Unabashed

Titan is cool. Cassini is due to photograph the moon in the next few weeks, and I fully anticipate–in fact, I’m going to go ahead and predict–that NASA will find proof of life on Titan. Why am I so confident? Because exploration of our solar system has never had as much active effort as it does right now. Because Titan has an utterly alien environment–but it’s an environment, with rain and cryovolcanoes, hydrocarbon lakes, mountain ranges… it has potential for water, and it has a stable atmosphere. And, besides that, it would be so freaking cool. But…You wouldn’t want to live there. Forget the fact that it’s cold and that the atmosphere isn’t breathable for humans, focus instead on the fact that the smell of fart would probably pervade every waking moment of your life. Still, whatever life they do wind up finding won’t be able to breathe our atmosphere, and who knows, maybe their farts will smell like our air.

Any way, don’t be surprised when, after a couple of months or years of analyzing the data, NASA announces irrefutable evidence of life on Titan.

The Singularity is near.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Life, NASA, Saturn, Titan

This, my friends, is pretty cool.

(Click for full-size image.) Notes from NASA.gov:

STS123-E-008018 (21 March 2008) — While docked and onboard the International Space Station, a STS-123 Endeavour crewmember captured the glowing green beauty of the Aurora Borealis. Looking northward across the Gulf of Alaska, over a low pressure area (cloud vortex), the aurora brightens the night sky. This image was taken on March 21, 2008 at 09:08:46 (GMT) with a 28 mm lens from the nadir point of 47.9 degrees north latitude and 146.8 degreees west longitude.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: , Aurora, Borealis, Earth, Horizon, NASA