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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: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday May 15 2017, @02:21PM
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.