NASA Strikes it Rich!

Do you know where there is enough natural gas (methane), and propane to meet all the world's energy needs for the next thousand years?

No, not in Saudi Arabia, not in Siberia, and not the in Antarctic, in fact it isn't on Earth.

Nasa has just announced that they have "struck it rich" on Titan!

But where the hell is Titan?

To quote wikipedia:
"Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn and sixth farthest among those large enough to assume a spheroid shape. Frequently described as a satellite with planet-like characteristics, Titan has a diameter roughly 50% larger than Earth's moon and is 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System, after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and it is larger by diameter than the smallest planet, Mercury (although only half as massive). Titan was the first known moon of Saturn, discovered in 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens"

NASA has just announced the Cassini probe that is orbiting Saturn and its many moons has detected a lake near the south pole of Titan that is a little bigger than Lake Ontario (see the Nasa website ).

So what is so interesting about this? Well according to NASA the excitement is because it is the first planet/moon apart from the earth to have had a liquid detected on its surface - hip hooray!

But that isn't very exciting to you or me but on the other hand the lake doesn't contain water; it is made up of ethane, propane and probably other liquid hydrocarbons. The whole of Titan is awash with the stuff but the surface temperature of Titan (−179° C, or −290° F) means that methane rains down from the sky and ethane and propane are liquids and some of the rocks are actually water ice.

Why doesn't the whole place catch fire? After all methane, ethane etc are highly explosive.

There is no fire hazard on Titan, simply because there is no oxygen there. You would treat oxygen on Titan the same way we treat methane here - as an explosive gas!

In reality, this announcement will do nothing to solve our current fuel crisis. It would take more energy to get the methane and ethane gases and liquids from Titan back to Earth than would be provided by the fuel when burnt here.

So Earth's fuel crisis isn't going to be solved by Titan - or is it?

I was taught that oil and natural gas was formed by the decomposition of billions and billions of fish and plankton trapped in the earths crust under impermeable salt caps for millennia. This is proved by the fact that tiny skeletons or fossils are found in the oil - hence the term "fossil fuel".

But where are the fish and plankton that made all the fossil fuel on Titan? How could so much "fossil fuel" be made in such a cold environment 10 times further from the Sun than the Earth in the absence of oxygen and liquid water?

Perhaps once billions of years ago the Sun was hotter and hot enough to support life on Titan - but if that was the case then any life on Earth at that time would have been fried and Earth itself would have been burnt to a crisp.

So perhaps Titan moved... perhaps - but that seems to be rather unlikely.

How about it got some energy from Saturn - that's a possibility, for example gravity could induce heat in the surface like on Io (that's another story), but Titan is the twentieth most distant moon of Saturn, so this seems unlikely that there a biosphere beneath the surface warm enough to support liquid water and life, though this is proposed by some scientists. But even if there is could that biosphere be responsible for the production of so much ethane, propane etc?

So where did all these Titan hydrocarbons come from if not from fossils?

Hydrogen and carbon are very common elements not only on Earth, but throughout the Solar System. The Sun, Jupiter and Saturn are 99.99% hydrogen - the surface of Venus is shrouded in a blanket of hot high pressure Carbon Dioxide and Uranus and Neptune are mostly composed of water, ammonia, and methane...

There's methane again... Were there fish and plankton on Uranus and Neptune? It seems more likely to me that methane occurs naturally throughout the solar system - in fact methane, and other hydrocarbons have been detected in clouds in deep space far across the universe... When you put together carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms which occur through out the universe inevitably these will combine to form more stable molecules like methane (CH4) and from time to time two methane molecules will combine to form ethane (CH3CH3) which in turn can combine with methane to form propane (CH3CH2CH3) etc etc etc...

So methane and the higher order hydrocarbons occur naturally (abiogenically), without the existence of life through out the whole universe...

except on Earth.

On Earth everyone knows that methane and higher order hydrocarbons (including oil) all come from tiny little fish and plankton!

It seems rather odd to me that we should be the exception to a "universal" rule.

So what are the implications of this?

Well first of all it implies that at least some of the stuff we drill out of the ground isn't a fossil fuel at all but has always been here since the Earth condensed out of the cloud surrounding the young Sun.

And if it has always been here then it should be mixed fairly evenly through out the Earth's crust - we just detect the stuff that is close to the surface and that hasn't evaporated away because it got stuck under impermeable rocks and salt domes where it mixed with fish skeletons and other fossils similarly trapped.

What evidence have I got for this theory? Well apart from Titan that is difficult. I could point to the presence of helium in natural gas which is difficult to explain (to you and by the petroleum scientists).

I'm not the first to come up with this harebrained idea - there was a geologist called Professor Thomas Gold of Cornell University (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Gold), who propounded this theory back in 1979 and as a result a very deep well was drilled into a meteorite crater that forms Siljan Lake in Sweden http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siljan_(lake). According to Professor Gold the meteorite should have cracked the earth's crust an allowed some of the deep abiogenic methane to be found at depths that would preclude it from being made biologically.

Everyone laughed at him and his project failed...

But given all that methane and ethane on Titan...perhaps Professor Gold was right after all. If he was it means that we should never run out of oil and gas, though we may have to drill a lot deeper for it. If that is the case then the price of oil and gas (and energy in general) should plummet - one of the drivers for the recent spike in the price of oil (apart from greed and speculation) was worries about oil reserves - BP for example has only 13 years worth of oil reserves left and everyone thinks that perhaps we have reached the "tipping point" and the world's oil reserves will soon dwindle to zero, but thanks to Nasa and Professor Gold perhaps that will never happen...

Pilgrimage to St Sixtus

Last weekend I made a pilgrimage to the very northwestern tip of Belgium to the remote hamlet of Westvleteren and the Trappist Abbey of Saint Sixtus. The journey took about 4 hours each way. A train from Brussels to Popering (just beyond Ypres) and then a "Belbus" (a bookable bus) from there to the bus stop just outside the Abbey. We weren't allowed into the abbey - it is a closed order and they don't let people in - so why did I and 9 other hash buddies go all that way?

Beer of course!

"The best beer in the world" to be precise. The Trappist monks brew 3 beers there when they are not praying.

* Westvleteren Blonde (green cap), 5.8% ABV
* Westvleteren 8 (blue cap) (formerly Extra), 8% ABV.
* Westvleteren 12 (yellow cap) (formerly Abt), 10.2% ABV.


It was a true pilgrimage for me as although I had tasted each of them before it was a privilige to go to the only place where the beer is made and officially sold.

Unfortunately for us there was no beer to take away for sale - the monks only brew when they feel like it as the abbot said "We are no brewers. We are monks. We brew beer to be able to afford being monks." Fortunately the very large and modern visitors centre across the road was open and had an ample supply of all three beers for consumption on site.

We had a brilliant time (well most of us - poor Satan's L'ill Helper was struck down by a sudden bout of food poisoning) trying repeatedly all three beers.

We started with the deep dark Westvleteren 12 which positively exploded with taste on the tongue and keep exploding and changing like a very spectacular firework display for a good two or three minutes after swallowing the almost black nectar. It was absolutely fabulous - rich chocolatey, tarry, nutty, burnt caramel, hoppy wonderful! Mind you by the end of the first glass my taste buds were almost completely overloaded. It was like going to hear a wonderful symphony orchestra play and being in the front row. The taste was almost overwhelming.

The Westvleteren 8 was almost a relief after the 12. It was far more drinkable and easier on the palate. You could easily want a second one after finishing your first glass (which is what I did).

The Blonde 'little sister' of the other two beers was almost a disappointment - it was a perfectly respectable blond beer but not a patch on the other two and there are probably quite a few other blonde belgian beers that would give it a run for its money. No, the stars of the show were the 12 and the 8 - we all agreed and just to make sure had more of each.

By the time it came to go and get the bus things were pretty blurry - looking at my photos (see my photos on Fotki ) a day or two later brought quite a few forgotten incidents on the journey home flooding back.



Just to make absolutely certain that my head would hurt for days afterwards some of us went for something to eat at a Chinese restaurant (the Blue Lotus) back in Brussels and then did what seemed eminently sensible at the time but remarkably stupid now - we went and sat on a balcony and between 6 of us polished off a whole bottle of Scotch - ouch!

Things are not going well on Mars

Phoenix is looking more and more like a turkey.

After a week of practicing Phoenix managed to get 3cc of icy Martian soil into its scoop - yipee!

But having got it in there it now won't come out! The robotic arm poised the scoop over the open doors of probably the last Tega oven and tipped the scoop upside down....

and almost nothing came out. Have a look at Nasa's photo here.

The sticky soil problem struck again - once again the icy soil has behaved like deep frozen ice cream and first melted on contact with the scoop and then refroze just like ice cream does on a spoon when it is straight out of the freezer.

So now what? There is a little soil in the Tega oven - but not enough for it to trigger the closing of the oven door to start the baking. They could try to shake the scoop or use the rasp to loosen the soil - but every second counts as the ice is sublimating (evaporating) and pretty soon there won't be any ice left in the soil which would make the baking pointless.

Not only that but what is probably the last operational Tega oven is not really usable any more. The readings for any soil added to it will be effected by the soil that has been delivered this time and will have been sitting there slowly sublimating in the sun.

Oops - chalk up yet another cock-up for the Phoenix team.

Now what are they going to do with the extra 40 days that have been added to the life of the project (to make up for all the lost time due to all the previous cock-ups)?

I am still gobsmacked by how all these problems haven't been forseen by these rocket scientists. Weren't they expecting it to be cold? Didn't they try out the collection of icy hard soil in freezing low pressure conditions before sending Phoenix to Mars? Obviously not!!

Photos of the DRIFTER Balkan's tour

I've finally got around to uploading my photos of my tour of the Balkans to the internet. They can be found on my Fotki Site. I warn you there a lot of photos, and not many captions as yet.

We (the DRIFTER Hash House Harriers) visited:

• Sophia (Bulgaria),
  
• Skopje (Macedonia),
  
• Pristina (Kosovo, where we ran a Hash in a mine field),
  
• Ohrid (Macedonia) which has a beautiful lake
• Tirana (Albania) where I took part in the most extreme Hash I've ever done
  
• Kotor (Montenegro)
• Dubrovnik (Croatia)

The photo below is one taken by Higgins it is me and Yark Sucker on the Tirana Hash - the teeshirt seems to be wrong this time...

Here are some thumbnails of the photos I took
Dubrovnik on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans
Kotor Montenegro on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans
Tirana Albania on the DRIFTER tour of the Balkans

Ohrid, Macedonia on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Skopje Day 3 on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Pristina, Kosovo on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Skopje, Macedonia on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Sofia, Bulgaria on the DRIFTER Tour of the Balkans

Earth from Deep Space

The NASA Deep Impact spacecraft which was sent to rendevouz with the comet Temple 1 a few years ago has just beamed back an incredible film of Earth as seen from deep space.

Deep Impact was 31,000,000 miles (50 million kilometers) away from Earth heading off to look for distant planets in our solar system and yet another comet (Hartly 2) to rendezvous with when it looked back at Earth and took a picture every 15 minutes to create the video sequence.

The object that flies across the Earth is not Darth Vader's Death Star, but the Moon!

I knew that the Moon is small when compared with the Earth and its diameter is about the same as the width of the continental USA, but to see this so graphically illustrated is stunning.By the way, when Deep Impact got to the comet Temple 1 back in 2005 it was 83 million miles from Earth! It fired a block of metal about the size of a washing machine to hit the comet. The resulting explosion was much bigger than anyone expected and generated so much light and dust that the crater the missile made was totally hidden - rather spoiling one of aims of the mission (and the bet the scientists had on how big the crater would be).

On planning an expedition

Imagine you are planning a trip from your home in Arizona to a distant and strange unexplored land to collect and analyse the mineral content of its soil. What do you pack?

A shovel......................................................................................Check!
A rake.........................................................................................Check!

Then what do you take to analyse the soil with?

A lab for analysing the soil we have in our back yard...........Check!
A grill over the lab to stop large pebbles clogging it up........Check!

and nothing else?.......................................................................Check!

Wait a minute though - what if the soil isn't loamy or sandy like it is in Arizona?

What if the ground is hard, how about a drill?

What if the soil is light, flakey, or very dusty, how about a broom or a dustpan and brush?

What if the soil is sticky, how about something to wipe things down with?

Perhaps it would be a good idea to consider all these things before setting off.

So why did Phoenix fly all the way to Mars with only have a shovel and a rake and no way of easily picking up what was raked up?

The scientists are once again blaiming Mars, whingeing that the Martian soil isn't what they expected. The complaint "It's like trying to scrape dust up off the sidewalk" has been added to the other moans such as "the soil is very sticky", "the soil is clumpy", and "the ice is not as deep as we expected".

Obviously none of the scientists was a Boy Scout... (Be prepared and carry a Swiss Army Penknife!)

Ok, Ok, I know that Phoenix has a 'rasp' on the end of the robot arm. But the rasp (a last minute addition to Phoenix) is behind the scoop and the scoop has shown itself to be unable to pick up small particles from the hard smooth surface (hence the complaint). To get the icy soil into the scoop the rasp has to spin hard and fast against the ground hopefully spraying flakes of the surface in all directions. Some of the flakes then fall on a small platform by the rasp where they can be manipulated by tilting and wiggling the scoop and arm through a backdoor in the scoop - hardly what one might call a brilliant design.

Come on NASA - this isn't rocket science

New Countries

I'm just back from a visit to some of the newest countries in Europe including what I think is the newest country in the world, Kosovo (I will tell all about the epic DRIFTER Hash House Harriers tour of the Balkans in later posts).

It is odd therefore to realise that I am currently living in what could easily become two even newer countries. Unless someone can persuade the Walloons and the Flemish to get their act together Belgium could very quickly split into two.

The King of Belgium today refused to accept the resignation of the interim Prime Minister who was resigning because he had failed to broker a deal between the two factions - I wonder what will happen next? While the north of Belgium is almost exclusively Flemmish and the south French speaking (Walloonian) the middle bit, particularly around Brussels is a real mix...