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Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#21

Post by pyrale »

austincheney wrote: post #4
Santosh83 wrote: post #3

Let's first ensure we do all possible things as a species and a collection of communities to restabilise Earth and give ourselves a 99.5% chance of healthful survival for the next 200 years, which is probably the reasonable timeline until we can establish more or less independent non-Earth habitats that can survive without Earth indefinitely. This is like expressing the wish of wanting to run while simultaneously ign…

Why not do both?

Mainly because right now, any significant endeavour is tied to using massive amounts of fossil fuel.

As long as it will be the case, we won't be able to start new, large scale projects without jeopardizing our ability to live on earth.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#22

Post by Tepix »

diegoperini wrote: post #16
simonh wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is one thing I’ve learned, from many posters on HN in many different topic, it’s that human civilisation is apparently incapable of achieving more than one goal at a time.

That's very cynical and definitely not true at all. Human civilization constantly achieves multiple goals at the same time on a daily basis. If you are not seeing that, you are probably reading the wrong newspaper.

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#23

Post by yummypaint »

cookingrobot wrote: post #9

Let’s colonize Mercury. It’s not actually hot at the poles - it’s shaded enough from the consistent low angle to the sun that there’s even water ice. And the planet is full of useful metals (more than earth), and as much solar energy as you can handle. The article dismisses Mercury out of hand as “too hot” but I think it’s our best bet. https://www.universetoday.com/130109/how-do-we-colonize-merc...

One difficulty with mercury is that its magnetic field is about 100x smaller than earth's. This means much less shielding from cosmic rays for the same incident flux. Since it's about twice as close to the sun as earth, its sitting in 4x the radiation field. Not insurmountable if you can dig down, but less of an issue further out in the solar system

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#24

Post by timq »

It looks a better bet to colonize Mars with genetically modified humans to sustain radiation. If such technology is not available at the time, having DNA correcting machines to give birth to sane humans is probably going to be a solved problem by then. Even though adults will suffers from the radiations.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#25

Post by blackrock »

I think it’s a better idea to just build a rotating space habitat.

Harvest the metals from the moon, and build a mass driver to launch it into Earth orbit, where it’ll get assembled into the space habitat. Then spin it to get 1g.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#26

Post by Tepix »

The article argues that on Mars we'd have to live underground which requires a lot of construction of tunnels and excavation. It does not appear to take into consideration the huge lava tubes that are present on Mars (and even bigger on the Moon). These are estimated to be dozens of kilometers long and hundreds of meters wide. They could be very attractive for human colonies.

On the other hand on Triton, even if you live at the surface, the Sun will be very weak. The main advantage of not living underground will be less resources to create a habitat.

I consider sufficient natural sunlight to be important for human wellbeing.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#27

Post by diegoperini »

Tepix wrote: post #22
diegoperini wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's very cynical and definitely not true at all. Human civilization constantly achieves multiple goals at the same time on a daily basis. If you are not seeing that, you are probably reading the wrong newspaper.

I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic.

Oh, sorry, I really couldn't see that (no sarcasm on my part).

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#28

Post by keiferski »

pyrale wrote: post #21
austincheney wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not do both?

Mainly because right now, any significant endeavour is tied to using massive amounts of fossil fuel. As long as it will be the case, we won't be able to start new, large scale projects without jeopardizing our ability to live on earth.

> Mainly because right now, any significant endeavour is tied to using massive amounts of fossil fuel.

But does that actually matter in space? I am asking out of genuine curiosity here: does using fossil fuels in space have any real downside? There is no atmosphere, ergo no greenhouse effect. The vastness of space would seem to swallow up any sort of pollution.

Re: Saturn's largest moon may be the only place beyond Earth where humans could live

#29

Post by Nimelrian »

cookingrobot wrote: post #9

Let’s colonize Mercury. It’s not actually hot at the poles - it’s shaded enough from the consistent low angle to the sun that there’s even water ice. And the planet is full of useful metals (more than earth), and as much solar energy as you can handle. The article dismisses Mercury out of hand as “too hot” but I think it’s our best bet. https://www.universetoday.com/130109/how-do-we-colonize-merc...

Getting stuff to mercury is hard though. IIRC it takes around 16,000 m/s of dV to get from LEO to the surface of mercury. Titan would take even more (19,000) but a huge chunk of it can be reduced by making use of aerobraking.
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