It could go either way — it’ll come down to cost and ownership. I don’t think Mars will go past being a tourist destination. Anything worth mining is easier to get from the asteroid belt.

Still, it could be done, and Titan’s methane would make it a lot more doable.

Mars will probably never be terraformed. Much cheaper to mass produce o’neill style colonies.

True. Mars will probably be exploited for what can be dug up from the regolith and rocks though. It might be more long-term efficient (on a centuries scale) to use terraforming with hydrocarbon mass addition to at least build up the atmosphere sufficiently that people working there only need pressure suits instead of full spacesuits.

Titan is one such source but is not the only one. But it’s the biggest so far the we could get at relatively easily.

As for water, that’s part of the point. Once you orbital colonies and orbital solar it becomes industrially trivial to extract oxygen from moonrock and regolith. But the moon has just about zero carbon, hydrogen or nitrogen. That’s why you need to look further afield. When you have methane and oxygen, you can create water in situ (amongst other things).

What is most likely is that asteroids will be mined for hydrocarbons first, with Titan perhaps coming later.

Compared to lifting water or oil out of Earth’s gravity well, crossing the solar system is actually cheaper in dollars and energy.

Hmm.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the idea, but it seems horrendously complicated and expensive. It might even turn out cheaper to work out a way to do it locally. Especially since I suspect whatever craft we have capable of hooning around the solar system will be quite busy indeed finding water for the people doing the colonisation/industrialisation.

Mars will probably never be terraformed. Much cheaper to mass produce o’neill style colonies. Much more practical too: terraforming could take decades or centuries, would cost a bomb, only double available living space and doom people who are raised on Mars to stay there. Oh, and it’s at the bottom of a gravity well and is not very accessible from Earth compared to the moon or the asteroid belt.

In any case, somebody will have to mine Titan to get those hydrocarbons to where they’re wanted, and I’ll take bets that it will be done for profit.

Probably in order to terraform Mars as a commercial colonial enterprise.

Well, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. Exterminate!

That hydrocarbons can be generated from natural sources has been known for a long time and does not to support the pseudoscientific abiotic oilers.

All we need to do is set up a convict colony there and build a could of great big rail guns to toss the mined He3 down into Earth’s gravity well. Should be fine, as long as they don’t plan a rebellion with the aide of a self-aware computer…

n artist’s imagination of Saturn’s largest moon Titan

Titan’s surface organics surpass oil reserves on Earth

13 February 2008
Saturn’s orange moon Titan has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, according to new Cassini data

Wtf. I have been lead to believe that our hydrocarbons like oil comes from dead dinosuars and organic matter and that ambiotic theory was crap. It isn’t?