

1021
00:59:55,680 --> 00:59:59,960
Speaker 1: in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably being spray

1022
01:00:00,200 --> 01:00:04,160
Speaker 1: out in these jets. And if the jets become Saturn's

1023
01:00:04,240 --> 01:00:07,760
Speaker 1: e ring, one of the rings of Saturn is a

1024
01:00:07,800 --> 01:00:12,520
Speaker 1: graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of miles

1025
01:00:12,520 --> 01:00:15,840
Speaker 1: into space. That is crazy to think of it that way.

1026
01:00:16,880 --> 01:00:21,280
Speaker 1: It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy. Either way,

1027
01:00:20,760 --> 01:00:24,720
Speaker 1: I think that's great. So much like Titan to do

1028
01:00:24,840 --> 01:00:29,200
Speaker 1: the real exploration and discovery work about the potential for

1029
01:00:29,320 --> 01:00:32,720
Speaker 1: life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got to get

1030
01:00:32,760 --> 01:00:36,520
Speaker 1: back there. And I actually just recently read a piece

1031
01:00:36,520 --> 01:00:39,560
Speaker 1: in Scientific American that was talking about one of the

1032
01:00:39,560 --> 01:00:42,080
Speaker 1: people who's working on trying to plan such a mission,

1033
01:00:42,160 --> 01:00:46,680
Speaker 1: the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of mission obviously

1034
01:00:46,760 --> 01:00:49,560
Speaker 1: is not easy to devise or or too fund But

1035
01:00:49,920 --> 01:00:52,840
Speaker 1: best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe, as

1036
01:00:52,880 --> 01:00:55,480
Speaker 1: we as we leave this moon and make our way

1037
01:00:55,520 --> 01:01:00,360
Speaker 1: towards our next and final destination here our final object

1038
01:01:00,360 --> 01:01:02,840
Speaker 1: of study, I do want to stress what you're about

1039
01:01:02,880 --> 01:01:05,919
Speaker 1: to look at is not a death star. It's a moon.

1040
01:01:06,000 --> 01:01:09,280
Speaker 1: It's not space station, it's a moon. Um, I'm talking

1041
01:01:09,280 --> 01:01:11,600
Speaker 1: of course about Mimus. Then why are we called an

1042
01:01:11,640 --> 01:01:16,440
Speaker 1: instructor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions then for

1043
01:01:16,440 --> 01:01:20,440
Speaker 1: for minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus is big

1044
01:01:20,800 --> 01:01:24,160
Speaker 1: claim to fame. Is it's just a frozen moon that

1045
01:01:24,240 --> 01:01:26,760
Speaker 1: looks a lot like the Death Star from Star Wars.

1046
01:01:26,960 --> 01:01:29,240
Speaker 1: It's got this big crater that looks a lot like

1047
01:01:29,280 --> 01:01:31,880
Speaker 1: the weapon. What would you call it the crater in

1048
01:01:31,920 --> 01:01:35,919
Speaker 1: the Death Star from which the planet destroying beam comes out? Yeah, yeah,

1049
01:01:35,920 --> 01:01:39,920
Speaker 1: an enormous crater uh known as the Herschel Crater. It

1050
01:01:40,000 --> 01:01:42,760
Speaker 1: is a hundred thirty kilometers or eighty miles. While it

1051
01:01:42,840 --> 01:01:46,600
Speaker 1: dominates the landscape, giving the world's appearance the world an

1052
01:01:46,600 --> 01:01:49,760
Speaker 1: appearance of a great eye. Uh. The crater covered Moon

1053
01:01:49,880 --> 01:01:54,760
Speaker 1: is less than one miles and kilometers in mean radius.

1054
01:01:54,960 --> 01:01:58,479
Speaker 1: It has roughly the land area of Spain. Not very big.

1055
01:01:58,520 --> 01:02:02,120
Speaker 1: The not very big, and again, most of this visible

1056
01:02:02,160 --> 01:02:05,040
Speaker 1: side is crater. It's not perfectly round either, more of

1057
01:02:05,120 --> 01:02:08,120
Speaker 1: an an ovoid. The shape and it's a low density

1058
01:02:08,160 --> 01:02:11,840
Speaker 1: suggest that it's consists almost entirely of water ice, which

1059
01:02:11,840 --> 01:02:15,360
Speaker 1: is the the only substance we've ever detected on Mimus.

1060
01:02:15,600 --> 01:02:19,320
Speaker 1: It's tidally locked. And this is crazy. It's it's believed

1061
01:02:19,360 --> 01:02:23,600
Speaker 1: that the impact that created the Herschel crater probably came

1062
01:02:23,640 --> 01:02:27,280
Speaker 1: close to just shattering it entirely. That's how because you know,

1063
01:02:27,320 --> 01:02:30,080
Speaker 1: a crater that big on a world this small, Uh,

1064
01:02:30,120 --> 01:02:31,800
Speaker 1: you know, it was just a hair away from just

1065
01:02:31,960 --> 01:02:35,080
Speaker 1: breaking it into pieces. So should that have happened, would

1066
01:02:35,080 --> 01:02:41,240
Speaker 1: it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah? And

1067
01:02:41,480 --> 01:02:43,800
Speaker 1: I don't know exactly how the ring formation works, so

1068
01:02:43,880 --> 01:02:47,600
Speaker 1: we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else,

1069
01:02:47,640 --> 01:02:50,280
Speaker 1: it might end up resembling you know, one of like

1070
01:02:50,320 --> 01:02:53,240
Speaker 1: the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we

1071
01:02:53,360 --> 01:02:56,240
Speaker 1: might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be

1072
01:02:56,280 --> 01:02:58,040
Speaker 1: a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh

1073
01:02:58,160 --> 01:03:02,280
Speaker 1: those other lump moons that are not discussing in this episode,

1074
01:03:02,360 --> 01:03:05,600
Speaker 1: you know, among the among the fifty three named moons

1075
01:03:05,640 --> 01:03:08,760
Speaker 1: of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things about Mimus, though,

1076
01:03:08,880 --> 01:03:14,320
Speaker 1: is that it should experience more tidal heating than Enceladus.

1077
01:03:14,480 --> 01:03:17,520
Speaker 1: And yet while that frozen world, as we discussed both

1078
01:03:17,560 --> 01:03:21,960
Speaker 1: geysers and h and and clearly experiences internal heat, Mimus

1079
01:03:22,040 --> 01:03:24,800
Speaker 1: is just an unchanging waste land of ice. Oh yeah,

1080
01:03:24,840 --> 01:03:27,200
Speaker 1: we should have mentioned about enceladusts. I think I forgot

1081
01:03:27,200 --> 01:03:30,160
Speaker 1: to mention that the the what is the energy source?

1082
01:03:30,240 --> 01:03:32,160
Speaker 1: You know, why is there? Well, it's some of the

1083
01:03:32,200 --> 01:03:34,320
Speaker 1: same explanations that we saw in some of the moons

1084
01:03:34,360 --> 01:03:38,680
Speaker 1: of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by the orbit

1085
01:03:38,720 --> 01:03:41,920
Speaker 1: and gravitational influence around it. So it's got a not

1086
01:03:42,080 --> 01:03:46,560
Speaker 1: perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields, and this

1087
01:03:46,680 --> 01:03:50,720
Speaker 1: causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads to heat. Yeah,

1088
01:03:50,880 --> 01:03:53,640
Speaker 1: a lot of kinds of comparisons are often made between

1089
01:03:53,880 --> 01:03:56,280
Speaker 1: what we know about Enceladus and what we know about Mimus,

1090
01:03:57,360 --> 01:04:00,440
Speaker 1: to the degree that some have speculated on the assability

1091
01:04:00,480 --> 01:04:03,920
Speaker 1: of a liquid ocean in Minus. But it's such a

1092
01:04:04,000 --> 01:04:08,360
Speaker 1: small moon again, the size of Spain. It's it's hardly

1093
01:04:08,400 --> 01:04:12,040
Speaker 1: the best candidate. But yeah, you could say there's there's

1094
01:04:12,080 --> 01:04:15,080
Speaker 1: still an outside chance. So that's the case. Okay, we

1095
01:04:15,120 --> 01:04:17,720
Speaker 1: seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I guess

1096
01:04:17,720 --> 01:04:21,520
Speaker 1: we were not trapped in a tractor beam. However, we

1097
01:04:21,640 --> 01:04:25,920
Speaker 1: do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface

1098
01:04:25,960 --> 01:04:29,080
Speaker 1: of Saturn. Now, Joe, Oh, No, Saturn, which one seemed

1099
01:04:29,160 --> 01:04:33,800
Speaker 1: quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons and

1100
01:04:33,840 --> 01:04:37,480
Speaker 1: it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black

1101
01:04:37,520 --> 01:04:42,040
Speaker 1: white harmony plant lunar body here, but yeah, I know

1102
01:04:42,160 --> 01:04:44,560
Speaker 1: it's able to escape. If you notice that as we

1103
01:04:44,600 --> 01:04:47,320
Speaker 1: get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that?

1104
01:04:47,400 --> 01:04:49,920
Speaker 1: It's kind of like uh in Raiders of the Lost Ark,

1105
01:04:50,000 --> 01:04:52,160
Speaker 1: that scene where they zoom in on the box with

1106
01:04:52,200 --> 01:04:54,480
Speaker 1: the arc in it and it's making that satanic miall

1107
01:04:54,520 --> 01:04:59,040
Speaker 1: miallmy Allinois. I can't quite hear that. Over the two

1108
01:04:59,120 --> 01:05:03,840
Speaker 1: thousand and one space honestly monolith coral arrangement. But that's

1109
01:05:03,880 --> 01:05:06,520
Speaker 1: because I have headphones in listening to that. I always

1110
01:05:06,520 --> 01:05:09,640
Speaker 1: listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer

1111
01:05:09,640 --> 01:05:13,080
Speaker 1: to a large, scary planetary object. The folks, I should

1112
01:05:13,120 --> 01:05:15,080
Speaker 1: let you know that while we were working on this episode,

1113
01:05:15,160 --> 01:05:19,680
Speaker 1: Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of

1114
01:05:19,720 --> 01:05:23,600
Speaker 1: like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've

1115
01:05:23,600 --> 01:05:25,240
Speaker 1: got to share this on the lange. Oh yeah, I will.

1116
01:05:25,280 --> 01:05:26,480
Speaker 1: I will make sure that there's a link to this

1117
01:05:26,520 --> 01:05:28,000
Speaker 1: in the landing page. I believe it came from the

1118
01:05:28,200 --> 01:05:31,920
Speaker 1: record label Acacia. Uh. Definitely worth checking out. They put

1119
01:05:31,920 --> 01:05:35,200
Speaker 1: out a number of cool, cool tracks and cool releases

1120
01:05:35,240 --> 01:05:38,320
Speaker 1: over the years, including some stuff from the Weirding Module,

1121
01:05:38,360 --> 01:05:41,720
Speaker 1: which is one of my one of my favorite musical

1122
01:05:42,120 --> 01:05:44,680
Speaker 1: acts out there. This thing definitely made me wish that

1123
01:05:44,720 --> 01:05:47,280
Speaker 1: there was a good John Carpenter movie taking place on

1124
01:05:47,320 --> 01:05:51,080
Speaker 1: a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need perhaps we

1125
01:05:51,120 --> 01:05:53,880
Speaker 1: need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what you're saying.

1126
01:05:54,400 --> 01:05:56,800
Speaker 1: More like Ghosts of Mars, That's what I'm saying. Ghosts

1127
01:05:56,800 --> 01:06:01,080
Speaker 1: of Mimus, Ghosts of Titan one for each get to

1128
01:06:01,200 --> 01:06:06,640
Speaker 1: get ice cube on the phone and Jason Statham. All right,

1129
01:06:06,720 --> 01:06:09,960
Speaker 1: so there you have it, Uh, the moons of Saturn.

1130
01:06:10,200 --> 01:06:12,200
Speaker 1: So now you have both both the moons of Saturn

1131
01:06:12,280 --> 01:06:15,160
Speaker 1: and the moons of Jupiter covered on. Stuff to blow

1132
01:06:15,200 --> 01:06:18,080
Speaker 1: your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were

1133
01:06:18,080 --> 01:06:20,959
Speaker 1: going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons.

1134
01:06:21,040 --> 01:06:23,160
Speaker 1: So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're

1135
01:06:23,160 --> 01:06:26,400
Speaker 1: constantly learning more. Yeah. Yeah, so so feel free to

1136
01:06:26,920 --> 01:06:29,000
Speaker 1: look into this and research it yourself. You know, you

1137
01:06:29,000 --> 01:06:31,600
Speaker 1: should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that

1138
01:06:31,640 --> 01:06:34,680
Speaker 1: you can't learn about Saturday on your own. But anyway, yeah,

1139
01:06:34,680 --> 01:06:36,400
Speaker 1: we we do encourage you to do that because it

1140
01:06:36,480 --> 01:06:39,240
Speaker 1: is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are

1141
01:06:39,280 --> 01:06:42,120
Speaker 1: great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could

1142
01:06:42,120 --> 01:06:44,120
Speaker 1: have gotten into even more about the rings sometimes. We

1143
01:06:44,200 --> 01:06:46,320
Speaker 1: could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,

1144
01:06:46,360 --> 01:06:49,320
Speaker 1: the ring moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed, just

1145
01:06:49,440 --> 01:06:52,680
Speaker 1: rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on

1146
01:06:52,720 --> 01:06:56,440
Speaker 1: other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if

1147
01:06:56,440 --> 01:06:58,120
Speaker 1: you will have feedback you want to share with us

1148
01:06:58,120 --> 01:07:00,680
Speaker 1: about this, you can go to all the normal places

1149
01:07:00,720 --> 01:07:02,840
Speaker 1: to do it. Head on over to our various social

1150
01:07:02,880 --> 01:07:06,200
Speaker 1: media accounts. Were on Facebook, we're blow the Mind there, though,

1151
01:07:06,200 --> 01:07:08,480
Speaker 1: if you follow us on Facebook, make sure you're fault.

1152
01:07:08,560 --> 01:07:10,880
Speaker 1: Not only are you following us, but they make it

1153
01:07:11,160 --> 01:07:13,640
Speaker 1: make sure you check off the right boxes so that

1154
01:07:13,720 --> 01:07:15,960
Speaker 1: we're showing up, you know, right at the top of

1155
01:07:16,000 --> 01:07:18,400
Speaker 1: your your timeline, that you can stay on top of

1156
01:07:18,600 --> 01:07:20,360
Speaker 1: all the stuff that we are putting out, all the

1157
01:07:20,400 --> 01:07:23,400
Speaker 1: stuff we think is cool and worth looking at without

1158
01:07:23,400 --> 01:07:28,160
Speaker 1: having to depend on Facebook's tyrannical algorithm. Um, we're also

1159
01:07:28,200 --> 01:07:31,160
Speaker 1: on Twitter, We're on Instagram, We're on Tumbler, and of

1160
01:07:31,200 --> 01:07:33,360
Speaker 1: course Stuff to Blow your Mind dot Com is the

1161
01:07:33,400 --> 01:07:36,400
Speaker 1: Mothership should be getting a facelift in the very near future,

1162
01:07:36,760 --> 01:07:38,800
Speaker 1: and we have all sorts of great content. They're including

1163
01:07:38,840 --> 01:07:41,200
Speaker 1: all of the podcasts that we've ever done. And if

1164
01:07:41,240 --> 01:07:43,040
Speaker 1: you'd like to get in touch with this directly to

1165
01:07:43,120 --> 01:07:45,600
Speaker 1: let us know feedback about this episode or any others,

1166
01:07:45,680 --> 01:07:47,480
Speaker 1: or to let us know topics you'd like us to

1167
01:07:47,520 --> 01:07:49,760
Speaker 1: cover in the future, you can email us at blow

1168
01:07:49,800 --> 01:08:01,560
Speaker 1: the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more

1169
01:08:01,560 --> 01:08:03,880
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how

1170
01:08:03,920 --> 01:08:16,519
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com. The big, Big