Titan: The Weirdest World in the Solar System?!

Abstract

Science fiction written prior to the dawn of space exploration nearly always pictured other worlds as weird and wonderful places. Exotic landscapes, exotic life—exotic just-about-everything was the order of the day. Then came real space exploration and the romantics amongst us must have felt a tinge of disappointments at the rather bland scenes being transmitted back to Earth. Gone were the jagged mountains of the Moon, the canals and strange plants of Mars and global oceans or bubbling oil fields on Venus. True, the human landings on the Moon and the robotic ones on Mars needed to set down at the safest locations available, and these “safe” regions were mostly rather dull in appearance, but the impression that the worlds around us were mostly unexciting fields of broken rocks was difficult to avoid.