Forcing Paradigms Upon Titan

When NASA sent the Cassini spacecraft to Titan (the largest moon of Saturn), certain things were expected to be found based on their ancient universe and evolutionary presuppositions. Titan was baffling already, because it has a dense atmosphere, which was a puzzler right there.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Worse for secular scientists, Titan was recalcitrant by acting decidedly young. With Cassini using radar and other instruments to map its surface, tellers of cosmology tales are in high gear finding truly remarkable "explanations" to force Titan into pretending to be old. It makes more sense to admit that the ancient universe paradigm is wrong and that the data fits a young universe.

As the Cassini orbiter makes its 103rd close pass by Titan, have long-agers found ways to keep it billions of years old?

Space.com announced the 103rd flyby of Titan by Cassini, and it’s a daring one: just 2,274 miles above the surface at 13,000 miles per hour; PhysOrg announced the next day that it was successful. With about 40% of the surface mapped by radar and other instruments, enough should be known by now to explain its youthful appearance in terms of the assumed age of the solar system (4.5 billion years).

Astrobiology Magazine reported that JPL chemists are getting closer to reproducing Titan’s peculiar smog, but the fit isn’t perfect yet. That article did not address the age conundrum: how long can Titan’s atmosphere create these complex molecules, and are they reversible?

Jeff Hecht at New Scientist was the only reporter recently to address the age question. First, he laid out the problem:

You can see how Jeff laid out the problem and read the rest at "Keeping Titan Old".