From the Vault: Saturn's Brood

if we say the same thing in the episode. I think we do get into a little bit into films that take place on or around Saturn. I think we talk a little bit about Outland. Do we talk about Ali? I think we did, yeah, and uh. And then also I think Silent Running comes up as well, the classic Brewster and film where he sort of hides out in your Saturn man, what is wrong with our brains? The main thing we remember about every episode we do is

what Sean Connery sci fi movie we talked about. These are the Sean Connery based guide posts that are just kind of tacked into the ground so we can revisit these episodes in the future coming soon on Stuff to Blow Your Mind The Science of Czardas. Okay, well, we shouldn't take any more time at the beginning here have fun with Saturn's brood. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. There's peace in

those rings. As we spiraled into Jupiter, our orbit decaying rapidly inside the path of the sulfurous io we assumed that we and our forest ste bio arc were headed for the same fate as the old Galileo probe, through the fierce radiation ELTs, through the crushing gravity, into the Jovian atmosphere, and all the way down. But then something happened. It was as if a hand of a silent god reached out from the darkness of space and just plucked us gently from the depths of the gas giant's gravity

well and lifted us up up to freedom. We still don't know what happened. Our navigational computers have no explanation, but our orbits ceased its decay, and with the slow gradual acceleration, driven from some source totally foreign to the ship itself, we were on our way, but not on our way home, something out there, some unknown forces urging

us in the other direction. Despite the long journey, our ever dwindling share of sunlight, and the powerful radiation bath we just endured, the plants that once struggled for life in our forest dome are now unexpectedly thriving, as if more of the Solar system great moons want to be seen, want to be understood, and some hidden intelligence is helping them.

And now the cold golden wheel of Saturn looms in the foreground, with its major moons appearing as tiny points of light in the darkness, growing ever closer as our spiral begins again. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert lamp and my name is Joe McCormick, and backed by popular demand, we are now going to explore the moons of Saturn. So this will be, I guess, a sequel of sorts to the episode we did a while back about the moons of Jupiter or the major

moons of Jupiter. In both cases, these are large gas giants. They have lots of moons, so we have to uh, I would say, pick our battles, but they're not battles. Their missions of peace and exploration, that's right. Yeah, and the case of Saturn here, there are currently fifty three known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmation, So that's a lot

of moons. But we are gonna, indeed going to stick to just the the key items of interest here, the ones indeed that you've likely heard of in science fiction, that you've certainly heard of h in science journalism. So yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna. We've picked up some good destinations here for our trip. So Robert, Saturn is a kind of different beast than Jupiter, isn't it. Yeah, I mean

it's easy to lump them together. They're the two biggest objects in our Solar system, the biggest objects to enormous gas giants, easily the two jazziest planets as well. Like my my son who's four, I haven't really been pushing the space agenda as much as I have like the Earth sciences agenda, But even he instantly knows Saturn and he knows Jupiter. Well. Saturn, I would say, is the

iconic image of a planet. Now, if you go to if you're looking for clip art or vector images or something like that of images of planets, you're gonna see Saturn. Because Saturn you can recognize it's got the rings. It's the planet that's not just different in terms of coloring and uh and what you might see about its atmosphere or lack thereof, or cratering and stuff like that, its whole profile is different. It's like a different animal altogether. Yeah, and it's it's kind of the pin up model of

the Solar System. It is the one that you see the most just really gleaning, elegant, just crisp images. And if you have just a row of globes, a row of circles, the presence of Saturn, perhaps more so than any of the others, is going to queue you in. Oh I'm looking at a model of the Solar System. Oh right, Yeah. It's the difference between a bunch of balls and planets. But it's also different than Jupiter in that Jupiter was this very intense experience. Now Saturn also

is very large, it has a deep gravity. Well you know, it's got those same things going forward. But Saturn, i would say, is a more peaceful and colder thing to experience, unlike the intense radiation bath of Jupiter. Yeah, it's a little more serene. Those we'll discuss here. It itself is a very hostile world, and its moons are pretty hostile as well, at least two beings like at least too, you know, weak fragile beings like us, so we can scarcely survive outside of a slim portion of our own

planets environment. Reading reading up for this episode, I was astonished to discover how excited scientists are about the possibility for life and a couple of Saturn's moons. Because when you think about life in our Solar system beyond Earth, everybody always mentions Europa that that's the one that comes to mind, and for a good reason. There's a lot of reason to want to study Europa from an astrobiological perspective.

But Saturn has some really good moons going for it, and we're going to explore what's going on on those moons today. All right. Before we get into that, though, let's let's just roll through some of the basics about Saturn, just to give everyone a grounding in the planet that plays host to all of these wonderful spheres and ovals in occasion, just lumps of rock, uh, and the potatoes, the spongey potato. So again, it's the second largest planet

in our Solar system. It's a gas giant without solid substance save it's dense, hot, pressurized core of rock, ice, water, and other compounds, and all of this is enveloped by liquid metallic hydrogen inside a layer of a liquid hydrogen. So it's located nine point five astronomical units away from the Sun six planet in our Solar system, as the posters tell us, and has seven icy rings that encircle it, spanning up to one seventy five thousand miles or two

two thousand kilometers. So what are the rings consist of? Yeah, I've always wondered this. Yeah, the contrary to what bugs Bunny may have taught you, if I remember correctly, they are not the solid rings that you can run around on. They're not like a treadmill or anything. But scientists haven't always known that that's true. They have not always been aware of that. We know now that it's it's mostly

water ice. The planet's ring system extend hundreds of thousands of kilometers out from the planet, but the vertical height is typically about ten meters or thirty feet in the main rings. Are you serious? But but but but there's there's there's a key butt coming up. They can grow far larger. During Saturn's autumn two thousand nine equinox, the Cassini spacecraft images showed us that vertical formations and some of the rings had piled the particles up, but in

ridges more than three kilometers or two miles tall. And there's some fascinating structures and behaviors that you can see within the rings to including these like a propeller shaped objects that can form. It's crazy now light Jupiter. Saturn is made mostly of hydrogen and helium, and in the upper atmosphere, wind speeds can reach five hundred meters or sixteen hundred feet per second in the equatorial region. These winds fast. It's pretty fast, so it looks more peaceful

than it is. Just because it doesn't have a big red spot doesn't mean it has some some anger to it. Uh. These winds, combined with heat rising from the planet's interior, cause the yellow gold bands that we see visible in the atmosphere. But they're not as visible as the bands we see on Jupiter. Right, Yeah, it's not. It's not as angry. It's not. It doesn't look like somebody just poured a bunch of like red liquid into you know, a swirling mixer bowl of pancake batter and blood. That

is a great way to describe it. That's how I think of Jupiter. Yeah, this one is more just like pancake batter with some with some honeyead. You know. There's a wonderful coincidence with the other episode that we recorded this week, Robert, which was the episode on the Library of Babel. And now I'm not sure what the publishing schedule is going to be, but in the episode on the in the Library of Babble, we discussed how people in the Library of Babel seek out the Crimson hexagon.

That's right, and indeed there is a hexagon on Saturn. It's it does not contain any books. It is not a room per se. Well, you don't know that, I'm pretty sure, but yes, if you look at you I'm sure I'm number of people have seen seen images of this here. But if you if you look at various images of Saturn, there appears to be a hexagon at the top, almost as if it has a little hexagonal hat, a little skull cap on um. And it's weird to look at because you're seeing this in nature. This is

not obviously an object designed by anybody on purpose. But it's not circular. It's got these clear corners. Yeah, it's not the kind of shape that you would necessarily expect. But there is, of course a very natural reason for this. This is caused by jet streams uh in the in the wind systems of Saturn. Basically you have a region here that's bound on each side by different editing edditing storms.

So it's uh, it's the kind of thing if you've ever met somebody who's playing with a lot of bubbles, you know, like doing a lot of bubble art and not sure what you mean bubble bubble, like blowing bubbles and then sticking other bubbles, maybe blowing smoke into those bubbles. Okay, I'm not very familiar with this art form. Oh you're not. Oh it was big medicine on like Sesame Street and and um Mr Rogers neighborhood and back in the day,

I really completely lost touch with my inner child. Well, blowing big bubbles is a lot of fun, but blowing small bubbles too, because you can join them together and if you really know what you're doing, you can form geometric shapes at the center where these bubbles bubbles border other bubbles and kind of force different shapes towards the center. Oh yeah, okay, I think I know what you're talking about.

So I I tried to think of that when I think of this particular scenario, to try and remind myself that yes, uh, non spherical shapes are possible within nature given the right circumstances. Now, another quick fact about Saturn. Here a day last ten hours and a year. The time it takes for the body to orbit its central star last twenty nine earth years, and the planet's magnetic field is smaller than Jupiter's, but still five seventy eight times as powerful as Earth's, shielding Saturn and many of

its moons from the solar wind. Okay, well that's going to be important if we're talking about, I don't know, putting a colony there or something very important. So on that note, let's start talking about the discovery of Saturn, the discovery of Saturn's moons. Saturn, of course, is a very We've known about Saturn for a very long time. Right, nobody knows who discovered Saturn, because the ancients knew about Saturn. We've known about Saturn as long as we've had history.

You know, naked eye astronomers could peer up into the night sky and see Saturn. So uh so, what we're really going to be talking about is the first telescopic studies of Saturn. And you might recall from the last episode that the person usually credited with discovering the largest moons of Jupiter, the four Galilean Moons, was the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, and Galileos also given credit for discovering the rings of Saturn, though he didn't really understand what

he was looking at. Now, Like we said, everybody already knew about Saturn, but they knew it as a point of light in the sky. And when gali Leo looked at Saturn, he saw something very odd, a triple star. It looks like one enormous star with two tiny stars attached to it on either side, like little side cars

riding along with it. Now. Fun fact, Galileo wanted to get credit for being the first person to discover this triple star, but he wasn't ready to publish his findings yet, so he used a method that I thought was pretty clever. He instead disseminated an anagram and by the way, when this came up, I had to look up anagrams of our names for fun. I have no good ones, not really. My name is. I've got comic jock rim and that's about it. But Robert, you've got some awesome anagrams in

case you've never looked him up before. You've got Mr babele Rot. That's pretty good. You've also got barrel tomb, barrel to m okay. But anyway, uh So, anagram jumbled around letters, you know, jumbled up, and then you can you can un jumble them to spell the original message and show if it's a sufficiently short number of letters, you know, you can show that you had this idea

all along, and that that was Galileo's idea. So the antagram that Galileo spread around could be un jumbled to read something along the lines of I've discovered the triform planet, and if anybody tried to scoop him, he could just unscramble it and show that he had seen it first. But we now know that Saturn is not a triform planet.

So who figured that out? Well? In sixteen fifty five, around six fifty six, the Dutch astronomer mathematician and all around science guy Christian Hygans made a study of Saturn through a more powerful telescope, and he made his own discoveries. So by observing how the side stars of Saturn could disappear and then reappear. And this is something other observers hadn't noticed too, Hygans realized that he was actually looking at a planet surrounded by a flat disc of rings.

It could disappear because of what you mentioned about how flat it is, right, so it could be very bright when we're looking at it at an angle where the rings are reflecting up toward us. But when the rings suddenly turned to where they're pretty much perpendicular with our view, they completely disappear. There's not enough surface to reflect anything. It's like a It's like a lady in a hat

with a wide brim. Depending on how she is holding her head, the positioning of her neck, you may or may not see the brim of the hat, and you'll see at a very degree. Yeah, so she tilts her head towards you, you see the brim. She tilts her head flat relative to your perspective, you don't really see much. And so Hyggan's observed that but Hygan's didn't know what

the rings were made of. I think he actually thought they might be some kind of solid structure, maybe more like the bugs money example, And just try to imagine that in reality. Again, I love thinking about like when you had less information and and just we're trying to conceive of what the universe was like solid rings around the planet. Yeah, I mean they based on the information avaiable at the time. Yeah, why not fascinating. But of

course subsequently we learned more about the rings of Saturn. Now, of course, Hygan's discovered something else while studying Saturn, a moon. Nobody had seen any of the moons of Saturn up until this time, and he discovered the largest moon of Saturn, which is Titan, which is going to be a fascinating thing to explore in a little bit here. But then subsequently other moons of Saturn were discovered by astronomers like Giovanni Cassini and William Herschel, And we're still learning more

about Saturn's smaller satellites. Today, we don't know everything there is to know about Saturn's moons, and especially it's smallest moons. Yeah. Again, like I mentioned earlier, fifty three known moons, nine currently awaiting confirmations, so we're still figuring it all out. Now. We have actually sent exploration missions to Saturn, so there were several fly bys Pioneer eleven, Voyager one and two that they did fly bys of Saturn, did a little

bit of observation. But the big one, the real hero for for planetary science and discovery and the Saturn sphere is Cassini. The Cassini Hoygien's mission. So the Cassini orbiter entered Saturn's orbit in two thousand four during Saturn's northern winter, and it's been conducting research on Saturn and its moons ever since, and it has sent back some awesome photos. One of the coolest thing about the Cassini photos I've

always thought is how real photos that are taken by Cassini. Now, of course they're usually like color enhanced or enhanced in some way, but real photos taken by this probe look like illustrations. They often they just don't look like a picture that somebody took with a real camera, but they are with of course some enhancements. I don't know. I love that. I love it when reality can't pass for real. Yeah,

because the thing that you're photographing is so utterly unreal. Yeah, I mean to our earthling conceptions, to everything that we have evolved a view here on this world. Yeah. And of course another part of the Cassini mission was the Huygens probe, which went down landed on Titan in two thousand five after Cassini reached Saturn in two thousand four, and that also sent back some amazing imagery and made some fascinating discoveries that we will talk about in a

bit when it's time to speak of Titan. So now it's time to take a quick break. But when we come back, we will be spiraling in towards Saturn, beginning with the outermost moons and working our way in. All right, we're back, Robert. It it seems like we're coming up on a on a strange outer moon. Yes, we in fact, we're coming up on the largest of the outer moons. Iappodus Appetus. Yes, it didn't that sound lovecraft. I in like something they would worship. A chanted name I appatus.

You just want to invoke it. Yeah, named, by the way for a Tartarus bound Titan. So it's nice and has a nice gloomy feel to it. Iopodus is not unlike the Yen Yang of Chinese philosophy. Just to prepare everyone for what you're gonna see here. Uh, it's leading hemisphere is dark, while it's trailing hemisphere is significantly brighter. It's a tidally locked world, like a number of moons, meaning that one side always faces Saturn and the other

side always faces the void. It essentially looks like the yen Yang. It essentially looks like the black and white cookie from that episode of Signfeld. It's like that the two face of Saturn's moons, and it's it's crazy to behold, and it's been crazy for scientists to try and figure out exactly why this is. We'll get into shortly and mentioning two face. It's it's monstrous in more than one

way in appearance, that's right. It also has an equatorial ridge, which is a chain of six mile or ten kilometer high mountains. And this is wonderful. It it might have formed that during a high speed rotation period or most exciting abot all of it might be a collapsed ring. No, you're making that up. No, that's one of the theories. Collapsed ring. Yeah, these are essentially like the collapsed ring mountains, which sounds like a perfect It sounds like something out

of a Jack Vance novel, you know. So it could have had a ring that was drawn into the planet by gravity, collapsed into it and became this planet wide ridge of mountains that looks like a horror movie monster backbones sticking up out of the planet's flesh. Yeah, it's crazy,

a killer now. It It orbits at about a little over two million miles or three million kilometers away from Saturn, and it has probably and this has probably protected it from tidal forces and melting episodes that would have resurfaced it. So it's far enough away from Saturn that it Saturn's gravity is not warping it too much. It's not heating it and causing the geological activity exactly. But you do

have the strange dark and white side. And there have been three major theories over the years as to why one side is black and the other is white. Hit me all right. So one theory is that i Appetus maybe sweeping up particles from the more distant dark moon phobe and steadily renewing this dusting to cover up all but the newest craters. Okay, so that's one possibility. Another one is that I saw a volcanism may be distributing

the dark materials. We're talking of volcano like eruptions of hydrocarbons, perhaps to due to chemical reactions that are in turn caused by solar radiation. Oh nice, so you've got a planet that's half covered in soot sort of. Yeah. Now the third theory, then, this is the one that's that is backed up by a lot of data from two thousand seven's uh Cassini fly by, and that is that thermal segregation is going on. So what is that? So, yeah,

the salad works. It takes the Moon as long as seventy nine days to rotate around Saturn, and it's some dark material areal made its way to the Moon at some point in the past. Perhaps dude tying into one and to the first theory, um, then the long periods of solar exposure on the dark side would have caused the dark material to heat up and volatile icy materials within the dark to sublime out and retreat to colder regions. The bright regions become brighter and the dark regions get dark. Okay,

so sort of a slow attrition. Yeah, okay, so a Yapodus is a fairly small world, right, it's about one seven the mass of Pluto, about the width of Earth's moon. But what is the life potential? I want to know? That's our main question with all these right, yeah, yeah, that's certainly, that's the one thing we want to know on each of these. Is it possible that there's some

sort of life clinging to this little moon? Now we know that the planet itself is probably alive and it's a curled up movie monster that's going to unfurl with its backbone finally sinking in as it stretches its back out and raises its claws. But assuming that's not the case, and it's just a rock in space, what we are what's the hope that there's life on it? Very very little,

very little hope for life here? Despite the insistence by various UFO groups that there are domed cities or other such constructions here, well, if you look closely enough and you want it enough, you can find dumb cities. Not just about any world, Ain't that always the case? Uh? Could we put a colony there though, if it were entirely self contained and we had the you know, in the necessary technology, of course, possibly, but you get down to the fact that there are worse and better places

to consider in the neighborhood. But it wouldn't be like trying to put a colony on Io or something. No, it means like you could do it, but they're better places. Interestingly enough, this world is the location of the monolith in the original novel two thousand one of Space Odyssey. Oh so not wait, hold on the monolith the monolith on Earth's moon or the monolith on Jupiter in orbit around Jupiter. Right in the movie it's in orbit around Jupiter,

but in the book it was Saturn. But in making two thousand and one space honestly, they couldn't get the models to look right for Saturn's rings, so they changed

it to Jupiter. Yeah, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Um. It's interesting to look at the the media, the fictional attention that has gone to Saturn versus Jupiter, and I feel like Saturn is often it's almost like Saturn is the heaven of our science fiction dreams of our future Solar system, and Jupiter is more the hell Jupiter, or at least the limbo. Yeah, like Jupiter is where the Jovian moons. That's where you put weird bases and weird

weird colonies and mining colonies and maybe prisons. Saturn. For the most part, it seems like there's a lot of dreamy or stuff going on there, or maybe that's just me. That's my my read on some of the examples I was looking at. No, it is dreamy. You're exactly right. I mean we mentioned that earlier. It's the saturn An imagery throughout popular culture and art and everything. It's very serene, very dreamy, very pretty, kind of quiet silver light in

the background of space. Now we're gonna do a quick fly by of the next moon because it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to see there, but it is worth pointing out as a strange landmark in the

sphere of Saturn, and that's the moon Hyperion. Yes, Hyperion, despite its wonderful name, despite whatever whatever you might expect of it, based on Dan Simon's Wonderful Hyperion books, which would, by the way, do not take place on this hyperiond I think it's alluded that a distant exoplanet named Hyperion is colonized by individuals who are originally somehow tied to hyperion in our Solar system, but totally different things, because hyperion in our Solar system, as it orbits around Saturn,

is essentially a giant potato. Yeah. It's an irregular shaped and it's very small, about one point one times the mass of Earth's atmosphere, not Earth, but the gas in the atmosphere, about ten percent percent the width of Earth's moon. It's not very big, and it's shaped very strangely, like a like a spongy, low density sweet potato. Yeah. I've

seen it described as a large frozen rubble pile. Uh. It's it's the largest of Saturn's irregular, non spherical moons, and it's probably the remnant of a larger moon that was destroyed by a major impact. So this is just a junk, man, this is a rubble moon. We're not gonna land there. There's certainly nothing, no life to consider here, but it's kind of worth the point out as we continue our journey towards a far more interesting um planetary object. Yeah.

Do you hear that sound? I think we're I think we're coming in now. What is that sound? It's signaling the Titans. So Titan Titan is about the mass of murk Cury, about one point eight times the mass of Earth's Moon, about a hundred and fifty of the width of the Moon, the Earth's moon. It's spherical, obviously, and it Saturn's largest moon, larger than the planet Mercury. And this is the only moon that we're discussing today that has been explored by a lander, by a human made lander,

the Hygan's Tightened Lander, a beast of planetary exploration. There are videos available online that show the landing imagery sent back by the Hygan's probe. You should watch them, but try to imagine a tighten landing. What this world is like. Unlike so many of the moon's that we've surveyed before,

this approach is very unique in the Solar System. On Titan, we descend from orbit through a thick, cold atmosphere and everything below is shrouded from our view from space by this murky haze, and you descend through the freezing fog

and strong winds shake your ending craft. Yeah, this is the only moon in our Solar System that has clouds in a dense atmosphere mostly nitrogen and methane, and the atmospheric pressure is is about six greater than Earth, so roughly the same as you would find at the bottom of a swimming pool. That's right, but that's actually so that's heavy sounding to us, like you wouldn't want to spend your life at the bottom of a swimming pool.

But it's tolerable. It's tolerable compared to almost everywhere else in the Solar systems Venus. Yeah, so in Venus you might have what like nine atmospheres or something like that. It's like a cure. Yeah, you couldn't survive. Uh, And then other places there's almost no atmosphere atmospheric pressure to speak of. It's nearly like being in a vacuum. Titan is close. Yeah, this is the goldilocks finding the bed or the porridge. That is. It's not ideal, but in

a pinch, little my ears, but I can survive. But so you land on Titan, you land in the middle of a net puatorial desert, and there's a strange sound and tactle sensation you experience upon touchdown, not a dry thud like hitting rock, but a splat the sound of the soil that you're landing on being wet. Welcome to bog World. Now, it's maybe not exact exactly fair to say bog world, because the soil isn't as wet as

the mud you'd find in many bogs on Earth. But relative to the rest of the Solar System, it's bog world. Titan is bog world. And as far as we know, Titan is the only place in the Solar System other than Earth that has beaches. Some planets have subterranean oceans covered in ice a rock, right, We've talked about that, Some have frozen polar water ice or frozen ice surfaces entirely, But Titan has liquid lakes on a terrestrial surface. However, those lakes are not the water lakes we know love.

Titan has a hydrocarbon hydrological system, which translates to seas and rivers of liquid methane. So in the equatorial region there's this vast desert of ancient water waterways, ancient river beds, and dried up coastlines, and towards the poles you'll come

across clouds and storms and methane lakes. Now, Titan itself is uh It's it's mass is composed mainly of water in the form of ice and rocky material in fact Titan is so cold negative trees fahrenheit or negative celsius that water essentially acts like rock and lava too on our world. So the ground you walk on, I guess it's ice mostly, but it is water water ice that

acts like rock. Yeah, so it's it's crazy to think about that that it's this this It sounds like an alternate dimension where everything is a little skewed instead of instead of motions of water, it is. It's it's this of substance. And uh. And and the rock is actually water. It's like everything's turned on its head in topsy turvy.

Totally true. And that's actually something that's covered in a fantastic lecture that I listened to given in two thousand eleven by the NASA planetary scientist Christopher McKay about the possibility of life on Titan. And Uh. I listened to this lecture. I thought it was great, and I just wanted to cover some of the things he talks about and and maybe we can have a discussion about what they mean. But so in this Christopher McKay lecture, he

begins by noting a curious fact. So several years back, we had detected that titans atmosphere features a hydrogen flux towards the surface. That means there's hydrogen in the atmosphere and it appears to flow down to the ground and then not come back up. So what's happening to the hydrogen on the surface of Titan. We will come back to that question. So McKay talks about how all forms of life needs some way of harnessing energy. So on

Earth there are two primary strategies. You've got like photosynthesis, right, capturing sunlight energy, and then you've got chemical energy redox chemical energy. So life also needs several other things. It needs carbon, you know, organic molecules to make its tissues out of for food and stuff like that. And it needs liquid water. I've already discussed why that's a little

problematic here exactly. So there is gonna be no liquid water, and the main constraint on an environment being able to host life on Earth is the absence of liquid water. You can mess with all the other variables, and as long as there's liquid water there, there's still probably going to be something alive. This is why world's with some form of liquid water, sort of the hot spots of solar system astrobiology investigation like Europa Enceladus, another moon of

Saturn will get to in a bit. And the recently discovered spongy wet spot that appear seasonally on Martian soil. I don't know if you've read about that, but it's pretty cool, uh that they found that. You know that there's some parts of the soil on Mars that seemed to thaw seasonally. So even if there's just occasionally liquid water, there's more hope than in this world of Titan, which seems to just be ever in the freezer. Yeah, but

McKay points out something interesting. It's not necessarily the compound H two O itself. That's important because there are plenty of worlds full of completely frozen water ice that that don't seem to be good candidates for for life. Life is ultimately a subset of chemistry. It's biochemistry, and that chemistry needs a liquid medium to take place in Liquid is sort of like the canvas on which you you know, paint the wonderful artistry of complex chemistry. So maybe it's

not water that's the key. It's just liquid. It's the liquid phase of matter. So how about those methane lakes on Titan. In many ways, Titan is analogous to Earth. So Christopher McKay points out that, like Earth, that has a nitrogen based atmosphere. And if you're saying, wait a second, I thought we had an oxygen atmosphere. Oxygen is only

about our atmospheric composition. About seventy eight percent of our atmosphere is nitrogen, and if our atmosphere were entirely oxygen, this would be a problem for you at high concentrations at regular atmospheric pressure, oxygen pure oxygen's toxic. It'll destroy your lungs. As we mentioned, it has roughly comparable atmospheric pressure. Mackay compares it to being under fifteen feet of water. That sounds about right compared to what you said, right

being at the bottom. So it's not like Venus, it's not like Mars. It's it's not you know, it's not the nicest place to be compared to what we're used to on Earth, but it's closer to Earth than anything else we're aware of. It has a hydrological cycle with clouds and rain storms. Now this is crazy. Yeah, I I don't usually think of anywhere except Earth having rain. Yeah, and here we're talking about what methane rains. I say, yeah, methane, of course, so the methane is going to be H

four raining down from the sky. And speaking of methane, Titan is rich with organic compounds. Now this doesn't mean stuff that we know to be alive or organic compounds are just a sort of group name for carbon based compounds like methane that are very often associated with life, but they exist independent of life. You don't have to have life to make them. But if you want carbon based life to exist, these compounds need to be around.

But the biggest difference is temperature, right, So average Earth temperature is almost two hundred degrees cintegrade more than average Titan temperature. So it's like a cold twin of Earth. All this stuff that you see going on on Earth, you know, the hydrological cycle, the chemistry of the atmosphere, all that kind of stuff sort of has a cousin

that happens on Titan. But it's the freezing cousin, the much colder cousin, And that kind of makes you wonder if one of Earth's main features life also has a

cold cousin. Uh So, this is a situation where we're forced to to not dream of an entirely different form of life, but to say life as we know it existing on a slightly different world like but basically all things being equal, If the parameters were skewed a little bit, could a similar model of life still exists, Well, it'd be life as we know it in one way, but not in another. So it would be carbon based life.

So it's life as we know it in that sense, and we don't know of any other way that you could possibly build life, you know, without carbon, though it

could be possible, we just don't know. Um. But it is completely unlike Earth life in that all Earth life is water based, and this would be methane based, so it would be it would be completely alien biochemistry in that sense, but not in the sense that we'd still have to imagine it's based on carbon, because carbon is the only chemical basis we can think of for building up the kind of complex molecules that we see in life. So what did the Hygan's probe find when it landed

on Titan. Did it find microbes? You can guess no, because we would have heard about that. But it wasn't equipped to find microbes, so there could have been microbes there and it wouldn't have known. It's not like it came back so exactly. Um, and that might be a problem if it did, because as as we now know, it's very important to protect Earth from alien microbes. But a little bit about the science behind the Hygans probe.

So we when we sent the Hyggans probe to UH to Titan, we built it sort of like a raft, as a floating boat like craft, because scientists thought that Titan was going to be covered in a in a surface wide liquid ocean of methane. And the reason for this is because they were able to detect previously that the app sphere was rich in methane. And atmospheric methane doesn't last forever. It gets slowly destroyed by radiation from

the Sun and transformed into other compounds. So you can't have a methane atmosphere that just hangs around for the entire lifetime of a planet, you know, four billion years or however old it is since Titan was formed, so there has to be something on the surface to replenish it. And from this they reasoned it looks like there's liquid methane on the surface of Titan. Which is slowly evaporating

being processed turned into atmospheric methane gas. And so they thought, okay, we'll drop a boat into these methane lakes and we'll see what happens. But instead of dropping into lakes, it dropped into the equatorial region of Titan, which was something more like a desert. But the probe was able to detect that it was not as totally desert like as

it first seemed. As we mentioned before, the ground is soft, soft, and damp, moist soil, and one instrument was also able to notice that methane steam was coming out of the soil where the relatively hot spacecraft was sticking into it. Okay, so if there's liquid all throughout the soil, this liquid methane throughout the soil on Titan, that seems like an analogy to what we experience on Earth, where pretty much anywhere there is moisture of any kind you can find life.

By by analogy, it seems like if there's life on Titan, we should be able to find it all over the place, even in the desert. Yeah, even in the desert, because even in deserts on Earth, if there you know, there's any water content whatsoever present, you're going to find some kind of life. So in his lecture, mackay asks, Okay, so if there's carbon based life on Titan that lives in liquid methane instead of liquid water, how would we be able to look for clues of this? And one

one clue is looking at atmospheric engineering. So you've probably read about how in looking for exo planets, they've theorized that one way we could look for life on exo planets is by looking for oxygen, right, because the pred sense of anomalous oxygen is a sign of geoengineering by organisms, Like our atmosphere is not oxygen because of the physics of planetary formation. That wasn't it wasn't like that when Earth was formed. Earth's atmosphere is oxygen because it's full

of critters like plants and cyanobacteria. Organisms change the atmosphere of our planet exactly. It's their waste, it's their waste product, it's their poop, you know, So they there or I guess they're they're breathing out, I don't know, however you want to phrase it. They take in sunlight and CEO two. They use the energy from the sunlight to split up the COO two, make body parts out of the carbon, and then spit out the oxygen as a waste product.

And so you could look at the original oxygenation of Earth's atmosphere. Is this mass poisoning event? Uh? We just happened to be the kinds of animals that evolved to thrive amidst this mass poisoning and to work well with it. So how could we look for similar clues on Titan? Uh? Well, you would have to imagine what an organism that gets along in liquid nitrogen to do to make a living. So you imagine a carbon based life form that lives in liquid methane and imagine how does it eat? What

does it do? Well? Titan has tons of compounds on it that make perfectly good food. One one example would be acetylene, or another would be ethane. So if you're an organism on Titan, food is just all over the place. In McKay's words, food is quote falling from the sky. It's not not hard to get a meal there. But organisms like us get energy by a combination of eating food.

So taking in these carbon based compounds and then breathing taking an oxygen and then reacting that carbon and oxygen to create usable energy and the molecules we need and the waste product of CEO two. Our cold counterparts on Titan could perform a pretty much analogous process by reacting carbon based compounds and food with instead out of oxygen hydrogen, and that would create usable energy and then a waste

product containing carbon and hydrogen like H four methane. Uh So, if there's life on Titan, mackay and his colleagues predicted that it would probably alter the chemistry of the surface by depleting it of the compounds it eats and breathes, like acetylene, ethane and hydrogen. And remember we started with that missing hydrogen, so that there's hydrogen flowing down to

the surface and then disappearing. So the most fascinating possibility is that some kind of organism at the surface is consuming hydrogen spitting out methane as part of its metabolism and respiration, and that's how it gets along. Now we don't know. This isn't proof, right, we don't know that there's something alive on Titan, but but it definitely makes

Titan worth a closer look. I think we should send more probes right, Oh, most definitely, we definitely, we should definitely send more probes because one reason is always more problem One reason, of course, is that you know, if we find and this is something that McKay points out, is that if we find life on Mars or Europa, current life, past life, etcetera, there's a chance that it's related to us. Right, but when in contemplating Titan, this

would be an entirely different form. It would be it would be unconnected to us because it would be based on a different biochemistry. Yeah, I mean there's no liquid methane based biochemistry on that then, and there probably couldn't be because Earth is just not cold enough. Like we look at at Titan and say, how could you live on a world that cold? But any life form on Titan would look at Earth as like like we look

at Venus. You know, it's just this unbearable hell of intense heat where you know, the stuff you need to live, the liquid methane you need it just it boils. You know, you can't you can't sustain it. So anyway, we mentioned sending those probes, what what would they look for if we did send probes? Well, McKay suggests one thing look for evidence of the chemistry of life there. So uh.

The example he gives is that organisms on Earth we get oxygen easy, but nitrogen is difficult for us to come by, so we have enzymes that have to bust up nitrogen into molecules in the atmosphere and make them into ammonia in H three. Now, on a world like Titan, the problem wouldn't be getting uh, getting nitrogen making ammonia. It would be getting oxygen because there's no oxygen available

except that which is locked up in the frozen H two. Oh, the water ice that makes the rocky ground of this planet. So you'd see organisms with enzymes for melting water ice and getting that oxygen out of it. Uh. And then another thing he finally suggests, is to scoop up organic material from Titan and then look for biases in the

distribution of organic materials. You know, so looking for molecules that are appearing an anomalous concentrations that wouldn't be explained by inorganic chemistry, but would be explained if you're looking at a place where the chemistry of the surface is

being processed constantly by life forms. But the idea of life on Titan is interesting to me because of how cold it is, So we know there's a basic correlation between heat and metabolism, right, So a life form that lives on Titan is probably a very slow moving form of life, slow metabolism, slow life cycle, slow evolution. And this kind of makes me wonder about weird thought experiment extending out from this, what would intelligent life that evolved

on a freezing, liquid methane world look like? Because in many ways, I think our idea of intelligence is heavily colored by speed. Right, So can you imagine an organism that has as much technological and problem solving intelligence as a human but does everything literally one hundred times slower mm hmm, but but but potentially living a lot longer as well. So I mean, I guess it all becomes relative.

Then I guess it's it's just harder for us to contemplate, Like I have a hard time imagining something that's not a like whale sloth in this scenario and then wondering and then it's even a greater leap for me to try to imagine this alien methane based whale sloth even developing crude technology on this world, Like, yeah, it's just it's almost too much for me to fathom. I mean sirens obviously. Oh yeah, well let us not speak of

the sirens of Titan. But I I I agree with you about the difficulty of imagining you know, the whale sloth Like. Um, I just tried to do some math here, like, if a development happened in humans one million years after the emergence of the species, did you expect a hypothetical liquid methane alien world that did everything a hundred times slower to reach the same development in a hundred million years. Well, that wouldn't be ruled out by the age of the universe.

But then that sort of introduces questions about like, well, wait a minute, I mean, how would you even get a complex nervous system. Because it took life on Earth what like four billion years to evolve from the first self replicating molecules to technological intelligence. So would it take life on a cold planet four hundred billion years? Uh? And again, I'm just using a hundred times faster or

a hundred times slower as a hypothetical. I don't know exactly how slower it would be, but if it would take something like that long, we've got a lot of a long time to wait before we meet these slow moving organisms, because that's much older than the universe. Yeah, and again to say nothing of the various cataclysms and extinction events that are likely to to occur in the

history of any life sustaining, life evolving world. So it might very well be on the path towards creating this and then whammouh, some some body in Saturn's um gravitational system just crashes into you and wipes everything out. But then again, I also think of a very slow organism as a very resilient organism. You know, it's just hard to put them down. Yeah, but you know, the right commets, commet strike, the right the right medior can certainly do that.

Has anybody ever created a sci fi alien like that? I'm trying to think of one, Like an alien that's just amazingly slow. M hm. The nts sort of sort of like the ants. Yeah, I'm I'm not remembering one off hand. They tend to be This kind of alien would tend to be the the the the marginally experienced alien in a in a rather you know, rich diverse pantheon of alien species like this would not be your

central character because they're so unlike humans. This would be like the one character that you go to, uh, you know, about halfway through the novel to get a little elder inside. I guess, well, it makes me think that there there'd be a great creeping menace because imagine you colonize the world with some hundred times slower than you, cold cold liquid methane, intelligent organisms. And at first it doesn't seem like they're bothered by your presence. You can live in

peaceful harmony. But it just took them a hundred years to decide that they were going to destroy you. Yeah, they would play a different you know, long term game. Uh. And so I certainly have encountered that in fantasy novels before. You know, what happens when you have the great threat does not have to doesn't have to worry about the day to day, even year to year. I can sleep for centuries and wait for the game, the game board to improve and the situations to favor it once more.

So you know, you could see a similar model, I guess, uh, with you know, interplanetary situation, interplanetary politics, and then a great disadvantage we're always at. We gotta go get the groceries. Yeah, so they can say, you know what, we can lose the next three hundred interplanetary elections. You know, for us, that's just that's just a nap. It's small hyperions. One last thing I want to talk about for and we

mentioned future probes going to Titan. Definitely in favor of that Titan last I heard was not the top priority for for future missions, but it's you know, it's something that's being discussed and and there are some proposals. But one proposal for future exploration of Titans surface is the use of a type of robot that I think is really interesting. It's been referred to in the press as the super ballbot, but I like the design of this. I've talked about it on the other podcast I be

forward thinking before. But the robot design is a rover that is based on what's called tin Segreti architect picture, and essentially it is a mobile robot that looks like a jumble of rods and wires. So if you just made a tangled ball of sticks and wires connecting them at the ends, that's what it would look like. And

it moves by tensing and relaxing the wires. So it kind of tumbles along on the ground rotumbweed exactly, and it's resistant to damage from hard landings and stuff, so that this makes it an interesting design for a planetary rover to explore. But I've also always thought this would be a great design for a killer robot in the sci fi horror movie, Like just this this tangle of rods and wires, and it's kind of cute, it's kind

of funny. It just kind of tumbles up to you, but then it wraps around you and ten tenses the wires and then you're in trouble. Well, you know what makes sense because there's at least one killer robot movie that took place on the moons of Saturn. Saturn three um had Kirk Douglas in it. Oh, Michael, but Kirk, this is the movie. You sent me the trailer too, and it has Harvey Kitel with like he's he's looking

very slick in it. Yeah, he very Unharvey Kitel. Yeah, he's he's not his least leazy role I think, and kind of flash Gordon aesthetic and he actually looks good in it. Yeah. Fair Faucet in it as well, and that has a killer robot in it not the greatest killer robot from cinematic history. But you know, beggars can't be choosers, especially when you're looking at films that involve the moons of Saturn. Joe, it looks like we're coming

up on Raya. Yeah, that's right. So Raya after Titan, Raya is going to seem like kind of a letdown Raya or Ria, I've seen it, said Ria also, so Ria, I don't want to downplay the beauty and majesty of this wonderful moon. And so it's the second largest moon of Jupiter, second largest after Titan. Of course, Titan being the largest, is about one six the massive Pluto, more than of the width of Earth's moon. It's spherical, uh, in terms of life potential, there's not a whole lot

going on here. It's and the sort of almost half lunicized sphere of water, ice and rock with relatively low density. In many ways, it's comparable to the next moon we're gonna passone. And as far as surface features go, it's got craters and it's essentially a serene, beautiful cold sphere cratered in silent Okay, and in a far on a far lesser note. Apparently the latest Independence Day Independence Day resurgence involves at least a minor point about humanity building

a defense outpost here. So I don't know why. Maybe it just seems like a nice boring place to put all those guns. I suppose you know, there's sort of like a if you pronounce it ray, Uh, sort of like ray sort ray gun. Yeah, okay, that makes sense. That probably makes us as much sense as anything. It makes a lot of sense, Robert, makes so much sense.

Let's spiral on in and move on to the next InterPlaNet. Yes, Dione, as we mentioned, a small cratered moon mean radius of about three two kilometers, And what we're looking at here is a hard frozen lump with a dense core, probably a silicate rock, and the remainder of it is is just ice water ice, a very fine ice powder that's basically like smoke from Saturn's e ring constantly bombards Dinny.

And the dust from the ear ring ultimately comes from Enceladus, which has prominent geyser activity that we discuss in a bed. Great wisps mar the surface of Dione, and uh, these turn out these are actually bright canyon ice walls indicating pasta tectonic activity, and these ice cliffs could be a mature phase of the so called tiger stripes that are

encountered on Enceladus. Right, So we're gonna talk about the surface of Enceladus in a bit, But Enceladus is a is a younger, smoother kind of surface, but it does have these stripes along it. So you're saying like, if if Enceladus were allowed to mature millions more years, it could end up looking more like some of the surface features of Dione. Yeah, this is essentially the old boring uh Enceladus. But nothing nothing in the sphere of Saturn is boring. No, no, not boring, but the the less

interesting version of the same lunar idea. I guess we are spiraling in faster and it's something we've got to acknowledge now. The next one is going to be the moon Tethus or Tethis uh so teeth. This is about sixty five of the mass of the dwarf planet series. It's pretty small, roughly thirty of the width of Earth's moon, Roughly spherical, there's not a lot of suspected potential for endogenous life on Tethus uh and and teeth. This is

composed mostly of water ice with no real atmosphere. Is this frozen ice ball tidally locked in orbit around Saturn. But the coolest feature of teeth This is some thing that I came across, I think last year. I was reading about this and I just love it. I'm not

quite sure why. It's just a surface coloration feature, but in July, NASA reported that in enhanced color images from the Cassini spacecraft there were a series of these arc shaped red streaks that could be seen side by side parallel on the surface of Teethus, and it looks like Freddy Krueger slashed the moon with his glove. It wasn't

the first time the arcs had been seen. They've been spotted faintly visibly as early as two thousand four, I think, but this was the first time they were imaged really clearly. And it's fascinating because we were not positive what causes them, at least as far as I could find. And maybe somebody has a private theory somewhere, but I I couldn't find that these are explained yet. They they're probably geologically young, these red streaks, because they cross over older features like craters.

But what created them and why are they red in color? Scientists don't know. So there was a NASA JPL press release from that mentioned speculation on that they could be maybe exposed ice with some kind of chemical impurities, or they could be out gassing from inside teeth this but ultimately we don't know yet. All right, Well, let's leave this moon behind us and move on to uh one of we've already uh discussed a little bit, and that is Enceladus, a moon about the size of Arizona. Yes,

could fit within the borders of Arizona. Another way to to imagine the circumference of this moon, it is not very large, is that if you were to punch a hole in the Earth along the borders of the state of Texas, you could drop And why would you want to do that, But just if you were to do it, take a cookie cutter Texas sized cookie cutter punched out

that part of Earth, you could drop Enceladus through the whole. So, coming after some of the giants we've seen like Titan and and Rhea, you might be kind of underwhelmed by its size, But do not be underwhelmed because Enceladus is quite interesting. Yeah. One of the crazy features here is that Enceladus has hydrothermal vents that spew water, vapor, and ice particles from an underground ocean beneath the icy crust of Enceladus, and the plume material contains organic compounds, volatile gases,

carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salts, and silica. And it's all expelled out to a distance three times the radius of Enceladus and at a speed of approximately eight hundred miles per hour or four d per second. It's a continuous eruption that continually refreshes the Moon's surface. Uh. And it cloaks the entire Moon in an enormous halo of fine ice dust, which then in turn feeds Saturn's ear ring, which we mentioned earlier. Right, So the ear ring is

this outer ring around Saturn. You've seen those concentrated inner rings. That the ear ring is more this great vast haze expend extending outward, uh from Saturn. And it's uh oh, oh, it's cool. I love the jets coming out of the south pole of this planet feeding this. And there's an even cooler implication I want to mention in a bit. But there's another striking feature of Enceladus that you would notice long before your spacecraft sets down if you're landing

on the planet. Enceladus is the most reflective large object in the entire Solar System. It's like a bright mirror reflecting the sun straight into your eyes. And Enceladus may be alive, not the planet itself, as we discussed with the Appetus, but but something within the planet. So Enceladus is believed to have a rocky core surrounded by a smooth, high, highly reflective ice crust, but in between them, evidence indicates the presence of subterranean oceans, much like other moons we

observed around Jupiter. Now I've seen claims of both global subterranean oceans and regional regional subterranean seas positioned under the South Pole um. But the way the ocean has started to become intensely interesting to scientists, especially astrobiologists. Now, why is that, Well, we've seen examples before where these where these subworld oceans. I mean, we have liquid water, and clearly we have we have jets of it, we have

we have activity going on here. There's energy taking place, there's warmth, and there's liquid and there and there are important compounds. As you mentioned earlier, what's in those plumes coming out of the southern pole polar region of Enceladus. Again, the Cassini spacecraft detected organic compounds, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, salt, silica, volatile gases. Uh, that's good stuff if you look in Live, going right down the list, checking off many of the

key factors necessary for life as we know it. But do we know it? No, we don't. And that's the thing. The Cassini spacecraft is not equipped much like the Huygan's lander. It's not equipped to detect to the presence of life, but it can, it can look for clues. Uh. So the material and these plumes go all over the place, sometimes it falls back down to Enceladus. Forms this filmy mist in space which you mentioned, becomes part of Saturn's

e ring. And I'd just like to point out that if I understand this correctly, if it turns out there is life in the subterranean ocean of Enceladus, it's probably being sprayed out in these jets. And if the jets become Saturn's ring, one of the rings of Saturn is a graveyard of alien microbes spread hundreds of thousands of miles into space. That is crazy to think of it that way. It's crazy or it's awesome and it's creepy.

Either way, I think that's great. So much like Titan to do the real exploration and discovery work about the potential for life on Enceladus, we need another mission, got to get back there. And I actually just recently read a piece in Scientific American that was talking about one of the people who's working on trying to plan such a mission, the astronomer Caroline Porko. And this kind of mission obviously is not easy to devise or or too

fund but best of luck to them all. Right now, Joe, as we as we leave this moon and make our way towards our our next and final destination here our final object of study, I do want to stress what you're about to look at is not a death star. It's a moon. It's not space station. It's a moon. Um, I'm talking of course about Minus. Then why are we called an astractor beam. Well, we're gonna have some questions

then for for Minus. But but yeah, it basically Mimus is big claim to fame is it's just a frozen moon that looks a lot like the Death Star from Star Wars. It's got this big crater that looks a lot like the weapon that what would you call it? The crater in the Death Star from which the planet destroying em comes out? Yeah? Yeah. An enormous crater uh, known as the Herschel Crater. It is a hundred thirty kilometers or eighty miles while it dominates the landscape, giving

the world's appearance, the world an appearance of a great eye. Uh. The crater covered moon is less than one miles and on komes in mean radius, it has roughly the land area of Spain. Not very big, not very big, And again, most of this visible side is crater. It's not perfectly round either, more of an an ovoid. The shape and it's a low density suggests that it's consists almost entirely of water ice, which is the the only substance we've

ever detected on Mimus. It's tidily locked. And this is crazy. It's it's believed that the impact that created the Herschel Crater probably came close to just shattering it entirely. That's how because you know, a crater that big on a world this small, uh, you know, it was just a hair away from just breaking it into pieces. So should that have happened, would it have become another ring of Saturn? Potentially? Yeah, And I don't know exactly how the ring formation works,

so we don't know. I guess, well, um, if nothing else, it might end up resembling, you know, one of like the potato moon that we mentioned earlier. You know, we might still have a sizeable lump, but it would be a lesser lump. It would be one of those, uh, those other lump moons that we are not discussing in this episode, you know, among the among the fifty three named moons of Saturn. Now, one of the interesting things about Mimus, though, is that it should experience more tidal

heating than Enceladusts. And yet while that frozen world as we discussed both geysers and uh and and clearly experiences internal heat, Mimus is just an unchanging waste land of ice. Oh yeah, we should have mentioned about Enceladusts. I think I forgot to mention that the the what is the energy source? You know, why is there? Well, it's some of the same explanations that we saw in some of the moon of Jupiter. It's it's internal stress caused by

the orbit and gravitational influence around it. So it's got a not perfectly circular orbit. There's some changing gravitational fields and this causes stretching and flexing inside Enceladus that leads to heat. Yeah, a lot of kinds of comparisons are often made between what we know about Enceladus and what we know about Mimus, to the degree that some have speculated on the possibility of a liquid ocean in Mimus. But it's such a small moon again, the size of Spain.

It's it's hardly the best candidate. But yeah, you could say there's there's still an outside chance, and that's the case. Okay, we seem to be passing Mimus at this point. I guess we were not trapped in attractor beam. However, we do seem to be moving rather quickly towards the surface of Saturn. Now, Joe, oh, No, Saturn, which once seemed quite serene and peaceful and beautiful, uh, glowing moons, and it's it's frozen worlds and it's nice, you know, black

white harmony plant lunar body here. But yeah, I know it's able to escape. If you notice that as we get closer, Saturn is making a sound. Do you hear that? It's kind of like, uh in Raiders of the Lost Dark, that scene where they zoom in on the box with the arc in it, and it's making that satanic miallmami allenoise. I can't quite hear that over the two thousand and one space honestly, monolith coral arrangement. But but that's because

I have headphones in and listening to that. I always listen to that whenever I move in closer and closer to a large, scary planetary object. Folks, I should let you know that while we were working on this episode, Robert shared with me a fantastic mix that's sort of like a Saturn influenced electronic music mix that Robert, You've got to share this on the lane. Oh yeah, I will. I will make sure that there's a link to this in the landing page. I believe it came from the

the record label A Caci A uh. Definitely worth checking out. They put out a number of cool, cool acts and cool releases over the years, including some stuff from the Weirding Module, which is one of my one of my favorite musical acts out there. This thing definitely made me wish that there was a good John Carpenter movie taking place on a moon of Saturn. Yeah. Yeah, we need perhaps we need more John Carpenter space movies, that's what

you're saying. More like Ghosts of Mars is what I'm saying, ghosts of Mimus, ghosts of Titans, one for each world. Get to get ice Cube on the phone and Jason Statham. All right, So there you have it, the moons of Saturn. Now. So now you have both both the moons of Saturn and the moons of Jupiter covered on stuff to blow your mind. Now, there was absolutely no way we were going to cover everything interesting about Saturn and its moons. So there's tons more to learn out there, and we're

constantly learning more. Yeah yeah, So so feel free to look into this and research it yourself. You know, you should feel free. Don't let us tell you that that you can't learn about saturny on your own, but away. Yeah, we we do encourage you to do that because it is a fascinating planetary system and all those moons are great stuff. Uh and and I feel like we could have gotten into even more about the rings somememb We could probably do a whole episode just about the rings,

the ring, moonlits and everything like that. Yeah, indeed just rings in general, because we could discuss other rings on other worlds in our own solar system. So hey, if you will have feedback you want to share with us about this, you can go to all the normal places to do it. Head on over to our various social media accounts. Were on Facebook, we're blow the mind there though, if you follow us on Facebook, make sure you're fault.

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