Last Gas Before Pluto

                           The Hydrocarbon Lakes of Titan    European Space Agency

The Oil Glut At The End Of The Universe

 

By Russell Seitz   

 

There was  more to last  summer’s nostalgia binge than the Rolling Stones and The Beachboys. Paul Ehrlich was back on the air. At the height of the last ‘energy crisis’, the  Neomalthusian population bomber predicted  global starvation and the implosion of  natural gas supplies by the time  Mick Jagger turned  40 . No such luck, so  Ehrlich turned to warning of a mass extinction of Republicans . But even as he and former next president gore were exhorting us to  repent ,and trade in  our limos, Lear  and Escalades for Segways and Amtrak seats, a funny thing happened on the way to Saturn .  The space probe that alit on its smog shrouded moon Titan may have changed everything , again. Civilization is about to clash with a Titanic oil glut.

 
Titan is awash with liquid hydrocarbons, but the Huygens Lander has found no sign of life, which means finders keepers for NASA’s proprietors. That means us, and the cameras show a planet-scape  Albert Beirstadt  might have painted to decorate the board room of Standard Oil. Sure it's cold outside on Titan , but  this week, Earthly science jourals are abuzz --there’s some kind of atmosphere -- a mixture so rich that the rain on the plain is mostly methane.

 

Right now it’s merely drizzling, for spring is in the air on Titan, where spring lasts about seven years. But sure as Vivaldi’s four seasons, there will be some serious thunderstorms when summer rolls around and temperatures in Titan’s southern hemisphere soar into the minus one hundred and seventies. Ten years from now, Titian red thunderheads will let loose a barrage of propane hailstones and torrents of LNG will fall, filling Titan’s great lakes with enough unleaded High Test to float a supertanker. If all the methane in Titan's atmosphere condensed , the feckless moon would be thirteen feet deep in gas, not counting sea level rise due to global warming. 

 
Eat your heart out, Ibn Saud. There’s more oil on the South Slope of Titan  than a Nigerian politician could steal – 150 million barrels per capita for every man woman and child on earth, Texans included. Glory be to NASA, we have seen OPEC, and it is us.

 
This leaves Gore fans in the Oil Patch feeling conflicted and Halliburton execs very glum indeed.
Houston, we have a problem - oil too cheap to meter. So great is the extraterrestrial gas glut that were everyone in China and India combined to acquire   two Hummers and  a Rolls , the supply would still last for millennia . Needless to say such a gas glut would worsen the CO2 problem - not the Greenhouse effect, but how to get oxygen enough to burn it all. It takes loads of oxygen to run a car. What use millions of tons of alien oil per capita when Earth only has a tenth the oxygen needed? Before we haul our jet skis to the balmy beaches of Hudson’s Bay to celebrate global warming in earnest, we have to figure out how to keep them idling smoothly.

 
At last inspection, there was about a million tons of air per Earthling, which works out to only about 200 thousand tons of O2. That’s scarcely enough to let us emulate Al Gore’s gas consumption, even though he’s downsized from a 747 to a non -presidential Lear Jet to advertise his small is beautiful book.

Gore recently told David lLderman “We’re filling the sky with CO2”, but how are we going to live long enough to oblige him when 10% CO2 will asphyxiate a lab rat? Literally driving oxygen to extinction would give vegetarians cause to rejoice, for plants would inherit the earth. But carnivores would face what Greens style the Tragedy of the Commons. The porterhouse consuming classes would be caught between gas heap enough to cruise all summer in a Hummer, and the difficulty of lighting charcoal in an increasingly inert atmosphere.

Where will the nation find air enough to grill out?  Be of good courage -- Ronald Wilson Reagan knew what he was about in signing the Montreal Protocol into law-- ozone may be good for something after all-- it can light a barbecue in a trice without sacrificing trees to make newspaper for kindling. Since pungent ozone is constantly replaced by stratospheric sunshine, not a drop of Titan's bounty need go to waste.

The best is still to come. When the Huygens Probe scrunched down on a beach of hydrocarbon sorbet last winter, the sound of breaking waves was distinctly audible in the background.Providence  has so abundantly endowed the Titan Pipeline scene with the smell of napalm in the morning that it seems  the manifest destiny of  our nations dudes and dudettes to check out the break.

 
Why wait for earthly seas to boil dry as the sun goes nova in a billion years when Titan beckons today?  It may be a trifle chilly just now, but before the sun goes postal, the place will rival Bondi Beach , and surfers will doff their space and wet suits amidst the endless summer at the end of the solar system. Who wants to colonize Mars when body surfing  beckons in  the LNG  crashing on Titan’s gnarly shore —O brave new world that has such octane in it!

Copyright 2006

Comments

[dave]

"...150 million barrels per capita for every man woman and child on earth..."

I need that number expressed in terms I can understand - how many chickens and green peppers would that barbecue on my propane grill?