The latest news from the Huygens probe says that the terribly cold landscape of Saturn's moon Titan has rivers, lakes, and even rain made not of water, but of liquid methane gas. As the scientists put it, Titan has a landscape which is strangely similar to Earth's, but the processes which form it are done with very different materials. This successful voyage to Titan is one of the things which keeps me from falling into total despair about the human world.

Those who follow space art, hearing about Titan, will easily recall the view of the planet Saturn from Titan as painted by the greatest American space artist of all time, Chesley Bonestell, one of my art heroes. When Bonestell painted that famous picture in 1944, no one knew what the surface of Titan was like or whether the sky was clear or cloudy. Nowadays we know that an observer on that moon would not be able to see Saturn due to the clouds which cover the whole sphere. And yet the Bonestell picture shows deposits of snow which need not be water, but some other frozen organic compound, just as it might be on the planet. And there may indeed be craggy mountains somewhere on Titan, since the probe could only show us a small area. The rest of Titan will remain unknown, at least for now, a world of perpetual winter, where January never ends.

Posted at 3:26 am | link