TED | Talks | Carolyn Porco: Fly Me To The Moons of Saturn (video)

Following on from the previous post in which looked at whether or not it's a good idea for humanity to advertise its presence to alien civilisations that may or not exist, and may or not be kindly disposed towards us, here's a video which looks at humankind's current endeavours to explore our solar system by deploying robotic missions to the various planets, moons and other bodies, such as Pluto, which comprise our solar neighbourhood.

Carolyn Porco here gives us a progress report of the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn, and in this talk focuses on what has been discovered regarding 2 of Saturn's 47 moons, namely Titan and Enceladus, since the mission's arrival in the outer solar system, describing the surprising features that have been found there.

Before Cassini arrived, it had been impossible to see through the global haze over Titan, but we have since learned from the mission that methane on Titan is as ubiquitous as water here on Earth, and despite the incredibly low temperatures there, methane stays liquid, with rain, lakes and rivers carving out various parts of the landscape there - it's further thought there may be tectonic activity there, and the highpoint of this part of the mission was the deployment of the Huygens probe that made it down to the surface of Titan, and is referred to by the speaker as the culmination of a truly international effort.

The biggest surprises were on Enceladus, where it was discovered that the fracturing seen on its southern surface were a coating of 'organic materials' - and that it's south pole was the warmest point on the moon. The images of the plumed jets are thought to be ejecting from pockets of liquid water there, and along with the heat, strongly indicate that life might be supported there - which if true, and assuming that some sort of life did, or still does, exist on Mars, would make three locations within our very own solar system where life has taken hold.

As we saw in the preceding post, the mediocrity argument would appear to be very well expressed here - if at least three bodies in this solar system have life, intelligent or otherwise, the odds of life existing elsewhere in the galaxy and at other locations across the Universe, may well have shortened dramatically.