Titan: The next middle-east?

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I think you should learn to read. I did not say that miniature black holes were impossible. I said that to create any kind of black hole, matter has to be compressed to a critical density. Everything I have said about the mass limit only means that such miniature black holes cannot be created by collapsing stars. However, my statement still stands, it's just that the matter would need to be compressed with some kind of extreme external pressure, since gravity cannot ever be strong enough to do it. An explosion doesn't compress matter.

Oh, and by the way, there is nothing useful that you could do with such miniature black holes anyway because they can't even exist for longer than a few nanoseconds before decaying into a jet of many elementary particles.

Like I said, it doesn't work like that. The energy alone cannot produce miniature black holes. You have to actually compress a certain amount of matter to the critical density. The massive hydrogen bomb spoken about by Stephen Hawking in "A Brief History of Time" (which you so aptly spoke of), could hypothetically do this to a small amount of matter contained in the centre of the bomb and the extreme pressure to do it comes from the incredible strength of the blast. Simply raising the temperature cannot do anything other than vaporize the matter.

That's a hot visual.

Okay:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdgjxvgmRpU[/youtube]

http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro ... ject=Titan


So, when we get out there and colonize Titan, how would that methane and ethane be most useful? As a trade commodity? As a resource to be used on Titan itself for subsurface industry? Would it really be something to fight over once we get all the way out there or would we have already gotten out of our usage of hydrocarbons for most things?