Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @12:59PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @12:59PM (#509985)

    Yeah I think someone who wrote this article does not understand heat transfer... which is understandable as I do believe that course is the bane of would be engineers, and for good measure.

    I kept rereading headline and wondering if we are talking about the same titan here....

  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 15 2017, @02:21PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Monday May 15 2017, @02:21PM (#510022) Journal

    Yeah I think someone who wrote this article does not understand heat transfer... which is understandable as I do believe that course is the bane of would be engineers

    Lots of folks think thermo/heat transfer is a hard course... until they take fluid mechanics. Actually, I think it really depends on your math strengths. People who hate heat transfer generally hate the "messiness" of the solutions. It's often one of the first courses where a lot of stuff depends on looking up arbitrary stuff in tables to plug into weird partial derivative equations that make all sorts of arbitrary simplifying assumptions, rather than "pure" analytic solutions. Fluids has some of that too, but the math is generally a step up if you do it with any rigor; suddenly all that grad, div, curl, etc. stuff you've half-forgotten from the later semesters of calculus comes back with a vengeance.

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday May 15 2017, @03:54PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday May 15 2017, @03:54PM (#510073) Journal

    I think the heat transfer could probably be handled. I'm sort of imagining an advanced polymer with huge numbers of embedded micro-vacuum bottles. The outside of a Dewar flask never gets very cold. So make your vacuum bottles the size of a baby aspirin, and use lots of them. The real problem would be flexibility, but because pressures are about equal this would be less of a problem than in space. You *would* need a specially designed plastic matrix to maintain flexibility when cold.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.