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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

#281

Post by RandallBrown »

rbanffy wrote: post #147
aaron695 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> floating cities We have decided on Mars, can we stop forking it. Have we learning nothing from Linux? But if you have to, could you hurry up and make a floating city on earth to practice ? People would pay a tonne of money for that, and having floating cities (In reality small communal groups, so more a village) would be very very neat.

> make a floating city on earth to practice? Earth's atmosphere is lighter than the Venusian one at that altitude. A balloon filled with breathable air would float naturally. You can't do that on Earth.

Float it on the ocean?

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

#282

Post by zshrdlu »

jerome-jh wrote: post #60

Why not colonize deserts on earth? It is vastly less energy consuming, vastly more useful, but no less of a challenge.

Many (science fiction) dystopian societies have high inequality, with some people living in orbit while the rest eat Soylent Green. We live in such a dystopia, and many people on HN don't realize it because they are the lucky ones. Colonizing Mars isn't a goal that solves any particular problem in our civilization - it's a red herring.

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

#283

Post by NortySpock »

CydeWeys wrote: post #241
btkramer9 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is mostly true on Mars too except perhaps the eternal light part

Mars has a lot more benefit here, in that it has a normal-length day. Much better to reliably have sunlight for roughly half of every day than to rely on a few polar areas that are in sunlight most of the time. The equator of the Moon is more suitable for other reasons, so what are you going to do, put the solar panels at the poles and run long power lines down to the equatorial regions where the power is used? Nah.…

Plus Mars has an atmosphere (95% CO2, 3% Nitrogen, 2% Argon, 1% other at 1% of Earth atmospheric presure IIRC), which the Moon utterly lacks.

Compress that into a tank and you can chemically (or biologically) convert that into an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere to breathe.

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

#284

Post by ryanmercer »

logfromblammo wrote: post #260
wmeredith wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over time, we could evolve a branch of humanity, "Homo ares" These were called Belters (as in asteroid belt) in the excellent book series The Expanse, which is also an excellent sci-fi show available on Amazon.

Or evolve a branch of humanity that uses non-biological, radiation-hardened, easily-maintained, low-mass machines, instead of meat that doesn't grow correctly in low acceleration, uses chemical energy storage with no power generation capacity, and which gets scrambled without megagrams of shielding. That is, develop general AI with a sense of responsibility and filial duty to its parent species, and which won't turn…

This has been done in various hard science fiction novels. One series, the name escapes me at the moment, actually has one group of engineered human warriors that are quite different mentally from normal humans but they can survive in vacuum and have some insect-like traits physically. They can just drift through vacuum and quietly attach to the hull of an enemy ship.

Then you have the Old Man's War universe where the soldiers have engineered bodies and synthetic blood that they have control over (they can explode mosquito like creatures that try to feed on them as an example).

B. V. Larson's Star Force series sees characters changed by both nano bots and specifically-grown intelligent (as a colony) vats of bacteria.

Many science fiction series involve brain backus. If I'm not mistaken Peter F. Hamilton has them in his Commonwealth Saga and the Altered Carbon books and show have it. As does the previously mentioned Old Man's War series by Scalzi.

Daniel Suarez's book (his near-future hard science fiction books are quite good) Change Agent involves lots of serious genetic engineering, including changing one's entire appearance (rather dangerously) with a virus.

I think if we can manage to stay alive long enough as a species, we will be able to at least do everything except for the nano bots and possible even those if we get some significant physics and computational breakthroughs.

As a pre-teen in the mid 1990's a friend and I wanted to turn ourselves into anthropormphic creatures not unlike the creatures in the Island of Dr. Moreau (I believe it was actually the 1996 film adaptation that gave us the idea) and figured somehow a bacteriophage could be created to alter a host at a cellular level but we figured you'd need to find a way to selectively edit genes (that now exists with CRISPR and the like), suppress the immune system to prevent death from it overreacting during the process, and control the replication rate so the body wouldn't burn up with fever or have some sort of energy issue. If a couple of bored pre-teens could think that up while playing a MUD one afternoon, someone someday is going to start really tinkering with humans at a serious scale. It's already being done by biohackers.

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

#285

Post by JdeBP »

acheron wrote: post #142
jessaustin wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ultimate weapon of imperialist terror! Why haven't we built this already?! "It's most unfortunate, and not only for your farmers, that you've chosen not to have sunlight this year... perhaps you should reconsider our demands?"

Ian Fleming’s James Bond in Sunlight is Forever

It's close to the plot of several real novels. Ben Bova's Powersat. Roger MacBride Allen's Farside Cannon.

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

#286

Post by acchow »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #251

Everyone in the comments here debating the merits of Mars vs the Moon vs Titan seems to have missed the whole point of this article. The author is arguing that anywhere other than Titan is infeasible due to recent research suggesting that Galactic Cosmic Rays cause significant brain damage (not just increased risk of cancer). In fact, the article argues that the danger is so severe that even getting to Titan quickly…

Would living underground on Mars mitigate this?

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

#287

Post by tomjakubowski »

ghaff wrote: post #253
wmeredith wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Over time, we could evolve a branch of humanity, "Homo ares" These were called Belters (as in asteroid belt) in the excellent book series The Expanse, which is also an excellent sci-fi show available on Amazon.

The Expanse is quite good. But the earth/Mars/Belt differences are mostly cultural at least in the TV series. The "Belters" meme in SF has been around for a long time though. See Larry Niven for example. (And I'm sure it's older than that.)

Beltalowdah physiological difficulty in adapting to gravity is a recurring plot point on the show. The culture difference exists in part because no Belter can survive long periods on Earth.

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

#288

Post by bayesian_horse »

Technically, much of the spaces needed for food production or other industries on mars don't need to be underground to protect Humans from radiation. Plants and machines can tolerate it much better, and a Mars colony can't sustain itself without levels of automation that look ridiculous to our present day.

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

#289

Post by JdeBP »

ghaff wrote: post #280
JdeBP wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Prucher's Brave new words gives its earliest attestation for the word as Niven's Warriors in 1966.

I would have guessed Heinlein but I don't see evidence he used that particular term although he had similar tropes in his books--e.g. Loonies in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

For similar tropes, see the meteor miners in E.E. Smith's Grey Lensman.

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

#290

Post by peanut_is_yum »

ryanmercer wrote: post #284
logfromblammo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or evolve a branch of humanity that uses non-biological, radiation-hardened, easily-maintained, low-mass machines, instead of meat that doesn't grow correctly in low acceleration, uses chemical energy storage with no power generation capacity, and which gets scrambled without megagrams of shielding. That is, develop general AI with a sense of responsibility and filial duty to its parent species, and which won't turn…

This has been done in various hard science fiction novels. One series, the name escapes me at the moment, actually has one group of engineered human warriors that are quite different mentally from normal humans but they can survive in vacuum and have some insect-like traits physically. They can just drift through vacuum and quietly attach to the hull of an enemy ship. Then you have the Old Man's War universe where th…

> This has been done in various hard science fiction novels. One series, the name escapes me at the moment, actually has one group of engineered human warriors that are quite different mentally from normal humans but they can survive in vacuum and have some insect-like traits physically. They can just drift through vacuum and quietly attach to the hull of an enemy ship.

Pretty sure this was in some book in the Old Man's War series

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