Eh that's beside the point. We're not dealing with water or standard atmosphere or standard/uniform gravitational constant.
It'd be up to the hypothetical engineers of the future to figure out what they need to do to get the siphon effect to work over such a distance (surely an easier task than constructing the tube in the first place, and overcoming the problem of friction).
And if not a siphon effect then something else which would transfer energy from the "falling" oil on one side to the rising oil on the other to overcome the "hill" and keep the flow going with net zero energy.

This post was edited by taekvideo on Mar 28 2014 04:10am

Yeah a pump.
All I can really say is "something else" sounds like magic to me.

A better argument would be. You pump the fuel off Titan, and then recover some of its kinetic energy when it falls on the Earth. Forget this siphon business, it is doomed.

What is even going on in this topic? A siphon? Saturn's orbital distance varies from 9 to 10 AU. That means the distance from Earth to Titan can vary from 8 (Saturn at its closest and Earth is between it and the sun) to 12 AU (Saturn is at its farthest and Earth is on the opposite side of the sun). Even if you could create a pump system that could function along those distances, and then even if you could engineer this expanding and contracting siphon in such a way that it arcs up over the ecliptic to avoid passing through the Sun and obliterating itself, and even if the hydrocarbons didn't degrade in such a way as to become unusable during this likely decade-long trip from Titan to Earth, then what're you going to use for parts to construct this siphon? The amount of raw materials to traverse 800 million miles isn't even worth trying to do a calculation for. There's probably not enough steel (or whatever other material) on Earth to do it.

I think people frequently forget just how big this solar system is, and how insignificantly small we are compared to it.

Don't be such a naysayer -,-
So the engineers of the future will need to construct it from some material with significant strength at small thickness... similar to a carbon nano-tube only better.
We're talking hundreds or even thousands of years in the future... with the quadrillions of man-hours that will be put towards technological development (and probably a vastly more significant amount of AI computing-hours starting in the near future), there would certainly be something suitable available for use by then.
And if more raw materials are needed there's always the asteroid belt... according to a nasa report it contains over $600 quintillion worth of raw minerals.



hmm possibly... they already have liquids that can be siphoned in a vacuum and aren't subject the the whims of atmospheric pressure.
Perhaps something like that could be adapted as an additive to the hydrocarbons to allow the same effect, who knows.

This post was edited by taekvideo on Mar 28 2014 12:51pm

Yeah this whole pipe from titan to earth thing is fucking stupid... the only realistic way would be getting the fuel into orbit of titan and transporting it to earth with a few spaceships transporting the oil to storage facilities on the moon or something.

Here's an example I made, if each tank was at least the size of a dozen oil tankers then that would be a lot of oil coming in every year or two if our natural reserves were nearly depleted.

The siphon effect is only possible because air pressure is pushing more fluid into the pipe. You cannot siphon in outer space, because there is no atmospheric pressure. If you build a vacuum pipe all the way to Titan, you'll probably get like a meter of oil in there. You'd get the oil closer to Earth by just throwing buckets of it by hand.

Actually that's a common misconception, the air pressure doesn't "push" the liquid into the pipe. Gravity is the force responsible for pulling the liquid through the pipe.
The atmospheric pressure is only needed to keep the liquid bound together in a continuous stream to avoid breaking the flow... There are some liquids that can be siphoned in a vacuum since they have higher cohesion and can stick together without the atmospheric pressure.

any more than 4 refineries is a noob terran

inb4nolagrangepoint

Wait, what? If air pressure isn't pushing liquid into the pipe, then how could you ever start a siphon with an empty hose? Say you are siphoning gas from a car gas tank. You suck out the air and you now have a vacuum hose with one end in a pool of gas. Why would gas go up the hose?