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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.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday May 15 2017, @06:04AM (6 children)
Good luck mining for mineral resources in your cloud city. Might as well be in a space station.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 15 2017, @06:53AM (1 child)
Except the ISS or other space stations experience microgravity which weakens you big league in mere months [soylentnews.org]. Water can be extracted from the atmosphere of Venus.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @07:15AM
Better to build a space station with artificial gravity and have it "orbit" a suitable asteroid/moon that you mine. Or have some thing spinning that's attached to the asteroid (some asteroids may have low enough gravity that if you spin/swing stuff on it most people/"victims" might not get motion sickness). Note: it doesn't have to be one of those super expensive wheel things, there are much cheaper things that can be built.
It's funny how so many people supposedly have money for going to Mars but they didn't have the budget for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrifuge_Accommodations_Module [wikipedia.org]
I would have thought it's a lot more scientific and logical to actually do experiments to figure out whether humans and our favourite animals/livestock and plants can do OK in Mars/Moon/etc gravity for long periods of time.
If it turns out that humans can't tolerate Mars gravity for long periods then we shouldn't be wasting so much time and money on going to Mars. You can't easily adjust the gravity/acceleration once you're on the surface of Mars. Whereas you can adjust it on a suitable space station.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday May 15 2017, @12:45PM (2 children)
I think I'd rather be on Cloud City than on a space station, for the simple reason of much higher chances of surviving the movie. Why oh why don't they know how to protect small thermal exhaust ports?
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by Delwin on Monday May 15 2017, @03:28PM
Because it was a very well hidden sabotage by the lead engineer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @05:51PM
Seriously, the torpedo turned a corner, like it was being sucked in, but this is an EXHAUST port.
As an engineer he thought of everything that seemed reasonable, but no one told him the enemy might be a space wizard!
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 15 2017, @03:05PM
Yeah, but isn't that part of the OP's point about Venus? Good luck mining for mineral resources on Titan, where digging in the surface will just get you frozen methane and eventually water. There's no mineral resources there to speak of that I know of. So instead of going there, where it's far away, dark, and cold, you might as well build a cloud city on Venus. Sure, there's no mineral resources that can be feasibly extracted, but that's no different than Titan.
And at least on Venus, if you can ever figure out how to get remote-control mining equipment to survive the hellish surface temperatures and pressures, then you could potentially mine the surface. (I know, it's really not feasible.) Not so for Titan.
But yeah, if you're looking for mineral resources, Moon and Mars make some sense, though IMO it makes much more sense to capture and mine asteroids. We wouldn't even have to go very far, since there's plenty of asteroids that cross Earth orbit. And the Moon is very close too, though it's questionable how valuable its mineral resources would be. This Mars stuff makes little sense economically compared to these.