[Alcassin]

Oh great, we have Titan, I thought our Sun is closer though. There is plenty of hydrogen. Anyway, I see thet our problems with climate change is also solved, we won't ever extract fossil fuels from the ground, we are just going to import more carbon from the space :D

Excellent!


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mos6507', '
')Anti-Neocon satire is so passe.

[Keith_McClary]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mididoctors', '
')On Titan Methane isn't a fuel source as there is not enough free oxygen available to burn it with!

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mididoctors', 'Y')ou don't have to go to Titan as there are more Methane hydrates on Earth than fossil fuels ... mind you accessing them from Titan may be easier.

[kpeavey]

http://www.permanent.com/
this place has been around for years, asteroid mining and all that

[larry00]

Methane/Ethane burn and Titan has plenty of both!
You would have to be very naive to think these substances only occur on one moon of one planet.
Could very well be our light crude is a combination since its hard to see how usable crude exists at 6 miles under the surface in a usable form under heat that would melt steel.
Is Jupiter a sun just waiting to be born ?

Tis a golden age to be a scientist in.
Always keep your mind open as man has come a long way and gloom and doom has been predicted every decade as long as I have been alive but we are still here and prospering.

I'm hearing about a new space race to the moon by the US , Russia and China for a substance I think called Hydrogen 3 .

A metric ton would equil all Earth's energy production for a year.
Our moon is supposed to be rich in this substance.

Predictions are by 2014 mining will commence.

I really hadn't heard anything about this stuff till a week or so ago.
Energy doesn't have to be organic it's just that it was lying around near the surface and was easy/plentiful and our whole energy and transportation sector was founded on it.

We have to have a fundamental shift in energy production soon and we will because simple economics dictates that the more expensive organic materials become the cheaper alternative sources become.

Bio fuels are a boondoggle . The costs to the food segment of society are just now being felt and we can scarcely afford the clean water at 4 gal. used per gal of ethanol produced.

Here is a link to a article on the Hydrogen Three and its value as a energy resource.

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/gallery/pdf/sp ... 063000.pdf

Note the 2000 date on the article then think about the increased cost of energy since then.
I have no doubt human nature has already solved many of the downside problems and the increased costs have made moon mining Hydrogen three viable.
You can Google Hydrogen three and several articles from science journals and even mechanics Illustrated come up.

[Rod_Cloutier]

Several of the best replies to my post, over the last few years, concern the possiblities of bring rare and exotic nuclear fuels such as Helium-3 back to Earth for energy. Even if my initial article has been met with ridicule, I still believe that the future of Earth's energy crisis lies in exploiting space resources for human benefit.

I have recently come across several very good (and serious) articles about the feasibilty of harvesting space resources- particularily Helium-3 from the moon. Also several new articles concerning the vast availabilties of metals, methane, Helium-3 and other materials in space. I just wanted to post them here so that people who visit this site and who actually want to avoid the messy catatrophies comming with the arrival of peak oil can at least learn about real space based energy solutions. A very partial list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3
http://www.moonminer.com/Lunar_regolith.html
http://acm.uva.es/archive/nuevoportal/d ... php?p=3530
http://gltrs.grc.nasa.gov/Citations.aspx?id=78
http://www.space.com/adastra/060209_adastra_mining.html
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 04122.html

The real disaster isn't the exhaustion of fossil fuels but that of inaction in finding real and long term replacements to our problems of resource limitations and energy consumtion.

[Plantagenet]

Why not just have the Jupiter Mining Corporation send the mining ship "Red Dwarf" to mine the hydrocarbons.

[jato]

One country managed to set foot on the moon 35 years ago. A total of 12 men walked on the moon at a cost of $156 billion in 2007 dollars. Expending 5,725,780 pounds of propellant each trip. The entire first stage propellant was RP-1 kerosene (oil) BTW. A total of 840 pounds of lunar material was collected from the moon.

13 billion dollars per person
2,862,890 pounds of propellant used per person
140 pounds of lunar material collected per trip (average)


Maybe 35 years ago I would have believed you.

[TheDude]

We may well have to look to the moon for He someday: Goodbye Helium, Goodbye Brainscans

Rather blase about this subject but Wiki has this to say about He3 power generation:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he reality is not so clean-cut. The most advanced fusion programs in the world are inertial confinement fusion (such as National Ignition Facility) and magnetic confinement fusion (such as ITER and other tokamaks). In the case of the former, there is no solid roadmap to power generation. In the case of the latter, commercial power generation is not expected until around 2050[29]. In both cases, the type of fusion discussed is the simplest: D-T fusion. The reason for this is the very low Coulomb barrier for this reaction; for D+He3, the barrier is much higher, and He3-He3 higher still. The immense cost of reactors like ITER and National Ignition Facility are largely due to their immense size, yet to scale up to higher plasma temperatures would require reactors far larger still. The 14.7 MeV proton and 3.6 MeV alpha particle from D-He3 fusion, plus the higher conversion efficiency, means that you get more electricity per kilogram than you do with D-T fusion (17.6 MeV), but not that much more. As a further downside, the rates of reaction for He3 fusion reactions are not particularly high, requiring a reactor that is larger-still or more reactors to produce the same amount of electricity.

[JPL]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MonsieurX', 'h')ttp://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/news/cassini-20080213.html

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')itan's Surface Organics Surpass Oil Reserves on Earth

02.13.08

Saturn's orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes.

[heroineworshipper]

There definitely wouldn't be any more oxygen if all that was burned. Just need a way to siphon it from 1 billion miles away.

[neocone]

Thread already done here:

http://www.peakoil.com/fortopic36550.html

Problem is... you need a helluva lotsa barrels of energy to get ONE BARREL OF THAT SOURCE.

[Serial_Worrier]

Yay! Let's suck Titan dry, then on to the next planet/moon we can suck dry. "The Matrix" pegged humanity perfectly.

[nobodypanic]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Serial_Worrier', 'Y')ay! Let's suck Titan dry, then on to the next planet/moon we can suck dry. "The Matrix" pegged humanity perfectly.

[Jenab6]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BigTex', 'N')o, no, no, this can work... Problem solved.

[joelcolorado]

Okay I got it. I was out the other night and someone pointed out TITAN to me. I noticed it was uphill from the earth. Knowing something about syphoning, this is gonna be easy as fluids will run downhill once you get them started.

The current use of oil is like a giant suction they say, sucking the reserves dry, so we can use that suction to start the syphon and we can then use all the free fuel from TITAN

[Jenab6]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('joelcolorado', 'O')kay I got it. I was out the other night and someone pointed out TITAN to me. I noticed it was uphill from the earth. Knowing something about syphoning, this is gonna be easy as fluids will run downhill once you get them started. The current use of oil is like a giant suction they say, sucking the reserves dry, so we can use that suction to start the syphon and we can then use all the free fuel from TITAN

[ReducedToZero]

I got a crazy idea... Lets use that big ass bright thing 150 million miles away.... starting 50 years ago!

[joelcolorado]

I am going to use a hose so that we can put a valve on it and regulate how much we get here. Walmart has them on clearance this week.
hahha

Yes, too bad we have not harnessed the sun. Good grief.
My friend has a passive solar house and its NICE and henever has a heating bill all winter. Has to vent it as it gets TOO hot. If every house built from now on was like that, we would elimnate the need for heating over time.

That is just a simple OLD type solar heat. There are newer and could be better ways out there in the future if we WANTED to do it.

[Serial_Worrier]

No I am addicted to hydrocarbons and I say let's suck every last drop out of TITAN.

Might as well face it, we're addicted to oil!