For those with an exploratory instinct, there’s nothing more exciting than an incomplete map. Blank areas are left to the imagination, full of potential, ripe with adventure. But incomplete maps don’t last for long, as our innate curiosity quickly compels us to fill in the gaps. Fortunately, there is always a frontier with new lands to chart, and these days, one of the most intriguing frontiers is Saturn’s charismatic moon Titan.

The Cassini spacecraft has been running circles around Saturn and its many moons for several years now, sending back vast amounts of data about the famed rings, the planet itself, and its remarkable moons. To me, the most amazing thing about this phase of exploration is how quickly our understanding of the most fundamental things changes. Before Cassini, telescopes gave our best views of Titan, and most scientists speculated about the presence of hydrocarbons in the atmosphere. Cassini arrived and saw a few splotches from orbit, dark patches that looked a lot like lakes. Subsequent passes have confirmed the lake hypothesis and narrowed down their composition to a simple hydrocarbon blend, mostly methane and ethane. Now the Cassini team is beginning to understand the full scope of the moon’s hydrocarbon dynamics. Last February, mission scientists calculated that Titan has more hydrocarbons than all of Earth’s known oil and gas reserves on its surface alone. (Maybe Big Oil money is coming to space exploration!) Most recently, the spacecraft has shown the true extent of the lakes and captured seasonal changes in their perimeters – likely the result of rainfall. (See map below.) The dynamics of the hydrocabon cycle remains a mystery (might there be a large subsurface “aquafer” of liquid methane?), but Cassini is making real progress.

These rapid-fire discoveries about an entire moon’s most basic geographic traits are impressive. Given the ultra-specialization that membership in today’s scientific community demands, it must be pretty liberating to be discovering fundamental facts about an entire planet. The ever-changing map of Titan reminds me of European maps in the 15th and 16th centuries as whole new continents were discovered and explored (and exploited). Seeing the progression as the shape of the Americas are refined from amorphous blobs to the more familiar contours we know today, one senses an intellectual investment, a real curiosity to understand precisely what is where.

Of course, the process can’t stop now: the natural and cultural wonders of the Americas took decades, if not centuries, to fully explore. The more lucrative discoveries came early (the unfortunate Incas and the Aztecs), while “natural phiIosophers” took a couple of centuries to come into fashion. But in the end, the most lasting discoveries from the New World changed our views of science, of the Earth, and of our relationship with the natural world.

So even if Shell does decide to suck Titan dry, we should make sure a latter-day Darwin get his (or her) chance to change everything first.