On Wednesday NASA scientists said they had found liquid flowing on the surface of Saturn’s moon Titan. This would make Titan the only body in our solar system after Earth to have liquid on its surface.
According to NASA, data from from the Cassini Orbiter indicates that there are multiple large lakes, possibly even whole seas, on the surface of Titan that are made up of liquid hydrocarbons and ethane.
Breitbart.com
“This is the first observation that really pins down that Titan has a surface lake filled with liquid,” said University of Arizona scientist Bob Brown, team leader of Cassini’s visual and mapping instrument.
NASA said large dark areas on Titan’s surface had been spotted during numerous close flybys of the moon. However until now it had not been possible to determine whether they were liquid or solids.
“Detection of liquid ethane confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan,” said Larry Soderblom, a scientist with the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.
What’s this? Giant lakes of liquid hydrocarbons freely flowing on surface of Saturn’s moon Titan!? How can that be? I thought crude oil was created over millions of years through the process of decomposition of organic matter? If that’s true then that would mean that at one time there must have been living organic matter on Titan.
But wait. Isn’t the surface of Titan entirely hostile to life as we know it? How could there be dead organic material there to create this stuff if there were never any living material there in the first place? Is it possible that maybe this stuff formed another way? If that’s true, then is it possible that the Earth may be capable of forming crude oil in the same way?
That would correlate with what many scientist now believe in that crude oil may not actually be rotted dinosaurs and plant life, but instead simply a natural byproduct of the planet’s formation. That hypothesis would explain how we are now finding oil deeper and deeper in the Earth.
Kind of puts a kink in that whole “oil is a finite resource and we can’t drill our way out of this mess” blathering…
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