Titan

Here I am in a little town (50,000 people, so maybe it's a medium-size town) 30 miles North of Nashville. I thought I'd come South for the winter to avoid ice and snow. Guess what? They've had more snow here this winter than in Isle au Haut! It's really amusing to see how they close schools if a single snow flurry is detected, but I suppose since they have no snow removal equipment here, they must do this to protect the little school kiddies. They're amazing down here. The children are able to build good-looking snow people with only 1/2" of snow! And they expend so much effort for something that's going to melt by noon.

The Tennessee Titans are big sports news in this area, having gone to the Super Bowl in their first year as the Titans instead of the Oilers, so when a friend called and told me the History Channel was having a special on the Titans, I tuned in. Turns out, it wasn't football. It was Titan, one of Saturn's moons. I had no idea that there was a body in this solar system that resembled the earth so much. Apparently, it's the only body which has geography like we do - continents, lakes, oceans - the satellite photos could have been of earth. And Titan is the only other body in the solar system that has mainly Nitrogen for its atmosphere. Well, Pluto does for about 50 years of its 248-year trip around the sun; the rest of the time, it's so cold that the atmosphere freezes and falls to the ground.

Anyway, Titan doesn't have water as its liquid. It has natural gas. Propane lakes, neo-propane/methane rain which would freeze a human solid as a rock when it hits. Wow.

Bet school is out a lot on Titan. But when the sun goes supernova and it gets hot enough, humans may be able to live there for a few seconds til it burns up.

I'm going back to Isle au Haut, where the living is easy and slow and life makes sense.