Tinaa was wondering...when the sun expands into a red giant, will Titan become the new Earth?

This makes sense to me...please, post your opinions on this issue.
Thanx. B)

Actually, I was repeating what I have read from theories written by much greater minds than I possess. It is interesting to think that Titan may hold secrets to finding the origins of life here. The sun will probably not hit the red giant stage for several billion years. If humans are around in the oh so distant future, perhaps we can observe how life begins. Maybe, when a probe lands on the surface, we are actually setting into motion genesis on Titan!

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I dont' know if that would happen, but if our probe magically transforms into a 1:4:9 megalith/obelisk, and it lands on Titan in front of a few nitrogen- breathing primates, I think Arthur C. Clarke will for sure have the last laugh...

When I say "New Earth," I do not mean it as in "growing flowers, and lions tigers and bears oh my" but rather as in a good place to colonize after our planet is devoured by dear ol' Sol.

If it doesn't grow lions, tigers, bears, flowers & (what the hell) possibly humans. Then how did lions, tigers, bears & flowers form? :huh:
Who created lions, tigers, flowers & bears :mellow:

Evolution.

Titan could very possibly become a second (third, fourth...?) home for life in our solar system. It would certainly develop independently from Earth, which would be interesting. This is assuming, of course, that we decide not to mess with it.

It would have to evolve quickly, though, since the red giant phase will last at most half a billion years. We'd be lucky to get anything more than algae.

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Will the temperature of the much larger red giant, that the sun has become, be high enough to sufficiently heat Titan at about 20 AUs away to fuel evolution. If so, would the effect on Saturn be neglible with respect to Titan?

Then again evolution may already be a work on Titan being powered by heat from radioactive materials.

What is the frequency of the peak radiation of an average red giant?

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I don't think red giants have the same surface stability as our current yellow dwarf star does. And our star throws coronal mass ejections and x-ray flares our way every few years. These coming from a red giant would be truly disasterous. I think that in 5 billion years, when all of this happens, that we'll have a few more options than just the moons of this solar system to chose from.

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I don't think the sunn would give off enough energy even in it's red giant stage, to warm Titan enough to make it hospitable for earthly life-forms. The watery (icy?) moons of Jupiter would have a better chance.

I also agree with John--whatever "humans" are still around when the sun begins to expand from helium burning will have many more options than just moons. I mean, we are talking 4 or so billion years from now.

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Well first off, while Titan is a helluva lot further from our current Sun's surface, it won't be so far from a Red Giant version of 'ol Sol. That sucker's gonna puff up like a weiner left too long on the grille.

Second issue: if there is enough, and gentle enough, radiation from our future Sun to heat Titan, don't forget that Titan itself has a 1.2 million kilometer orbit around Saturn; which orbit it completes every 16 days. This means that our future "earth" will be going hot/cold every 2 weeks as it passes behind Saturn and stretches out several hundred thousand miles further from the Sun. Summer/Winter lasting a week each? That actually could be kinda fun.

Third: we ought to be careful about any life we seed on other planets and let grow unattended. If it originates spontaneously there then fine, it will probably be so distinctly different in life chemistry that it would be no threat to a future human population; but a collection of earth based lifeforms: bacteria, viruses etc. allowed to mutate in an high radiation environment for a few million years would be quite an ecological crap shoot for any future humans looking to tame that world. Maybe they'd be completely harmless because they hadn't had humans to munch on for the last millenia and adapted to feed on other food sources, but they would still be based on the same chemistry as us and who knows what they would become?

Whoa, whoa, whoa....Evolution created tigers, bears, lions, flowers, humans, etc :huh:
How is evolution created? Has anybody seen anything evolve before? Ya know, something just pop out of nowhere.
That would be weird. How come nothing has evolved on Mars? Why only Earth? There's so much life on Earth, but not a drop of life on Mars. Things that make you go hhmmm... :huh:

2 answers for those animals :
1. God create them
2. Evolution
It's up to you for what you think is true or false, cuz nobody can tell you the right answers even the best scientist and best Father in the world.

For Mars...
Because Mars is too cold and sometime too hot, the air is thicker and no water...

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Ahh, well then...I see most people on this forum do not believe we can colonize Titan by the time the sun goes red and poofy...
So what do these guests and members believe in, then...how about building an artificial planet on which humans can live? Hmn...
Please respond to this idea, its obvious no one believes in the first...

My opinion is that by that time, even a thousand years away we will have seriously mucked with all planets and moon sized planets creating new Earth type living of the open air type. Titan would have pretty fair gravity, my bet being we live on it within the next 400 years and start heating the atmosphere with huge solar mirrors etc. Titan is tidally locked to Saturn, meaning if it was left alone it would develope simple life with its own character, during its warm phase as Sol evolves.

First we will terraform using bacteria and such like, mosses and things that turn Mars black and heat it up, then genetic engineering bacteria may well mean we can clear the thick atmosphere of Venus,

Then later we will move to Astro Engineering, using replicating machines to mine asteroids and shunt water and asteroid mass around and generally start wetting and bulking moons up....

500Ma away Earth will be heating up, we will move copies of all of our ecosystems to Mars long before then, as things hot up and our technology increases we will work through Jupiters moons, Saturns, probably decant the gas atmospheres of Neptune to reveal its Earth Mass core. Uranus may have a core around a third as dense as the Earth, meaning even if its 3 - 5 times as large as Earth the surface would only have around 1 g, once again heaps of gas to decant away. My guess is thousands of years of interstellar flights could well tap into it as a chemical propellant, gas could be stripped by grazing an atmosphere with a beam such as a lazer, which points at a collector = gas mining station.

My guess is that we will expand out into space once we learn Astro Engineering, even if flight times are thousands of years, interstellar travel will just always be a one way trip - outwards. It won't matter if systems don't have Earth type planets as we will just sit in cryogenic stasis while our machines alter any new solar system and introduce a variant of the Earths ecosystem... Interstellar

2500 Million away when the Jovian moons get to hot Titan will probalby be the last Earth type planet in the old Solar system backwater, probably as a Park and Monument to the "Home System". The unstable star will have chased mankind out of Sol, maybe a few "care takers" will remain.

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Howdy Ya'll!
Just wanted to throw my two cents worth in here.

Ok, again I'm -very- new to astronomy, but from what I've read, seen and researched, as far as Mars goes, it could be quite possible to terriform...i.e. make it a habitable planet. I would also think that Europa would also be a possible candidate.

A couple of quick issues that I do want to address while I'm here in regards to TuTones comments...

" How is evolution created? Has anybody seen anything evolve before? Ya know, something just pop out of nowhere."

Evolution, as I understand comes about from a couple of primary sources (at least from what I recall from Carl Sagan's "Cosmos"). There are basic cellular mutations and either natural or unnatural selection (by unnatural, I mean interference by humans). Why has no body seen it? Becuase it generally takes -a very long time-. How long did it take man to evolved from apes? Do you honestly think this is something that just happened overnight? If so, you really need to go back and study your high school biology! Evolution is -NOT- something that can generally be witnessed in a single person's lifetime.

"How come nothing has evolved on Mars?" Who says it hasn't??? Just exactly what did you think the rover's Spirit and Opportunity are doing up there...sight seeing? Their looking for signs that life might have once, or possible still does exist on Mars! Some of the discoveries these probes have made are remarkable! Amounst other things, we have found very good evidence that Mars may have indeed once been a "water planet" such as Earth. Yes, the Earth is special...if for no other reason then because its where we live (and as thus should deserve -a lot- more respect then we give her), but don't adopt the extremely arrogant and foolish assumption that simply because the Earth is lucky enough to have such a widely diverse collection of life forms (including us), that we -must- be the only life out here. Mathmatically speaking alone, theres a better chance of hitting the lottery! Even if we don't find any other life in -our- solar system, it is very very likely that there is other life out there somewhere. Think about it with an open mind for just a moment...in our galaxy alone there are billions and billions of other stars and each one has, at the very least, the possibility to have some kind planets orbiting it. If even 1 out of every 100 solar systems has -just one planet- that is capably of supporting life (at least life as we know it) then there could be a tremendous amount of life out there! Now multiply that by the number of other galaxies out there (again, dare I say billions and billions) and the possibilities are staggering! Now theres something that will make you go "hhmmm".

TuTone, I would strongly recommend that you "read up" a little more and I would highly suggest reading Sagan's book "Cosmos" as a good starting place...you seemed to miss quite a bit when you were in high school.

As to Tiny's comment; " 2 answers for those animals : 1. God create them 2. Evolution"

With no direspect meant towards anyones religous beliefs (even though when you say "God" one would assume you meant the Christian God...there are -many- others you know), if you compair the two -rationally- then there is no comparison...evolution. Look at all the imperical evidence there is to support evolution then look at most religions beleifs in the idea of "creation" (particularly those of Christian based faiths)...I honestly do not understand how any rational, intelligent person could possibly believe that "God" created this all. I myself am an eclectic pagan (if you don't know what this means, -please- go look it up) and while I do have a firm belief in the concept of "deity", it is hard for me to believe that some all mighty creator just waved his hand and said "let there be light". I"m sorry, but narrow sighted thinking such as this is what led to the "dark ages" of man kind in the first place!!! Evolution is a -fact-, not a theory and anyone who says otherwise really needs to take their nose out of their bible and do a little more research into how things in this universe work. When I look into my telescope up at the "heavens", I do -not- see the face of God (or the Goddess for that matter). I see a grand and intricate universe waiting to be explored. When I look at lions and tigers and bears, oh my! I do not see creatures that were put here by some creator for man kind to ravage, rape and destroy as he see's fit, I see examples of the great diveristy of life that has risen and evolved on a small insignifigant planet in a way that is -most likely- possible through out the universe. -We- just have not evolved to the point that we can see this other life....yet. In addition to all of this, take a look at the reseach experiments that were done at Cambridge University back in the sixties. In labratory experiments, they were able to take the basic elements that were available after the formation of the Earth (i.e. hydrogen, helium, etc..) and put them in an enclosed chamber and "zapped" them with high voltages of electricity, similar to that found in lightening. They created this black tar-like goop, but upon closer examination they found that they had created the basic elements of crude elementary DNA! BTW, DNA is also a fact and not a theory. To me at least, this is -much- more compelling evidence as to how life developed on this planet...at least when you compair it to the finding of crack-pot yo-yo's who see the face of Jesus in something like the Horsehead nebula or people who quote a text that is 2000 years old which even the original texts that are available are rather vague at best and has been re-written by every controlling monarchy since. I also do not understand -why- people would put so much faith in such a text, that is known to be historically inaccurate at best and possibly out and out fiction in many cases, simply because it's called "The Holy Bible", yet when they are confronted by the over-whelming evidence of evolution and actual -facts-, they continue to call it a theory!?! People, if the church lied to us about something as basic as the Earth being round, isn't it at least possible that theres other things they have lied about and mis-represented as well? Sorry Tiny, but these are things that are easy to explain -if- you look at them objectively. Yes, each person needs to make their own choices, but choices should be based on facts and knowledge if you wish to make intelligent choices...are you going to buy a rusted clunker of a car that won't start from a guy in a plaid suit wearing a very bad hair piece simply because he says that car was only driven to church on Sundays by a little old lady?

As far as the original question goes about Titan, when the sun becomes a red giant, I would like to think that if Titan is a viable option for habitation, then as I said before, terraforming would be a more practical way of doing it instead of waiting for our sun to become a red giant. I also agree with the others that hopefully by that point we will already be out amounst the stars ourselves (as a people, not the folks on this board! LOL!). We're only in the very infancy of truly exploring our own solar system and our universe, but look at whats happened in the last one hundred years...we've gone from the belief that "if man was meant to fly, he'd have wings" to putting men on the moon. We have the current search for worlds, such as "hot Jupiters" around -other- suns. We have machines exploring Mars and Saturn and we even have one or two "probes" that are on their way out of/have left our solar system! If your looking for things that make you go "hhmmm", then think about what the next 100 years could hold!

I wish you all bright blessings and gentle breezes,
Jim

Actually, there at least two examples of evolution that have occured in the past two hundred years.

1) In England, there are a lot of forests made of trees that are white. In those forests, there are butterflies. Most are white because when they land on the trees predators can't see them and don't eat them. They go on and make more white butterflies. There are also a few black butterflies that have, by luck, escaped being eaten through the years. Black, obviously, is very easy to see on a white background.

When the Industrial Revolution came, the trees became blackened by all the soot thrown up, and soon the white butterflies were the ones that stood out and the black ones were camoflauged. Well, obviously, the white ones were eaten and the black ones reproduced and then there were a bunch of black butterflies flying around with a few white ones that were lucky enough to not be eaten.

By now, there isn't as much soot being put into the air, and the trees have lightened up again. Guess what? The population reverted back similar to what it was before: mostly white, a few black.

2) Have you heard of pesticide-resistant insects? Why is that? Well, it's because the other insects have been killed off by our pesticides, and the few that were, by random genetic mutation, resistant to pesticides. Those few multiplied and now there are a bunch of them and we have a problem now because we have to find new pesticides to kill them off. And the whole cycle will repeat again.

By the way TuTone, if you want to discuss religion in here...don't. Read Rule 7 of the rules.

Iomitus, you're pushing it a bit too, but I'm sure you're here to discuss science, not religion. Based on what you've said so far, you seem to be a good thinker and will probably contribute a lot to this forum. Welcome!

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I am fairly sure that before our sun turns into a white dwarf that the surface temperature and light on Titan's surface will make it potentially habitable by Earth standards. Unfortunately this will only be the case for a comparatively very short period of time, perhaps only 10s of millions of years. This would preclude the development of complex lifeforms since it there won't be enough time for them to evolve. I think that when the sun has reached its maximum size as a red giant, it will be too hot on Titan such that it will end up like Venus is now. Of course any existing life on Titan (if any exists now) would likely become extinct when it heats up.
A few wrinkles that may affect what happens on Titan. Most red giants have been observed shedding its outer layers from time to time as they age. Such expulsions of mass could have dramatic effects on the planets by themselvves, extinguishing any life that might be there, but ultimately could cause the orbit of the planets to migrate outward affecting the habitability of their moons. Also, if you believe in Dr. Manuel's iron sun theory, there the sun may never enter a red giant phase.

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Because of the new hype of the Titan mission, I'd like bring this thread back to life...so, please read and post a reply.
Thanks.

And of course Titan itself. I think all we need to do is get Titan closer to the Sun (or the Sun closer to Titan, but I can see some problems with that) and it will automatically turn into an Earth, there's plenty of water, and after a few years you'll get used to the smell of methane.

Cheers.

I think, VanderL, it may be easier just to start some habitats there without solar aid - that just makes it far too complex, too complicated. Remember, some organisms (archaebacter) here on earth survive without solar light (not the complex creatures, but still organic life).

or there is a possibility of the atmosphere nearly match with the earth but the scarcity of oxygen and water??

sunil

...Again.

Titan is not now, and never will be a new Earth. Sufficient terraforming is not possible.

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Forming opinions as we speak

On making the animals.
In Londons subway, that' been existing roughly 100 years, a new species of mosqito appeared.
They live in the dark and can't cross with other mosqito species.



[B]**edited a religious comment***[/B]

I'm not sure Titan would be suitable, but europa sounds good so long as it has some firm spot to live on!

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Europa has some troubles too. For one thing the radiation on the surface is lethal in a few seconds. For another, when it warms up to our temperature, you'd have to live on a big lead-lined glass houseboat sailing on a sea of Sulfuric Acid.

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Around the time Sol enters RG phase, I plan to open a coffeehouse-boutique-museum on Titan, advertising the beautiful view of the Cradle of Civilization. Of course it will be one of thousands, in thousands of starsystems. [Sigh] Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be... S

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Pick one.

Yes.... that is a problem.... :huh:

Wasn't there a jovian moon that was a candidate?

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Europa's possible subsurface ocean is a candidate for life, but not for us to colonize. The environment close to Jupiter in which Io and Europe orbit is one of highly ionizing radiation. Ganymede, the largest, would be better for us and it still has a high water ice content (air, fuel, and water). Callisto would be good, too.

As for Titan, most of you seem to think that it only being habitable by us for a few million years is a bad thing. Human civilization hasn't even existed for 1 million years so I think we'd be happy with several million years.

As for evolution vs creation, what if the creation was evolution?

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...and we'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere; and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys...

hi john

that must be where i must have got the idea jupiter had habitable moons. :blink:

As for:

if that question rhetorical it should be fine, but otherwise it think the answers will lean towards religion and politics - something we aren't meant to discuss here.

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