There is almost no doubt that someday man will explore the planets in his solar system and perhaps will extend his exploration out to other star systems and maybe in the dim future, out to other galaxies. Some of the planets and moons are rich with minerals and hydrocarbons. Will this prompt private industry to push for exploration and a way to get this stuff back to Earth? There are pros and cons on this idea. Is it easier for oil companies, for example, to just keep raising prices, selling less product, but making just as much profit or more? This way their reserves will last far longer and they may not feel the need to try and develop ways to transport product from other heavenly bodies back to the earth. On the other hand, having almost an unlimited product is also advantageous to these companies.

Saturn's moon Titan has been found to have so much hydrocarbon on it that it surpasses all the oil reserves of the entire Earth. How much more does it have? As hard as it is to believe, it has hundreds of times the amount, that is known to exist on the Earth. This not only includes the oil reserves on Earth, but also all the natural gas reserves as well. If this stuff could be sent back to Earth cheaply, it could cause so much competition among the oil companies, if they didn't do price fixing, that the price of gasoline and heating oil would go to all time lows. How do we know this? That moon was recently surveyed by our probe Cassini. There is so much hydrocarbon on that moon that it actually rains down from the sky. Can you imagine a place where the rain storms are composed of hydrocarbons? The deposits also form lakes and dunes on that moon. This has to be a weird place indeed. One scientist stated, "Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material—it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals. This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.” Only about 20% of the surface of this moon has been mapped. In that 20% resides several hundred lakes and seas. Not water lakes and seas, but hydrocarbon lakes and seas. Several dozen of these lakes and seas alone contain more energy reserves individually than the entire earth has. Then there are the dunes that I mentioned. The dunes are thought to be composed of organic material and this material is thought to also contain more hydrocarbons than Earth's reserves.

What would be the easiest and cheapest way to get this stuff back here? It seems to be if they could perfect a way of using antigravity to create a stream of these hydrocarbons that would flow toward the Earth and rain down in a particular area, that would be the cheapest way to go, unless someone builds a transporter, like the type you see in Star Trek and beams this material down to the Earth. Either way, that would make this stuff dirt cheap. In reality, the oil industry wouldn't want that to happen. They don't want prices to go down, they only want them to go up. When we talk about the reserves on Earth, the figures we have are only the ones that we are allowed to see. For example, it is said that the total reserves of natural gas is 130 thousand million tons. This amount of energy is about 300 times the amount of energy used in the United States in one year for residential heating, cooling and lighting. This amount of energy would only be a drop in the Titan bucket.Titan is covered with methane and ethane. The true reserves on Earth are probably far more extensive because they don't account for places the have never been tested for oil reserves, but are suspected of having them. The oil companies don't want you to know this.

Don't think for one second that Titan is the only other place where hydrocarbons have been found. Traces of these hydrocarbons have been found in meteor impact craters and in meteors themselves. Some Martian meteors, that have been picked up in the arctic, show traces of these chemicals. Does this mean the Mars has a lot of hydrocarbons? There are theories out there that state that Mars just might have lakes of hydrocarbons deep under it's surface crust. The Martian meteors that were found to show traces of hydrocarbons were examined for contamination and it was the opinion of experts in the field that contamination was unlikely. They never said impossible, just unlikely. They are right in that respect, the chances of a rock laying on the ice and acquiring hydrocarbons is very slim indeed. I would think that it would have to have been near a volcanic vent of some type. I think that it is important to remember that not everyone agrees that oil comes from dead animals and plant life. Some scientists believe that it comes from deep carbon deposits that come from hydrocarbons from when the Earth was first formed. If this turns out to be true, we just might find out that most planets have hydrocarbon deposits. There are also some scientists that think that life below the surface of inhospitable planets might flourish. In 1992 Thomas Gold defended this theory.

On our planet, when organic matter is buried it produces a fatty acid (VFA) known as acetate and this could provide an energy source for a deep biosphere. It is found at some very deep depths. Some feel that this source of energy is perfect for microorganisms, thus creating oil deposits. If this turns out to be the case, then planet formation itself just might be responsible for large hydrocarbon deposits, which would mean that hydrocarbons are plentiful throughout the universe. This might not be a good thing for us to find out, since this is the stuff that is said to be responsible for the greenhouse effect. If we find that these hydrocarbons are everywhere, it might kill the incentive for us to use alternate forms of energy and that would be a terrible shame.

This sort of fits in with the fact that the new Moon race is going to include many countries, not just two as in the past. Many countries are interested in staking their claims to territory on the moon. How this will be accomplished is not known, since there are treaties against this. Some of the countries that will try and race to the Moon are the U.S., Russia, China and India. I think that there will be more So why is everybody so hot to get there all of a sudden? The reason is that there is an energy source that has been discovered on the moon and it is called helium-3. We haven't announced any desire to mine this stuff, but we also haven't said that we wouldn't. Some people are saying that NASA has slowly been putting people that advocate this, in positions of importance at the agency. So what exactly is hydrogen-3? It is a fuel that is very rare on Earth. It is the perfect fuel to run nuclear fusion reactors on. Everyone would want a piece of this pie. It is being said that the reason the Chinese are sending a probe to the moon in 2011, that will land on it's surface, is to check for this substance.

Are the people of Earth on the verge of experiencing a "gold rush" type mentality that has nations instead of individuals pushing to get to other planets and moons in space for their energy riches? The more I think about this, the more I begin to think that maybe this is the best thing that could have happened. This is the kind of thing that just might advance our space travel capabilities enormously. Nations in their hurry to be the first to get to these places might just start to develop faster and safer ways of traveling to them, which in turn will advance our ability as explorers, that just might lead us to relations with yet unknown races. This also may advance our technology. Another thing that just might happen is that every country might just get it's fill of energy, which in turn will relieve the type of competitiveness that leads to war. Maybe this is the way that the nations of Earth will finally get along, because they all may become prosperous?