How will we terraform Titan?

[ARS]

Guys, I just found this:

"The second biggest moon in the Solar System (after Ganymede) and comprising 96% of all mass in orbit around Saturn. Despite its size (larger than Mercury), it only has one-seventh the Earth's gravity and its bulk density is less than twice that of water — there's a lot of ice and rock mixed in. It's covered in a thick hydrocarbon haze, making it the only moon to have a full-blown atmosphere. It's also the only known celestial body in the Solar System, apart from Earth, to have both a solid surface and basins of liquid on it. Unlike Earth's oceans, the liquids in question are light hydrocarbons, mostly methane and ethane — basically the same stuff that the atmosphere is made of. If oxygen comes into contact with the air on Titan, you won't have time to say, "Oh, the humanity!" as it ignites violently."

Makes me curious if the last part is true or not, considering that means the last thing you have to worry when you have a leak on your spacesuit isn't losing oxygen, but turning you into an example of spontaneous human combustion

[DDE]

8 minutes ago, ARS said:

Makes me curious if the last part is true or not

At surface level (of analysis), Titan's atmosphere would indeed flow INTO a breached Earth pressure volume. Initial intermixing might be troublesome, but combustion should happen quite splendidly anyway.

Edited January 1, 2019 by DDE

[55delta]

16 hours ago, ARS said:

If oxygen comes into contact with the air on Titan, you won't have time to say, "Oh, the humanity!" as it ignites violently."

That doesn't make terraforming impossible, just very, very difficult.

Kidding aside, sounds like it would be better to create a station near Titan and mine/extract resouces from it instead (after the science surveying, of course.)

[Nivee~]

On 12/31/2018 at 12:31 AM, Espatie said:

If you're on Venus and all you are interested in is the atmosphere, you can use a Cloud City.

Well, but to launch from that cloud city we would need about 10 km/s of delta-V... and for that we would need a very expensive transport system. I mean yeah, we can mine out the hydrogen from the sulphuric acid clouds, and oxygen from CO2 atmosphere, it would still need to be a multistage, and hence, expensive rocket system..

On a side note, there was a novel in Stephen Baxter's NASA trilogy called "Titan" (duh) where they went to Titan on a  Space shuttle! I would not give anymore spoilers, its a great book  

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

1 hour ago, Nivee~ said:

On a side note, there was a novel in Stephen Baxter's NASA trilogy called "Titan" (duh) where they went to Titan on a  Space shuttle! I would not give anymore spoilers, its a great book

Though, to be fair, I don’t know why they are called a trilogy, as they do not appear to be at all related. 

Spoiler

Plus the first book Voyage is the only one I liked. The other two are just a bit too out there for my liking.

I suspect that this post will be relegated to the “Book club and literature” section of the forum, though.

[Nivee~]

1 hour ago, Ozymandias_the_Goat said:

Plus the first book Voyage is the only one I liked. The other two are just a bit too out there for my liking.

Yeah, Voyage was very realistic and looked feasible, something that might just happen.. Titan is a story of grit and passion where the characters leave everything behind, to pursue the one goal: Reach Titan! The Shuttle's last hurrah! (Although yeah, Steph Bax fumbled the ending a bit )

I did not read the last part... Moonseed felt like a zombie-ish genre book from the book description, and that's a major put-off for me!

[KSK]

1 hour ago, Nivee~ said:

Yeah, Voyage was very realistic and looked feasible, something that might just happen.. Titan is a story of grit and passion where the characters leave everything behind, to pursue the one goal: Reach Titan! The Shuttle's last hurrah! (Although yeah, Steph Bax fumbled the ending a bit )

I did not read the last part... Moonseed felt like a zombie-ish genre book from the book description, and that's a major put-off for me!

I enjoyed Moonseed. Worth reading IMO and relatively cheerful for a Stephen Baxter book!

[Ozymandias_the_Goat]

23 hours ago, KSK said:

relatively cheerful for a Stephen Baxter book!

The key word being “relatively”, I suppose 

[KerikBalm]

On 1/1/2019 at 1:47 PM, ARS said:

Guys, I just found this:

"The second biggest moon in the Solar System (after Ganymede) and comprising 96% of all mass in orbit around Saturn. Despite its size (larger than Mercury), it only has one-seventh the Earth's gravity and its bulk density is less than twice that of water — there's a lot of ice and rock mixed in. It's covered in a thick hydrocarbon haze, making it the only moon to have a full-blown atmosphere. It's also the only known celestial body in the Solar System, apart from Earth, to have both a solid surface and basins of liquid on it. Unlike Earth's oceans, the liquids in question are light hydrocarbons, mostly methane and ethane — basically the same stuff that the atmosphere is made of. If oxygen comes into contact with the air on Titan, you won't have time to say, "Oh, the humanity!" as it ignites violently."

Makes me curious if the last part is true or not, considering that means the last thing you have to worry when you have a leak on your spacesuit isn't losing oxygen, but turning you into an example of spontaneous human combustion

Where did you find it?

On 1/1/2019 at 1:55 PM, DDE said:

At surface level (of analysis), Titan's atmosphere would indeed flow INTO a breached Earth pressure volume. Initial intermixing might be troublesome, but combustion should happen quite splendidly anyway.

The atmospheric pressure of Titan is higher than 1 atmosphere, but if you're going to go out in a space suit, you'll have the pressure equalized. The same would likely be true for any habitat.

Next, while Titan has significant hydrocarbons, the atmosphere is mostly nitrogen. Methane is only 1.4% of the atmosphere, that is pretty dilute.

Also, metha-lox isn't a hypergolic rocket fuel. You would need a spark to start the combustion. At the low temperatures of Titan, you will certainly not get spontaneous combustion if there is a leak in your O2 containing suit/hab.

While spontaneous combustion is not such a problem, the idea of terraforming Titan is still ridiculous.

Colonizing it is one thing, but terraforming? no.

[ARS]

59 minutes ago, KerikBalm said:

Where did you find 

I kinda forget, I'm searching a topic about the moons of Saturn on Google, just click a bunch of sites and I found it on one of them, an that's when I saw terraforming titan on my unread thread, so I think it's interesting enough to put it on the thread. Sadly, my browser auto-clear my previous session history when I reopen it, so I don't know what site it is

[kerbiloid]

A plastic moon.