Abiogenic Hydrocarbons

Where are all the dead dinosaurs on Titan,

Liquid Confirmed on Saturn Moon

AGOcomments: 174PrintSharefiled under: Science NewsText SizeAAAPASADENA, Calif. (July 31) -- At least one of many large, lake-like features on Saturn's moon Titan studied by the international Cassini spacecraft contains liquid hydrocarbons, making it the only body in the solar system besides Earth known to have liquid on its surface, NASA said Wednesday.

Scientists positively identified the presence of ethane, according to a statement from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which manages the Cassini mission exploring Saturn, its rings and moons.

Liquid ethane is a component of crude oil.

 

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Oh no..

 

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Water is a component of semen.
Who jizzed on Mars?

 

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To be fair, "ethane" is pretty simple C[sub]2[/sub]H[sub]6[/sub], whereas crude oil is a complicated mixture that includes far more complex molecules than that.

I don't think there is much debate that organic molecules, including hydrocarbons, *can* form without the presence of life. If they could not, then there would be no naturalistic way to explain life. (I suppose we could have been "designed" by silicon based life forms...) The question (former question, at least, which the geologists thought they resolved years ago) was whether a "abiogenic" process was responsible for the petrochemicals found on Earth.

From what I can tell, most of the people studying the question concluded that petroleum on Earth has a biogenic origin, except oil company scientists, a bunch of people the Soviet Union, and Oil Is Mastery (who may well be a time traveling, Soviet, oil Company Scientist, for all I know!) The old Soviet theory of abiogenic oil is presently a deep minority belief.

 

In an unrelated story, President Bush has vowed to put an end to the production of WMD's on Titan.............




I figured I'd say it before someone else did.

 

And Titan probably has no free oxygen that would enable such chemicals to be burned off. This is another strawman. No one is suggesting that hydrocarbons cannot form naturally. What we are saying is that the oil we depend on formed from biological sources.

 

A literature critic once commented, in passing, that most science fiction was wish fulfillment.

That is one of the few explanations I can come up with for the consistency of the correlation between political stances and belief in certain fictional "science". These guys all have the same wishes, underlying both the politics and the willingness to arrange reality to suit.

 

Um, yes we do. All oil is abiogenic. For more information google the OilIsMastery website.

 

That is totally incorrect and there is no evidence for that whatsoever. In fact it's impossible since petroleum can only be formed at pressures above 30 kilobar which corresponds to a depth of 100 kilometers deep in the mantle.

"There has not been any 'debate' about the origin of hydrocarbons for over a century. Competent physicists, chemists, chemical engineers and men knowledgeable of thermodynamics have known that natural petroleum does not evolve from biological material since the last quarter of the 19th century." -- Jack F. Kenney, 2002

 

There are no dinosaurs on Titan.

 

there are enough threads on oils crack pot theories, no need to infect WE as well