Titan
Titan is home to the Titanian Commonwealth, a political party, as well as Titan Station, its largest habitat. The people of the Commonwealth believe in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism, and live a tribal lifestyle that encourages artistic expression and scientific discovery. Automated mining systems generate the material resources that are needed by the colony. All members of the community contribute to food production, machine maintenance, social conflict, and any other issues that might arise that affect all members of the community.
The Titanians make full usage of a variety of sleeves, and morphological freedom is written into their simple legal code. Residents of Titan rarely sleep, instead putting their sleeves into stasis chambers when they grow tired and digitizing themselves. The beginning of each "day" often is a review of the available sleeves and whether or not the resident wishes to incarnate themselves that day.
Titan is too cold to live on its surface, despite its deceptively Earthlike conditions. Instead, Titanian settlements bore through the rock in a network of tunnels, connected to a space elevator. Synthetic sleeves designed for extraordinarily cold atmospheric conditions can operate on the surface for limited times. Travel between settlements is conducted by large trucks piloted by a transhuman ego and frequently carrying supplies and databanks. Power on Titan is primarily generated through the use of hydroelectric turbines placed in engineered canals fed by Titan's methane waterways. That power generation is supplemented through the use of several nuclear reactors brought from Earth to kickstart the colony. Because those are only rated to function until 2151, alternate power generation must be completed. Titan Station's space elevator is powered by solar panels, although its energy output is low. As a result, the space station that services Titanian settlements is small and minimal.
Geography
Titan is the largest moon of Saturn and the second-largest natural satellite in the Solar System. It is the only moon known to have a dense atmosphere, and the only known body in space, other than Earth, where clear evidence of stable bodies of surface liquid has been found.
Titan is the sixth gravitationally rounded moon from Saturn. Frequently described as a planet-like moon, Titan is 50% larger than Earth's moon and 80% more massive. It is the second-largest moon in the Solar System after Jupiter's moon Ganymede, and is larger than the planet Mercury, but only 40% as massive. Discovered in 1655 by the Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens, Titan was the first known moon of Saturn, and the sixth known planetary satellite (after Earth's moon and the four Galilean moons of Jupiter). Titan orbits Saturn at 20 Saturn radii. From Titan's surface, Saturn subtends an arc of 5.09 degrees and would appear 11.4 times larger in the sky than the Moon from Earth.
Titan is primarily composed of ice and rocky material, which is likely differentiated into a rocky core surrounded by various layers of ice, including a crust of ice Ih and a subsurface layer of ammonia-rich liquid water.[16] Much as with Venus before the Space Age, the dense opaque atmosphere prevented understanding of Titan's surface until the Cassini–Huygens mission in 2004 provided new information, including the discovery of liquid hydrocarbon lakes in Titan's polar regions. The geologically young surface is generally smooth, with few impact craters, although mountains and several possible cryovolcanoes have been found.
The atmosphere of Titan is largely nitrogen; minor components lead to the formation of methane and ethane clouds and nitrogen-rich organic smog. The climate—including wind and rain—creates surface features similar to those of Earth, such as dunes, rivers, lakes, seas (probably of liquid methane and ethane), and deltas, and is dominated by seasonal weather patterns as on Earth. With its liquids (both surface and subsurface) and robust nitrogen atmosphere, Titan's methane cycle is analogous to Earth's water cycle, at the much lower temperature of about 94 K (−179.2 °C; −290.5 °F).
Type
Planetoid / Moon
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