Inhabitat has a post on a particularly unlikely plan for space based solar power - Japanese Corporation Plans to Turn the Moon Into a Massive Solar Power Plant.

Man hasn’t been back to the moon since 1972, but that hasn’t stopped a team of Japanese engineers from developing a plan to turn our celestial neighbor into a massive solar power plant. The disaster at the Fukushima nuclear power station has made Japan think more seriously about alternative energy, and as a result Shimizu Corporation‘s crazy plan has been gaining traction. The plan calls for a massive 12 mile-wide, 6,800 mile long “Luna Ring” of solar panels to be constructed on the moon’s surface. The solar belt would then harness solar power directly from the sun and then beam it straight to Earth via microwaves and lasers.

Shimizu Corporation’s plan would see 13,000 terawatts of continuous energy sent to receiving stations around the Earth, where it will be then distributed to the planet’s population. With NASA’s plans to return the moon currently on hold, Shimizu is planning on building the massive lunar construction project with robots. In fact, humans will barely be involved and will only be present in an overseeing capacity.

The SMH reported today that the European Space Agency has found that one of Saturn's moons (Titan) is an oilman's dream - a "giant factory of organic chemicals". It is rumoured that Dick Cheney is having invasion plans drawn up as we speak, with Exxon believed to have the inside running on a heavily one-sided production sharing agreement with any single celled organisms that are discovered in the soup...

Imagine a place awash with more hydrocarbons than a Texan oilman can dream of and where no one has staked a single claim -- all that energy is just going begging. The problem: this massive reserve is at least 1.2 billion kilometers (750 million miles) away from Earth, on a tiny inhospitable world where on a warm day it's minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit).

New findings by the mission to Titan, reported on Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA), say Saturn's orange moon has hundreds of times more liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth.

Methane and ethane fall like rain from the sky, forming massive lakes and seas, while complex organic molecules called tholins are believed to make up Titan's oily dunes, ESA said in a press release.

"Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material. It's a giant factory of organic chemicals," said scientist Ralph Lorenz. Lorenz, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, is a member of a team poring over radar data sent back by the US space probe Cassini, which dispatched a European probe, Huygens, to the moon's surface.

Understanding Titan's carbon-chemistry cookbook may unlock knowledge as to how Earth's carbon-based life began, the researchers hope. The study appears in the latest issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters.