Tides of Titan
UB Reader Edition
by Craig Carmichael
October 9th, 2025


   Titan is in some ways quite Earthlike, in other ways very alien. It has a nitrogen atmosphere of similar pressure to Earth's, and it has lakes, rivers and seas. It has a similar axial tilt of about 27°. But temperature is around 95°K where Earth is 295° - just 1/3 of our temperature in absolute terms. The 'water' is liquid methane with no large oceans, and the air has hydrogen in it instead of oxygen and methane vapor instead of water vapor. Gravity is just 1/7th of ours. A day (one orbit around Saturn) is 16 Earth days long and a year is 30 Earth years. The shadows are sharper from the more distant sun and a sunny day is about as bright as a heavily overcast winter day here in the north, where the streetlights sometimes stay on at noon.

   Per paper 49, The Inhabited Worlds, the 22 PSI nitrogen atmosphere would make Titan a mid-breather world, familiar to us, although the concentration of its breathing gas, hydrogen, is much lower than Urantia's oxygen concentration. The gravity would be "lightest" resulting in people around 10 feet tall - and other gigantic life forms, especially the vegetation. Life's movements would be slow and graceful compared to Urantia's pace. The climate probably ranks it in life temperature order one of five, where Urantia is in three.

   An unbiased observer would unhesitatingly call Titan a planet - it is larger than Mercury. To call it a "moon" of Saturn when any of a hundred orbiting "oids" of of rock or ice are likewise called "moons" and given names makes people (even some astronomers) conceptually conclude it must be an insignificant body. I ran across this Mercator projection of Titan at Google Maps.

The shallow, duney, flowing seas of Titan's equator and tropics.
The drifting sediments reveal the generally stronger eastward flows.
(reduced image)
https://google.com/maps/space/titan/@7.9975347,68.0273437,14129815m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDkyOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

It is a 360° composite mosaic mercator projection from the Cassini spacecraft's ISS [imaging science subsystem], beautifully stitched together from various images taken in methane transparent wavelengths at various resolutions. (mostly 948 nanometers infrared, IIRC) The dark parts are in the tropics around the equator. Perhaps the most prominent equatorial feature for reference is something that looks like a crater (or maybe volcano?) (far left above) at about 45° west longitude, zero degrees being the point where Saturn was directly overhead at the beginning of the Cassini spacecraft mission. (It has apparently shifted a little since then. Space scientists hypothesize that it will shift back. They may be right, but I hypothesize that it will continue shifting until Titan has rotated (given the stated rate) a full turn about once every thousand Earth years.) Zero° is at about the right side of the leftmost "sideways H" shaped sea.
[Note: Later I tried on another computer and got a rotatable Titan globe with feature names instead of this projection. ???]

   What I write below disagrees sharply with what mission scientists have published. I believe they have made serious and cumulative mistakes in their interpretations of both images and the other instrumental readings, leading to an unreal depiction of Titan having been presented to the public -- one that misses the really interesting stuff. I have made a very long footnote about that at the bottom. I won't dwell on it (much) in the main text.

   The equatorial dark area is fascinating geography. One can observe that it is shallow liquid (methane) by flow patterns of sediment bars throughout. This was also discerned in the T14 (or was it T12?) radio occultation experiment, which described regular "very rough" patches alternating with "smooth liquid hydrocarbons" areas. The features were later identified as dunes, running underwater to 400 meters deep troughs with the crests touching the sea surface to create the rough patches.
   It seemed more apparent in other images I've seen... here one can more vaguely discern that there is a deeper and broader "sea" every 90° of longitude, displaced by (IIRC) about 15° west from 0, 90, 180 and 270 degrees west. Ideally between each pair of seas are two east-west channels, one arcing northward and back, and one south and back. This "idealized" geography is marred by the fact that it's a real world, not a perfect ball. The arrangement looks blocked between the 0 and 90 degree seas (but I'm not sure it is. BTW this short apparently dry area is off the edges in my image), and is an odd shape between the 0 and 270 degree seas. The pattern is most visible on the right hand side: the deeper anti-Saturn sea (right of center at 180°), the shallower 90° sea with drifting islands (rightmost), and the north and south flow channels, full of sediment bars, between.

   The reason for this theoretical (and the actual) configuration would be Titan's elliptical orbit around Saturn, which causes immense tidal forces. The tidal impetus (IIRC) was said to be 9 meters, once per Titan day as it loops around Saturn, getting closer and then farther away. Earth's tidal impetus by contrast is about 1/2 a meter. (Note that that doesn't make Titan's slower tide 18 times stronger in the 1/7th gravity.) So for 8 Earth days as Titan approaches Saturn, 'water' starts flowing, then rushing, from the 90 and 270 degree seas toward high tide in the 0 and 180 degree seas -- the sub Saturn and anti Saturn poles. Water in lower latitudes is drawn toward these points on the equator, while also being pushed eastward. This explains why there would come to be four equatorial tidal seas with channels running between them, and the strong flows explains why they form dunes. Why there tends to be a north channel and a south channel I'm not sure but I have no doubt that has a logical explanation too. (It must have something to do with liquid wanting to flow all directions away from the 0 & 180 seas on ebbing tides, but straight back on the flood tides.) Then for 8 Earth days it is flowing back toward the 90 and 180° seas. Owing to Titan's libration, Saturn appears to move across the sky a bit, most rapidly and extensively as Titan approaches its periapsis. IIRC, it goes eastward by a few degrees, its trace 60 Km(?) across the surface. This "smear" motion adds to the impetus of the rushing tide on the approach and around high tide at the 0 and 180° seas, and diminishes it on the retreat, as it moves back westward more slowly around apoapsis. Thus, water is pulled more eastward at these high tides than it is westward at the low tides as the water returns to the 90 and 270 degree seas. This probably explains the 15 degree(?) westward displacement of the features, the more eastward-flowing sediment drift patterns, and probably even the gradual rotation mentioned. As 'water' flushes more eastward around periapsis the solid ground would be pushed westward in compensation, but it flows less strongly back at apoapsis. Sediment would drift generally eastward (as seen) and gradually change the center of balance of the planet.
   Apparently the forces drawing liquid to the equator are so strong that the mid latitudes have no major lakes or seas. There is only the Equatorial band and a few large bodies in the Arctic and Antarctic zones.

Note: The ellipticalness of Titan's orbit which causes the tides seems to be somehow maintained over the ages by the orbit of Iapetus (possibly combined with that of tiny Hyperion), which must orbit in tidal resonance with Titan (again along with Hyperion). Otherwise it would long ago have become circular. Last I heard Iapetus' orbit was said not to be resonant with Titan's, and I couldn't find resonance myself, but it could hardly not be. Nothing else explains Titan's elliptical orbit. I suspect a precession of the orbital plane of Iapetus' non Saturn-equatorial orbit (itself another anomaly) has not been taken into account. I didn't think of it when I was trying. But especially when this makes it a 3D orbital mechanics puzzle it's probably way beyond me to try and prove/disprove it.


   The other amazing - astonishing - dominant feature of Titan that we are looking down on is dense forest canopy on land, pole to pole. Again IMHO, but All the various instrumental evidence published as well as the "fluffy", indistinct visual appearance points to it. I remember there was once a science article (from Ralph Lorenz?) "Titan is filled with caves!" It went on to explain that the density of the land area that was surveyed by the SAR radar was "so porous" for the first two kilometers depth as to be "ethereal". They were perplexed. What but forest canopy? Apparently space scientists couldn't even conceive of that. Nothing could live in such a deep freeze! Well... Earth life could never live on Titan. All Earth's life chemistries would be hopelessly sluggish on Titan. Titan would have life chemistries that would be explosive at Earth temperatures but "just right" there. Proteins, amino acids and "a complex organic chemistry at the surface" have all been described in publications.
   Obviously trees on Titan should be much larger than those on Earth in the 1/7th gravity and light winds, and with methane being lighter than water. I calculated 960 meter "tallest tree" heights "if all else was equal". I guess all else is not equal. 2000 meters seems unexpectedly tall, but it's in the right ballpark. Naturally trees grow as tall as they can, competing with other trees for sunlight. Trunks and limbs, almost ubiquitous forests, are plainly visible in the many SAR radar imaging swaths. It looks like no other surface except forest. When I didn't tell a cartographer who looked at Earth satellite images every day that it was Titan, he unhesitatingly pronounced a "highest rez" radar image scene to be "mixed forest". (And he tried to guess which Earth satellite had taken it, naming two or three!) Space scientists didn't understand these stick-like "radar scatterings". (Someone came up with a theory so wild I didn't follow it, and that seemed to satisfy them. In a few years the wild theory will be assumed to have been proven, and any other theory will be deemed "pseudoscience". I've seen it before.) That individual trees could be so huge was simply beyond their imagination. I expect these trees took thousands of Earth years to grow, with the pace of life on Titan being proportional to the super long day and year.

   For the longest time I was puzzled why we didn't see sharp, distinct features on the surface in the visual images. It was only recently, long, long after seeing the trees in the SAR radar images, that I realized the ISS visual images were so vague and fuzzy because we were only seeing the leaves at the top of the forest canopy, and profuse aquatic vegetation around the seas, not solid ground. The scene is actually in sharp focus. In Google Maps parts of the Amazon rainforest look even more vague and featureless until one zooms in enough to make out individual trees. Cassini's views may be on the edge of vaguely seeing outlines of clusters of trees, and seemingly perhaps of the gigantic individual trees in some of the areas most finely imaged. I'm sure the mission scientists never got past thinking the "fuzziness" must be owing to "atmospheric haze" or "light scattering".

   About the only sign of possible animal life I found was something with several long fuzzy arms apparently crawling onto a leaf in the Huygens' after landing images, where it landed in very shallow liquid smack on top of a dune. It looks like a starfish to me. It didn't move perceptibly in the hour and more that Huygens continued sending its heavily artifacted, low-rez, monochrome pictures. Sharper images might have revealed small arm motions, and color would surely have made a world of difference. The space scientists never even mentioned it AFAIK. I think they preferred to not see it and focus instead on the leaves and stems..., er, I mean... "ice rocks" -- that the Huygens' GCMS spectrography team had already told them the 'organic' spectral readings said couldn't be ice rocks. Anything stranger than "ice rocks" on "dry ground" was apparently just too much cognitive dissonance.
   Any animals in the Cassini views from space wouldn't even be a pixel, and that's if they weren't hidden under the trees. The fact that no land is cleared suggests there are no people (yet?), unless very primitive.

   Should NASA stick with its present "Dragonfly" Titan drone plan unmodified, I predict the first thing that will happen is it'll get caught in tree branches coming down. Better if it's able to land on 'water'. But if landing in flowing water, one couldn't sit around to plan the next drone flight - that would be chaotic and probably disastrous too! Also Titan has profuse aquatic vegetation on a scale unknown on Earth, "plainly" visible in the Huygens lander images. (I say "plainly" only after much study of the DCT artifacted, low rez, monochrome images over a long period of time.) Being somehow unable to understand that it's vegetation is why scientists described the dune tops as "jumbled" and "chaotic"... "terrain" ...where the examiners couldn't determine "land elevations" in stereo views of scenes of stems and leaves.


   The Urantia Book tells us frankly that there is a non-breathers' world "in close proximity to Urantia". That had to mean it was in our solar system, and now although space scientists are still blind to it, ALL scientific evidence, mostly but not exclusively from the Galileo spacecraft exploring the Jupiter system in the late 1990's, points to Ganymede, as per my piece Corals of Ganymede posted not long ago. The book makes no specific mention that there might be a third life world presently in our system. Indeed it says not one cold world in 40 is suitable for inhabitation. There are only fourteen known worlds even as large as Earth's moon in our solar system. Jupiter and Saturn could hardly be considered "cold". That there should be even two habitable spheres among the other twelve seems remarkable, let alone three. However, there are hints. It does say "In your solar system only three planets are at present suited to harbor life." It points out that worlds orbiting giant worlds are often "Earth size" and ideal life habitations. If Ganymede, orbiting Jupiter, is large enough to be inhabited, well, Titan, orbiting Saturn, is virtually the same size. Both are around half the size of Mars - a bit more than half by surface area, a bit less by volume.
   Then the book goes to a considerable length to tell us that in Satania "only five [systems] have more than two inhabited worlds, and of these only one has four peopled planets, while there are forty-six having two inhabited worlds." So... one system has four (4), four have three (12), 46 have two (92) and so 619 - 4 - 12 - 46 = 511 with just one. Why do they mention it? Perhaps it's so that when we find there three worlds in Monmatia with people (or perhaps Titan is still evolving toward having them), we won't think it must be "normal" for worlds to be clustered like that, which would mean that most suns must have none. With three worlds, once again, we are almost unique!


The Footnote:

   The UB says the "The argumentative defense of any proposition is inversely proportional to the truth contained.", but in order to not be dismissed as an ignorant quack with a crazy imagination for concluding quite different things about Titan than the space scientists did from the same data or from their own published words, I feel compelled to make the following comment and add some - perhaps far more than necessary - examples. The comment: Only space scientists who don't believe their eyes, who ignore and misinterpret images and instrument findings that don't fit with preconceived ideas (speculations from before the mission), could possibly have concluded that this is dry land. Then they came up with wild alternative realities to explain some of the "bizarre" data that is perfectly and easily explained by it being liquid. Perhaps that's as far as I need to go, but here are the examples anyway:

+ The T14 (or was it T12?) radio occultation experiment revealed "smooth areas consistent with liquid hydrocarbons" alternating with "patches of very rough terrain" near the equator. "Lakes?" they speculated. There was a section in the report with alternative theories about what the "smooth liquid" readings could be besides liquid, but they were pretty unconvincing. They were probably added just to show that alternate interpretations had been considered. Most of the space scientists seemed ignorant of this experiment or simply ignored it because didn't fit with what they saw in the visible spectrum: "no spectral reflections", so "it couldn't be liquid". This ignored the "very rough ground" or "chaotic terrain" patches that would break up the spectral reflections. It was later determined there were dunes (again "obviously" from the evidence) with crests just at the sea surface and troughs to 400 meters deep, explaining the repeating smooth-rough-smooth-rough patterns.

+ Having previously decided it was all dry land, they tried to figure out why the material deep down at the bottoms of the dunes seemed darker (weaker radar reflections) than that at the surface crests, when dunes are usually of uniform material. and how in the very light winds anticipated and found, huge dunes could have formed. and thought it remarkable that the dune fields were utterly level for hundreds of kilometers. (Duh. duh. duh!)

+ Original speculation was that the liquid on Titan might be a mix of methane and ethane. The GCMS team reported finding "a reservoir of relatively pure liquid methane on Titan's surface" where the Huygens probe landed. That was the only analysis of the composition, but even years later the rest of them were still describing the liquid as "a mix of methane and ethane". Also in that finding "the rest" concluded it was only wet soil because toward the end of the Huygens transmission less methane was being vaporized by the GCMS. "Therefore" the instrument couldn't be immersed in liquid. But in jpl.nasa.something.something/~kholso/T2.mov (deleted early on - a time lapse video of the scene after the landing until contact was lost about an hour later) not only was the shallow liquid immediately visible to some observers before I saw it, it was obvious that Huygens' battery started getting low because the spotlight was visibly dimming, changing the light balance in the images. Low heater voltage explains much better why it couldn't vaporize as much methane toward the end. The Huygens transmissions weren't expected to last so long.

+ The signal strength of those transmissions as received by Cassini changed in a cyclic pattern. Again, no one knew why. Gentle waves on the sea changing the reflections are the obvious explanation.

+ They said "Liquid methane would look dark, not clear, because of absorption bands its spectrum." But Titan's atmosphere is 5% methane vapor. So the light that wouldn't penetrate the liquid would have been already filtered out in the atmosphere, so shallow methane liquid wouldn't look dark compared to the air. I emailed Will Grundy at Lowell observatory who had originally taken the spectrum of liquid methane about this, and he agreed. (He suggested I write it up for a peer reviewed scientific journal.) Clear liquid methane should in fact look clearer and less apparent than clear water because methane's refractive index is lower than water's (1.27 vs. 1.33 IIRC). -- a little more 'ethereal', just as it appears in the after landing images. Thinking "it should look dark" is probably what originally blinded the space scientists' perceptions. Water too has absorption bands. It doesn't look dark to us not only because of water vapor in the atmosphere, but because our eyes "just happen to" see the wavelengths between those bands.

+ Having failed to discern the sea in plain sight, to explain something else (I forget what) they hypothesized that there must be a subsurface sea of liquid water - for which no evidence has ever been found AFAIK.

   Emailing them to point out these things sometimes elicited a reply, but never a change of minds, at least not in their published interpretations. But to explain the "chaotic terrain" on top of the dune crests and where Huygens landed that broke up the "spectral reflections", I would have had to breach the subject of vegetation - stems and leaves growing upward. If they couldn't even be convinced an obvious sea was liquid, I was pretty sure they would have just deleted my emails at the first mention of "life" without reading further.
   But I should mention that I was told by a journalist that there was a much greater difference of opinions among the scientists than they let come out in public. (To be honest, I'm guessing nobody had the stomach to argue things out with opinionated Ralph Lorenz, who had created many of the preconceived ideas before the mission and whose views seemed to predominate.)