Random question and memes-aside, is there oil on other planets?
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.
Edit: GPT says hydrocarbons yes, oil as in Earth no (because that comes from complex living matter).
Edit 2: As far as we know, I really hope there's more life out there.
> According to Cassini data, scientists announced on February 13, 2008, that Titan hosts within its polar lakes "hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth." The desert sand dunes along the equator, while devoid of open liquid, nonetheless hold more organics than all of Earth's coal reserves.
Went on a bit of a rabbit hole and it appears that there is a lot of methane in the atmosphere and that gets broken down via photolysis into hydrocarbons somehow, and the methane likely is there from the formation of the moon originally via methane ice.
See Figure 2 [1]. Protons, electrons and water ions from space dissociate, in the presence of sunlight, nitrogen and methane. Those combine into intermediate-mass hydrocarbons that produce complex organics. The part we don't understand is how those complex organics, e.g. benzene and naphthalene, turn into large organic particles.
Titan's atmosphere "is a largely anoxic environment, with little oxygen to cause the termination of complex organic reactions" [1].
So there is nothing surprising in finding oil elsewhere than where it has formed.
Some hydrocarbons can form in the absence of life, e.g. by Fischer-Tropsch synthesis from syngas, catalyzed by some minerals, where syngas can form in volcanic gases or in hydrothermal vents. However that is likely to have been a negligible contribution to the oil reserves of the Earth and most or all oil ever found has a chemical composition that has clear indications of being produced by the decay of organic matter from living beings.
So I would say yes.
On average though, I would say no.