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posted by n1 on Monday May 15 2017, @02:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the new-colonial-era dept.

John Timmer at Ars Technica reports:

So, why Titan? The two closer destinations, the Moon and Mars, have atmospheres that are effectively nonexistent. That means any habitation will have to be extremely robust to hold its contents in place. Both worlds are also bathed in radiation, meaning those habitats will need to be built underground, as will any agricultural areas to feed the colonists. Any activities on the surface will have to be limited to avoid excessive radiation exposure.

Would anyone want to go to a brand-new world just to spend their lives in a cramped tunnel? Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest the answer will be "no." Titan, in contrast, offers a dense atmosphere that shields the surface from radiation and would make any structural failures problematic, rather than catastrophic. With an oxygen mask and enough warm clothing, humans could roam Titan's surface in the dim sunlight. Or, given the low gravity and dense atmosphere, they could float above it in a balloon or on personal wings.

The vast hydrocarbon seas and dunes, Hendrix and Wohlforth suggest, would allow polymers to handle many of the roles currently played by metal and wood. Drilling into Titan's crust would access a vast supply of liquid water in the moon's subsurface ocean. It's not all the comforts of home, but it's a lot more of them than you'd get on the Moon or Mars.


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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @03:00AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @03:00AM (#509721)

    Would anyone want to go to a brand-new world just to spend their lives in a cramped tunnel?

    Yes. They're called basement dwellers, they live in dark cramped spaces by choice, and they're antisocial loners who hate the Earth. Send them to another planet and everyone will be happier. The Facebook obsessed social media freaks don't want antisocial losers on their planet either.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @09:05AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @09:05AM (#509872)

    Hold on there cap. What's the internet going to be like on the new world. Basement dwellers need high speed connections to live comfortably.

    And potato chips. Looots of potato chips.

    • (Score: 2) by KiloByte on Monday May 15 2017, @11:39AM

      by KiloByte (375) on Monday May 15 2017, @11:39AM (#509946)

      Those of us brought up on Usenet and mailing lists can take hours-long ping times and lowish bandwidth just fine (we know how to download things once then cache locally). Getting rid of Facebook users is certainly worth it.

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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 15 2017, @06:09PM

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday May 15 2017, @06:09PM (#510158) Journal

      The interplanetary Internet will use lasers for high bandwidth transmission [smithsonianmag.com]. Latency will be bad, obviously.

      Sneakernet may be more promising. By the time basement dwellers can be exiled off-planet, 3D QLC NAND, the latest in HDD technology, or possibly holography, will have advanced to the point that multi-petabyte drives are possible. On the hard disk drive end, 100+ TB is likely in the 2020s [anandtech.com] with 1000+ TB being possible [semiengineering.com], whereas we could get 100+ TB SSDs as soon as this year or next year at the latest [theregister.co.uk].

      So petabyte-level consumer storage seems likely for the Morlocks. Meanwhile, compression codecs continue to advance. State-of-the-art H.265 can store 22 minute 720p content in 100 MB or less. Google planned to release successors to VP9 every 18 months, but it has slowed down its pace and joined Cisco and Xiph to create AV1 [xda-developers.com]. Whatever the codecs, in 20 years the basement dweller could obtain a drive storing millions of episodes of animus or whatever. High resolution VR video would eat up more storage, but VR gaming with procedurally generated content less so.

      Potato chips. You can 3D print them [all3dp.com]. Dry potato flakes could be combined with on-site water to lower shipping costs for the potato product. Or potatoes could be grown on-location [theguardian.com].

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