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Dazzling, legendary
It's the most beautiful planet in the night sky.
But secretive saturn has been holding out on us.
We learned a vast amount about it,
And most of this has been very surprising.
We thought we knew those bodies. We had no idea.
Saturn boils with extreme weather
And weird lights.
The rings ripple and twist,
Bullied by over 60 remarkable moons.
They are individual worlds. They each have a story to tell.
This is a planetary explorer's dream.
Today, saturn's moons
Are the hottest property in the search for alien life.
If there's one place in the solar system
I would put a bet that life exists there right now,
I would choose saturn.
And on saturn's largest moon,
We may have already found it.
We've found some curious things on titan,
And it might just be evidence of life.
captions by vitac www.Vitac.Com
Captions paid for by discovery communications
resync by iscol@hdvietnam.Com
how the universe works
is saturn alive?
Saturn, the jewel of the night sky,
Dazzles us with its beauty and scale.
It's huge so big,
You could fit more than 700 earths inside it.
But don't let size fool you.
One of the most interesting things about saturn
Is that it is so big compared to how much stuff is in it,
That it's actually lower density than water.
The old joke is that if you could find a bathtub big enough
And fill it with water,
Saturn would float, but it would leave a ring.
Other planets have rings,
But none so vast and glorious as saturn's.
The journey from the outside of the main rings
To the inside edge is 66,000 miles
Over 2 1/2 times the distance around the earth.
Yet this vast collection of dust and ice particles
Is whisper-Thin in places just tens of feet.
Saturn's rings are made up
Of mostly very small particles, of ice and rock.
Some of the particles are larger,
But for the most part, no bigger than grains of dust.
Racing within the rings
And orbiting far outside them are over 60 moons
Made from rock and water ice.
They range in size from tiny snowballs
To worlds with active geology,
Liquid water...
weather systems, and possibly even life,
A billion miles from the warmth of the sun.
It's so cold out there,
We just thought there'd be nothing there,
And we were so wrong. We were so wrong.
Saturn's first shocker
Its wild weather.
The storms on saturn are extremely violent,
Unlike anything we see on the planet earth.
In fact, saturn has the second fastest winds
In the entire solar system.
These winds race through saturn's cloud tops
At over a thousand miles an hour,
Four times faster than earth's strongest cyclones.
And lightning bolts flash up to 10,000 times more powerfully
Than those on earth.
Everything on saturn is just so very, very much bigger.
I mean, there are weather systems
That are as big or bigger than the earth.
Saturn's ferocious weather is surprising,
Because on earth, weather is driven
By the heat energy of the sun.
The sun warms the land, generating wind.
It causes the seas to evaporate, creating clouds and rain.
Saturn lies too far from the sun to feel the same warmth,
So the heat that drives its weather
Must be coming from somewhere else.
To understand this mysterious heat source,
We need to go back 4 1/2 billion years...
to the birth of the ringed planet.
The planets in our solar system
Emerged from a vast, swirling cloud
Of ice, dust, and gas.
The same ingredients can still be found on earth today
In places like iceland,
Where volcanic ash mixes with icy glaciers.
If you wanna build a giant planet like saturn,
This pile of raw material here is a great visual analog.
There's a lot of oxygen and hydrogen in the universe.
That makes water, and that makes water ice,
And the stuff initially that made the solar system
Is basically this stuff here.
It's dirty ice, water ice, with a little bit of
Little bit of rocky and metallic minerals left in there
Out there in the cold of space.
4 1/2 billion years ago,
A vast cloud of dirty ice particles
Shrouded in hydrogen and helium collapses under its own gravity,
And at the center, a new star our sun
Sparks into life.
The heat of the new star melts the ice closest to it
And blows away the gas, leaving only rocky debris behind.
But farther out, icy material and gas survive.
A boundary forms a frost line
Between the rocky inner cloud and the icy gas beyond.
Once you fire up that campfire, if you will,
What would be left behind in the inner solar system
Is gonna be this stuff
Silicate minerals you make a planet like the earth from.
But far away from the sun, where it's colder,
You cross the frost line, and what's out there
Is still cold enough to maintain the ice behind,
And there's a lot of it there.
At first you make sort of a solid core of this material,
But when you reach a critical mass,
You've got enough gravitational influence
To start to directly draw in some of the hydrogen and helium
In the interplanetary cloud.
Saturn's huge solid core,
Now 10 to 20 times the size of the earth,
Generates relentless gravity and draws in gas.
The bigger this gas ball gets, the more material it sucks in.
Saturn's massive gravity then gets to work
On its fledgling atmosphere, compressing it.
And like any gas under pressure, it gets hot
Seriously hot.
Even today, saturn's high pressure atmosphere
Heats its core to 21,000 degrees
Twice the temperature of the surface of the sun.
And it's this heat rising up
Which forms saturn's distinct bands
And drives its extreme weather.
Saturn's actually rotating very quickly.
It's a large planet.
It rotates once on its axis about every 10 hours.
So as the weather comes up from the interior,
It gets smeared out into bands.
That's saturn's north pole.
The bands do something that at first glance, seems impossible.
There is a gigantic vortex
A spinning region of air
That's shaped like a perfect hexagon.
You have waves
Of pressure, density, and temperature
That start to interact with each other.
And these waves can actually interfere
And become one big wave
That goes all the way around the planet.
This giant wave settles
Into a long-Lasting pattern, because below,
There's no rocky surface
To disrupt the winds that form it.
They form a beautifully defined regular hexagon.
It's one of the most spectacular things about saturn.
It took robotic probes
To reveal the weird weather on saturn,
But if these close-Up shots of storms and lightning
Took scientists by surprise,
They were nothing compared to the shock of what came next,
Because the rings are alive.
Imagine saturn without its rings
Just a pale globe floating in the darkness of space.
With rings, it's magical.
Undoubtedly, the one thing
That captures everyone about saturn is the rings.
It's inspired fiction stories, and it's inspired everyone
Who's looked at it in the night sky.
When i was 4 or 5 years old,
My parents bought a small department store telescope,
And i remember looking down into that eyepiece
And seeing this perfect jewel of a planet.
There's just nothing better than this,
And you can just see the rings
Going around the planet just perfectly.
They're just a gorgeous elliptical race track.
From the eyepiece of a small telescope,
The rings seem quiet and serene.
But up close, it's a very different picture.
We know this thanks to a space probe called cassini,
And over 10 years of images like these.
Ice particles jostle for position like stock cars,
Traveling inside the rings
At hundreds of thousands of miles an hour.
These particles range in size from chunks of ice
As big as houses to the finest powder snow.
It wasn't until we went to saturn
And stayed there with cassini that we learned
Just how fiercely complex it is.
You have the gravity of the planet itself
And all of these moons
Interacting with the rings and the moons and the planet.
All of these things are sculpting that entire system
On scales that are both subtle and gross,
And it makes this magnificent crown jewel of the solar system.
As small moons go around and side,
The ring particles dance around them in response.
We see areas of the rings that get raised up
As the moon goes by.
Moons will even switch orbits with each other,
So there's a lot of dynamic stuff
Going on inside the rings.
Scientists believe that from time to time,
Saturn's icy moons break up,
Adding new material to the rings.
This means that the structure of the rings
Is constantly evolving.
With cassini, scientists can deconstruct the physics
Of this evolution, and it's teaching us the rules
That make the whole universe tick.
All the planets in our solar system
Evolve from the same flat disc of dust and gas
4 1/2 billion years ago.
Astronomers see similar discs around young distant stars.
But even with our most powerful telescopes,
We can't see planets forming. They're too far away.
But saturn's rings are right on our doorstep,
A veritable snapshot of a mini solar system
Caught in the process of formation.
Looking at the rings,
We're looking at the formation of planets or bodies
In an arrested state of development.
It's like you took the beginning stages
Of the formation of the planets but stopped it.
Cassini shows structures forming spontaneously
Inside the rings.
They don't even need to be tickled.
They don't need to be disturbed into forming structures.
They form them on their own.
Does this tiny moon,
Captured in the process of formation,
Show us how the earth started its life?
You get something that just happens to form
Out of random processes, and that mimics what astronomers
Think they're seeing in protoplanetary discs
Surrounding other stars in the cosmos around us.
Cassini sees curious propeller-Like structures
Inside saturn's broad a ring.
They're caused by ring particles washing over tiny hidden moons.
The particles collide with the moons,
Sending them into random, ever-Changing orbits,
Sometimes closer to saturn and sometimes farther away.
Perhaps similar forces influenced the earth's formation
Around the sun,
Pushing it into closer or wider orbits.
Saturn's rings also help us understand
Why planets stop growing.
A walnut-Shaped moon called "pan"
Sits near the middle of saturn's a ring.
With so much ice around it to gobble up,
Pan should be huge, but it's tiny,
Only 20 miles in diameter.
If you have a moon embedded in a disc of ring particles,
You might naively think it just secretes ring particles
Until it grows into a, you know, a bigger moon.
But actually we find moons create gaps
In the ring around them.
So pan has created the inky gap.
Daphnis has created the keeler gap.
Rather than pulling ring material in,
Pan appears to push it away.
As the moon passes
The slower moving material outside it,
Pan's gravity flings the particles out
Into wider orbits.
The faster material inside pan's orbit is slow.
As it passes, the little moon, causing it to fall away
Towards saturn.
This natural cutoff and growth might explain why
Multiple planets form around stars,
Instead of single giant planets that eat the whole buffet.
Of all cassini's discoveries,
The most important is also the most surprising
A tiny ice moon that may be home to life.
For most of history,
The only moon we've been able to study up close
Is our own.
Multiple deep craters tell a powerful story.
Our moon is dead.
There's no active geology or weather
To wipe away these ancient scars.
But what about the moons around other planets like saturn?
Are they dead, too?
Our first assumption about saturn
Was that the moons would be like that
Cold, dead, lifeless relics from the early solar system.
It wasn't until we invented spacecraft
That could go to these moons that we discovered
How incredibly diverse our solar system truly is.
Take enceladus
An ice moon barely 300 miles across.
Nobody paid it any attention a decade ago.
But today, it's a geological rock star.
And this is why.
Enceladus orbits inside saturn's outer most ring
The e ring.
The e ring puzzled scientists because they couldn't figure out
How a ring so broad and so diffuse
Could hold itself together.
The cassini team decided to take a close fly by of enceladus
To solve the mystery.
Did it have something to do
With keeping the particles together?
What was the connection between the e ring and enceladus?
Well, now we know that enceladus is actually responsible
For the e ring being there in the first place.
2005, cassini captures an astonishing sight
A hundred geysers shooting ice particles miles into space
From cracks in the south pole.
Enceladus is hurdling its guts into space at a colossal rate.
As enceladus orbits saturn,
These icy plumes feed a vast shimmering halo
Around the planet
The mysterious e ring.
This icy plume also interacts with saturn's magnetic field,
Causing a plasma cloud of charged particles.
The particles race along saturn's magnetic field lines
And slam into saturn's polar atmosphere,
Raising huge ultraviolet auroras.
Geysers explain the e ring,
But how can they exist on a frozen moon
A billion miles from the sun?
On earth, geysers form in highly volcanic places
Where water comes into contact with hot rocks.
Enceladus, so small, and so far from the sun,
Should be cold and dead.
But thanks to saturn's gravity, it's not.
The source of the heating on enceladus
Is the eccentric orbit of that moon.
Sometimes it's a little closer to saturn,
Sometimes it's a little further away.
And that heating on enceladus from that kneading
Gravitationally making the moon stretch and pull
Is what warms the interior,
Causing the activity on enceladus that we see today.
The gravitational pull of saturn
Reaches deep into enceladus beyond its water-Ice exterior
Gripping its rocky core.
As saturn's grasp strengthens and weakens,
It massages this cold, rocky heart,
Bringing it to geological life with frictional heat.
The heat melts the ice around it,
Creating a vast subsurface lake
At the southern pole of enceladus.
This water jets out through huge cracks in the surface ice.
On earth, where there's liquid water,
There's life.
Could enceladus have what it takes
For simple organisms to exist?
Once cassini saw these geysers, the scientists knew
They had found something extremely wonderful.
They actually changed the mission of cassini itself,
Changed its trajectory.
We sent the cassini spacecraft to fly very, very close
Over these cracks where the water was rushing out.
Scientists clung to the faint hope
That the water would contain salts and organic molecules
Like ammonia,
The building blocks of life here on earth.
Stunningly, cassini's censors tasted all of them in abundance.
In that plume, there's organic material.
It's not water. It's a soup.
That's incredible.
All the main requirements for habitability,
Energy source, liquid water, source of biological nitrogen
And ammonia, organic material,
And the samples are coming up into space.
There's a big sign free samples, take one.
There could be life that could've evolved there.
Now we don't know. We haven't seen it.
But the conditions there are as good there now
As they were on earth 3 billion years ago
When life arose here.
The sensational realization that enceladus
May harbor life has sparked intense debate
About future missions to find it,
Because it has a rival for those precious research dollars.
Saturn's largest moon, titan, could also be home to life
Bizarre life.
And we may have already found it.
More than 60 moons orbit the planet saturn,
But one dwarfs them all.
Titan is a colossus, bigger than the planet mercury.
A thick orange haze hides its surface from our telescopes,
And when the cassini mission first appeared beneath
Titan's orange cloak, it revealed a world weirder
Than we could ever have imagined.
Titan is an amazing place.
And of all the things going on around saturn,
Titan might be the most exciting of all.
Titan has mountains and deserts, rivers and lakes.
Only the earth can match it for geological diversity.
But here, water ice takes the place of bedrock,
Frozen at 300 degrees below zero.
And instead of water,
The rivers on titan flow with methane.
This is a place where it actually rains liquid methane,
Liquid natural gas.
This liquid is filling up rivers and lakes.
This makes titan incredibly special.
It's only the second world in the solar system
Where we know there's liquid on the surface.
And like earth,
Titan has a thick nitrogen-Rich atmosphere.
But instead of the oxygen we breathe,
Titan's air is spiked with carbon-Rich molecules
That stain it a dull orange.
It's a soup of methane and ethane and propane
And acetylene.
Uh, the list of organic molecules is literally
Hundreds, hundreds long that we've detected there.
Titan's complex cocktail
Of atmospheric chemicals intrigue scientists.
But it also puzzles them,
Especially methane gas, which rapidly decays in sunlight.
So even a billion miles from the sun,
Titan's thick haze should've lifted long ago.
A vast source of methane must be replenishing
The orange smog.
Before cassini,
Scientists assumed the whole of titan
Was covered in massive impact craters.
Perhaps crater lakes filled with liquid methane
Were evaporating into the atmosphere,
Supplying the missing gas.
To help prove this theory,
Cassini carried a hitchhiker all the way to saturn.
The huygens lander released high above titan's equator
Parachuted through the clouds, snapping photographs as it fell.
As it went through the atmosphere,
It took a huge amount of data
And then landed on the moon itself and took pictures.
When we first saw those pictures,
It was life-Changing.
There were no craters.
It looked like flowing liquid had once shaped the landscape,
But at the landing site and as far as huygens could see,
That liquid was long gone.
Huygens landed in a spot almost identical
To what we're standing on right now.
If we look all around,
We can see this bleak, barren landscape.
We see pebbles and cobbles
That have been rounded and smoothed
Because they've come through river channels.
We see plenty of those at the huygens landing site.
Uh, in addition to that, we see lots of sand.
The desert huygens landed in is huge.
It stretches all the way around titan's equator...
with 300-Foot tall dunes sculpted by the wind
Just as they are on earth.
If the vast crater lakes weren't at the equator,
They had to be at titan's poles.
Cassini scheduled a number of additional flybys
To look for any signs of liquid.
One of the instruments onboard cassini
Is basically a radar gun.
It shoots radar waves at titan, and they get reflected back.
After two years of hunting with this instrument,
Scientists finally got the signal
They were waiting for.
One of the things it found
Is that near the north pole of titan
Were regions that were not reflecting radar,
And that sounds a lot like liquid.
Liquid absorbs that energy and doesn't reflect it back.
Later observations clinched it.
When cassini finally imaged
The north polar regions of titan,
It it finally saw these lakes and seas of methane
That we'd been looking for,
Only they weren't contained in impact craters like we thought.
Instead they're contained in big lake basins
That look just like they do on earth.
Basin lakes like this one in mono county, california,
Form in the depressions leftover from tectonic activity.
These geological features on titan
Could only mean one shocking thing
The moon was alive with geological activity.
If we were sitting on the margins of kraken mare,
Which is the largest sea that we see on titan,
Then we would probably see something very similar to this landscape.
We would look out across a fairly calm surface,
We think the winds are not very strong on titan.
And so we'd have this calm lake of methane and ethane.
And in the distance we would see hills and mountains
That have formed on titan
Probably through tectonic processes
In much the same way that mountains are built on earth.
Except on titan, it's so cold,
The volcanoes spew water, not lava.
And the mountains and lake basins are solid ice.
At first, scientists thought that methane evaporating
From these lakes generated titan's smog.
But when cassini flew by to measure the lakes again,
The levels appear to be the same.
The lakes didn't look like they were evaporating at all.
Scientists were stumped.
Either the lakes weren't the source
Of atmospheric methane
Or they were somehow being refilled.
Planetary geologist, jani radebaugh,
Believes a crucial clue to the missing methane
Lies in the formation of rocky deposits called tufa.
They're found here at mono lake,
Where clean spring water rises up from the ground
Into the mineral-Rich lake where the two water types react.
This is very exciting because this could be a clue
To the missing methane on titan.
So it's rock that has been formed from the chemicals
Contained in two fluids.
There is water that's emerging at the margin of the lake.
It's interacting with the lake water
Which has a very different chemistry
And all of the chemicals that are dissolved
Combine with each other and create this rock.
Radar images of titan's largest lake
Reveal rocky structures around the margins
That look just like mono lake's tufa.
Titan's tufa, if that's what they are,
Could be evidence of a layer of liquid methane
That sits above titan's frozen core
And rises and springs to feed its lakes
Just like spring water rises to feed mono lake.
So when those methane springs come in,
They interact with the lakes and a rock precipitates out.
So we see these organic rocks
Dotting the margins of the lakes.
And almost certainly there's also methane
Just bubbling up and emerging
At the margins of the lake as well.
If jani is right,
Titan's lakes do evaporate, feeding the atmospheric smog,
But they're constantly replenished
By underground methane springs replacing the lost fluid.
Titan is no dead world.
It's alive with active geology and complex chemistry.
And it might be alive with something else
Something really big.
We used to think that saturn was too far
From the sun and too cold to play host to anything dramatic.
We could not have been more wrong.
The planet boils and bangs with active weather
Storms, lightning, and auroras.
The rings constantly evolve.
And the moons aren't the frozen snowballs we expected.
They're shaped by active geology with warm water geysers
And lakes of liquid methane.
And now on saturn's largest moon, titan,
Scientists may have uncovered the first tangible evidence...
of extraterrestrial life.
Our search for life has been
Focused on liquid water follow the water.
I think it's a good strategy.
But i think we are limiting ourselves if we think that
That's the only place to look.
I think liquids may be interesting
Even if they're not water.
Astrobiologist, chris mckay,
Believes that life on titan
May have evolved to live in liquid methane,
Not liquid water.
But titan is so cold,
Simple life would play by a very different set of rules
Where bigger is better.
When we go to other worlds,
We're gonna be looking for bacteria,
And we assume that they're gonna be very small.
But you could ask the question, why are bacteria so small?
Well, i think the answer is because they live in water.
On earth, bacteria don't need to grow big
In order to thrive.
Water dissolves almost everything,
So it provides a nutrient-Rich environment
Where small and simple bring success.
You go to titan where the liquid is liquid methane,
Liquid ethane, very different from water.
There's no reason an organism should be small.
In fact, quite the opposite. It should be huge.
Mckay envisions enormous single-Celled organisms
Around titan's shores, looking like sheets of paper.
Their huge surface area would maximize
The uptake of food from the nutrient-Poor liquid methane.
I predict if there's life on titan
Living in liquid methane, you won't need a microscope to see it.
You'll need a yardstick.
When cassini released the huygens probe
High above the cloud tops of titan,
Mckay realized he had an opportunity
To bolster his theories of life on the surface.
His methane-Loving life-Forms must be eating to survive.
Perhaps huygens' delicate sensors
Would pick up evidence of ground level feasting.
As huygens was on its way to titan,
I'm sitting in a hotel room writing up a paper saying,
Hey, what if there's life on titan?
What would it eat? And how would we detect it?
How would this probe flying through the atmosphere
Detect it?
Literally the day huygens landed,
I submitted this paper to the journal,
Predicting that if there was life on titan,
It would eat hydrogen and the probe
Would be able to measure this depletion of hydrogen.
So let's look for hydrogen.
Huygens parachutes through titan's atmosphere,
Sampling the gases as it goes.
The upper atmosphere has plenty of hydrogen,
So do the middle layers,
But at ground level, there's a surprise result
An apparently drop-Off in the concentration
Of hydrogen in the air.
Something or perhaps someone was using it up.
When i heard a report that there was a depletion of hydrogen,
I my heart raced 'cause i thought,
If this is if this is hard data
For depletion of hydrogen,
I can't imagine any other way besides biology to explain that.
It's exciting in that it's consistent
With what we predicted,
But we have to wait for this to be confirmed
By other calculations, by direct measurements,
And so on.
If future missions can confirm methane-Based life
On titan, it will surely be the greatest discovery
In the history of science.
Because this low temperature biology must have arisen
Independently of life on earth.
If we discover life, let's say on mars,
There will always be the possibility
That rocks and ice and bits of material
Could've been exchanged.
But the chances of that happening from earth
All the way to saturn are next to nothing.
If we find a second example of life in our solar system
Especially in a place like titan
Which is so alien to the earth, so cold and so different,
That tells us something excruciatingly important.
And that is that life must be everywhere in the universe.
Robotic missions offer tantalizing hints
Of simple life on enceladus and titan.
But is saturn's realm only fit for giant bacteria
Or is it a place we humans could one day call home?
Saturn orbits a billion miles from the sun.
So far out it takes an hour for its reflected light
To reach our eyes.
Yet the future of our civilization
May rest on humans one day colonizing the moons
Surrounding this gas giant planet.
It won't be easy, but saturn has something
Worth the trouble
A magical source of fuel called helium-3
That can satisfy our increasing hunger for energy
For millions of years.
Some futurists believe that we have to have
A commercial incentive to going to saturn.
Not just to mine the minerals of the moons of saturn,
But also to harvest fuel in the form of helium-3.
Helium-3 is a rare substance that we can use
In fusion engines to provide perhaps unlimited energy.
Helium-3 may very well replace oil as the fuel
To take us into the centuries to come.
With its single neutron and twin protons,
Helium-3 is uniquely suited to a form of energy production
Called fusion
The same process that burns in the heart of a star.
When two nuclei are crushed together
Under enormous pressure, they fuse,
Creating a new heavier atom and a burst of pure energy.
Best of all, helium-3 doesn't release
Any of the harmful radiation
Associated with other fusion fuels.
The only trouble with helium-3
There's precious little to be found on earth.
Now you could find some helium-3 on the moon,
But the major supplies of helium-3 in our solar system
Are located in the atmospheres of the giant planets.
I call the gas giants
"The persian gulf of the solar system"
Because they are the location of its primary energy resources
Outside of the sun.
The gas giants provide
A near inexhaustible supply of helium-3.
But how could we extract it?
Jupiter has the most.
But the planet's immense gravity and dangerous radiation belts
Make it a no-Go for mining.
Neptune and uranus are way too far away to be practical.
That leaves saturn with relatively low gravity
For such a big planet.
And far lower levels of deadly radiation than around jupiter.
If we're gonna have a future human economy based on
Using controlled fusion and helium-3,
Saturn is the destination of choice.
Futurists envision winged drones flying through
The upper atmosphere of saturn, scooping up gases.
But where to process this super fuel?
The ideal base of operations would clearly be titan.
With gravity as gentle as our moons
And a thick earth-Like atmosphere,
Titan is surprisingly suitable for a human outpost.
We could have huge dome settlements on titan.
They would not have to be strong enough to hold pressure.
They could just be thin, inflatable membranes.
You could have dome cities like you see in science fiction
Which are really not possible in places like the moon.
Walking out onto the surface of titan
Would be much easier than on the moon or on mars.
The pressure on titan is kind of nice.
It's 1 1/2 times earth pressure.
You would need a source of oxygen.
And you need a very warm coat.
But it wouldn't feel as cold as you might think
Because the atmosphere is calm and there's not strong wind.
I think a coat like you might wear in antarctica
Might be adequate.
So you can imagine somebody stepping out of the spaceship,
Having a parka on, a mask, like a s.C.U.B.A. Mask
To provide oxygen,
And literally walking out on the surface.
Titan's low gravity and dense atmosphere
Could even send us soaring from place to place.
Let's say you had, you know,
It's a little bit of a wing on your arm,
And you started to flap your arms.
Remember it's almost like you're you're on the moon,
But with a thick atmosphere.
And you'd really be able to lift yourself
Off the surface, maybe fly, just a little bit.
When the helium-3 trade route has opened
And the earth becomes a fusion economy,
A new generation of rockets
Will open up interplanetary travel to everyone,
Taking humans to mars and jupiter,
Not in years, but in months.
And helium-3 might even power adventure tourism
To saturn itself.
You can imagine in a hundred years
When space travel is easy and there will
Be hotels orbiting the moon and mars
And everything, what would be the one?
What would be the place, right, to go?
It would be saturn.
I would hope one day that there is such a thing
As space tourism and people can visit places like enceladus.
It should be called
The enceladus interplanetary geyser park
Because it would be a phenomenal place to just go visit.
Standing on enceladus would be an amazing sight.
All of this frost condensing back out on the surface
Makes an incredibly brilliant white.
It's got some of the best powder snow for
Skiing anywhere in the solar system.
You could get close enough to actually
See the individual rings,
Maybe even see the little moons in the gaps sculpting
And pulling and pushing and prodding,
Shepherding those ring particles around.
You could go back over and over again,
And it would always be alien and exotic and exciting.
From a cold, dead jewel in our telescopes
To a place alive with magic and mayhem
Saturn and its worlds have come alive
And may harbor life itself.
Someday soon, this planet could remake our universe,
And nothing will ever be the same.
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