IdeaWave

Life on Titan

Craig Carmichael

I’d like to talk about Titan’s duney “tidal marsh” seas, and life on Titan, which space scientists have missed.

  • Titan: the most Earthlike planet in the solar system besides Earth: air (22 PSI), seas, lakes, rivers (of liquid methane). 1/7 gravity, 30 year year, 16 day days, 1/3 of Earth’s temperature.
  • The gravitational workings of Titan’s once a day tides: why, the resulting fluid flows, the predictable and actual locations of the duney tropical seas and channels, Titan’s slow rotation.

Life:

  • Breathing gas is hydrogen, as recently discerned by scientists.
    • Earth: C + O2 => CO2
    • Titan: C + 2 H2 => CH4
  • Cassini Spectroscopic results show abundant benzene, especially at shorelines.
  • Where Huygens landed: on top of a dune almost level with the sea surface.
  • Huygens GCMS results show organics and complex chemical activities occurring on Titan’s surface.
  • Huygens images show abundant aquatic vegetation that reveals the submerged dunes.
  • Cassini images show forests of giant trees, lakes of changing levels filled with vegetation, plain as day. River channels are marked by taller trees.

Will bring pictures taken by spacecraft to illustrate.

About Craig Carmichael:

Craig Carmichael is one of Canada’s most experienced inventors, since 2008 tackling several renewable energy, energy storage and electric transport projects concurrently.

I’m sometimes a researcher. I’ve been studying worlds of our solar system whenever data becomes available with special interest in the moons — and planets bigger than Mercury — that orbit Jupiter and Saturn. I have followed Galileo, Huygens and Cassini missions with great attention and have come to see what I feel is the ‘big picture’ of the surface of Titan and several other worlds, avoiding errors of narrow and uncorrelated interpretation of data that space scientists have fallen victim to.

2011 IdeaWave