Treasure Trove

Titan and Mars

Before the Huygens probe penetrated the complex atmosphere of Titan and landed on it, I had a persistent nightmare. It was that some kind of primitive life might be found on the giant moon. This would have been a marvellous and awesome discovery, changing for ever our ideas about life in the universe, but ruinous for our future plans for the solar system. This is because a vocal ``Protect the Aliens' Habitat'' lobby would have sprung up, inhibiting if not preventing the exploitation of Titan's resources.

Titan has at least three great industrial assets. Its very low surface gravity (about a tenth of Earth's) will make rocket launching operations easy - if workers can cope with temperatures of minus 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Its atmosphere is about 0.2 per cent hydrogen, more than enough to build a hydrogen industry to fuel interplanetary spaceships, the background to Arthur C. Clarke's 1975 novel Imperial Earth. Its other great asset is nitrogen. Titan's atmosphere is 94 per cent nitrogen. This state of plenty is remarkable when one considers that the nitrogen content of the Martian atmosphere, where people hope to create agriculture, is only 3 per cent! Not nearly enough to grow crops on a large scale. This is tremendously important to one of the key technological issues of the solar system. How to provide Mars with agriculture. For there can be no industrial civilisation without agriculture. So why not take some of Titan's hydrogen and export it to Mars? I owe this suggestion to Robert Zubrin. It would work like this: liquid nitrogen would be carried in tanks from Titan and guided by rocket to Jupiter, where a ``gravity assist'' would send it on to Mars. There, the tanks would be landed by parachute and the nitrogen put to use. Alternately, a brilliant scheme by Anthony Michaelis would be much cheaper if it worked. Nitrogen on Mars would literally be created. We would exploit the fact that the atomic weight of silicon, which is abundant on Mars, is 28.086. That of nitrogen is 14.007. In short the one is exactly double the other. Martian colonists could therefore use fission reactors to split silicon atoms and produce nitrogen atoms! To return to Titan, it must be regarded as the treasure trove of the solar system, with uncounted useful chemical compounds. People often wrongly imagine that the treasures of space are expensive substances that can be brought back to Earth---gold, diamonds and platinum. But in fact the most valuable materials are those that can be found up there and used up there. Commonplace on Earth, but expensive to bring into space. Titan is likely to have them in plenty. Carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulphide, nickel carbonyl, iron carbonyl, and sulphuric acid - - all for metallurgy. Hydrogen, methane, and methyl alcohol for fuel. Sulphur dioxide for refrigeration. Sulphur trioxide for making sulphuric acid. And of course nitrogen, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and ammonium hydroxide for agriculture. Titan is an extreme example of the beckoning treasure houses of the solar system. The asteroids will be others, but they are scattered far and will take long to codify. It will be the most important school for future industrialists. No wonder I worried about alien creatures.