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