Liquid Water on Titan

Report: #0075

Cassini has discovered evidence pointing to the existence of an underground ocean of water and ammonia on Saturn's moon Titan. The findings were made using radar measurements of Titan's rotation. "With its organic dunes, lakes, channels, and mountains, Titan has one of the most varied, active, and Earth-like surfaces in the solar system," said Ralph Lorenz, lead author of the paper and Cassini radar scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland, USA. "Now we see changes in the way Titan rotates, giving us a window into Titan's interior beneath the surface."  Titan has liquid water.

If that's not news.  Surely, you understand English better than I do. But sometimes you read a news item very quickly and don't grasp the meaning or implication of a discovery.

I'll give you my explanation. If I'm wrong, I want you to correct me. I also remind you of my forum blog. That would be the place to discuss.  Titan has been observed by satellites again and again. I won't give dates or which satellite, because I'm not a news broadcast – I want to discuss the essence. I'll give you the link to read the original: 

http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEM52QQ03EF_index_0.html

Titan has given us suspicion of water, air, and a dense atmosphere many times – one and a half times denser than ours, almost liquid if you're adapted, like our ancestors, to these gas mixtures.

Titan has a sea covered with ice. Until now, though that's already a sensation, for astronomers it's normal.

Ice exists even on the Moon, Mars, every comet – and apparently on all celestial bodies.

But liquid water, they say, we'll never find.

They don't dream of something impossible, they say.  They took radar photos of Titan, and suddenly, the previously found sea had shifted thirty kilometers.

What does that mean? Before, they thought there was water, but frozen to the bottom of this sea – a solid block of ice. Now, the lid moved, like at the North Pole – floating!

Not the sea moved, but the ice lid.

Even if it's thousands of meters deep, the part under the ice is in liquid state.  Titan has volcanic activity. It has heat inside. You, my friend – and you all too – knew that even on Earth, life couldn't exist, though we're close to the Sun, without the heat from Earth's depths. So, Titan has heat, has liquid water mixed with ammonia.  What is ammonia? It's the gas, for example, in septic tanks, sewer deposits, hermetically sealed silos.

There, it's a deadly place for mortals like us.

But bacteria, in the fermentation of organic matter, produce this gas. These bacteria live only where there is no oxygen.

Where there is ammonia, there is bacterial life. I'm an agronomist – nothing more and nothing less – but I know enough about the fermentation of all kinds of organic matter. In wine production, for example, only with the help of these bacteria does the juice begin to ferment.  Biogas is produced in the transformation of organic matter into humus and gas. In São Paulo, Brazil, there's one of the largest biogas factories from garbage. Pipes are placed in the ground, garbage put on top, and covered with earth. With heavy machines, this mixture is compressed over the pipes. There are dozens of meters of garbage and an earth cover like a sandwich. In the middle, pipes with open pores circulate. There, the gas produced with oxygen exclusion enters through the pores into this pipe circuit and rises to a tank where it's compressed and loaded into bottles or transported, like in a pipeline, to buildings for gas distribution.

The gas is a sign of bacterial life; therefore, there is biological life on Titan.  I recommend two books you must read:

Author: Frank Schätzing

Title: Nachrichten aus einem unbekannten Universum. Eine Zeitreise durch die Meere (Messages from an Unknown Universe: A Journey Through the Seas)  Author: Hoimar v. Ditfurth

Title: Am Anfang war der Wasserstoff (In the Beginning Was Hydrogen)  These two books – and others by the same authors – explain in a very interesting way how life is produced, in what places and in what almost impossible environments life is generated – in the most abstract way possible.  We cannot doubt that life is something natural. We cannot doubt that nature harbors life, wherever it may be, however it may be – with two legs or a hundred.

There are no miracles. But if there are, then there are!

 Josef Bauer