"Furthermore, solar radiation is eroding the methane space blanket.
--When enough methane has been depleted, the atmosphere will
collapse, because the temperature will fall enough to condense out the nitrogen, carrying it and all the other ingredients down to the surface. Dr. Atreya put 100 million years as an upper limit on the sustainability of Titan’s atmosphere – only about one fiftieth of the assumed age of the solar system.
He had no explanation for why Titan has such a dense atmosphere today, other than perhaps it formed recently by some unknown mechanism, and we are lucky to see it.
--When the reporter remarked that such an answer sounded like the same one the ring scientists give for why we see Saturn’s rings (which are also very short lived), he agreed, with a grin of chagrin.
100 million years is the upper limit; it could be far less. Whenever you are told the earth and universe are billions of years old, don’t just swallow it: ask questions.
That “the earth is 4.5 billion years old” is one of those truisms that everybody knows because the Discovery Channel says so,
Q: but what is the evidence?
Here is another case of a phenomenon that doesn’t fit. It’s not that scientists can’t find a way to fit anomalies into the timeline; the important lesson is that the timeline does not come from the data, but from the assumptions."
CEH