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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: 2) by wisnoskij on Monday May 15 2017, @03:22AM (13 children)

    by wisnoskij (5149) <{jonathonwisnoski} {at} {gmail.com}> on Monday May 15 2017, @03:22AM (#509735)

    Are we thinking of the same Venus?
    Mean surface temperature of 735 K (462 °C; 863 °F)
    Atmospheric pressure at the planet's surface is 92 times that of Earth

    So it is the temperature of a pizza oven, and about ten times more pressure than the human body can safely handle.
    So any structures will need to be super reinforced, with any failures instantly crushing all within with the air pressure alone.
    And these structures can forget about most metals, Maybe Titanium would still hold most of it's strength. forget about plastics. Forget about wood. Everything would pretty much need to be made out of ceramics and the like.

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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by its_gonna_be_yuge! on Monday May 15 2017, @03:35AM (7 children)

    by its_gonna_be_yuge! (6454) on Monday May 15 2017, @03:35AM (#509740)

    Are we thinking of the same Venus?

    Maybe you could read the comment, which said "the atmosphere of Venus". This has been widely touted as an alternative to Mars:

    https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20030022668.pdf [nasa.gov]

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by mhajicek on Monday May 15 2017, @06:04AM (6 children)

      by mhajicek (51) on Monday May 15 2017, @06:04AM (#509796)

      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)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday May 15 2017, @06:53AM (#509816) Journal

        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

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @07:15AM (#509820)

          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)

        by Thexalon (636) on Monday May 15 2017, @12:45PM (#509980)

        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

          by Delwin (4554) on Monday May 15 2017, @03:28PM (#510056)

          Because it was a very well hidden sabotage by the lead engineer.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @05:51PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @05:51PM (#510145)

          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

        by Grishnakh (2831) on Monday May 15 2017, @03:05PM (#510047)

        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.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Monday May 15 2017, @03:35AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday May 15 2017, @03:35AM (#509741) Journal
  • (Score: 1) by DmT on Monday May 15 2017, @09:16AM (2 children)

    by DmT (6439) on Monday May 15 2017, @09:16AM (#509877)

    Just send a bunch of different earth bacteria there. They will adapt the environment to their needs.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday May 15 2017, @01:54PM (1 child)

      by GreatAuntAnesthesia (3275) on Monday May 15 2017, @01:54PM (#510010) Journal

      Evolution does not work that way! Bacteria do not "adapt the environment to their needs." They consume, they reproduce, and they die. They can adapt their environment, but they do so entirely by accident and they probably won't enjoy the result.

      Your bacteria will either (a) die or (b) survive and adapt to their new environment. Assuming (b), they will then (b1) exhaust all resources in that environment until they are forced to adapt or die again or (b2) be so successful that they completely change their environment with their chemistry, forcing them to adapt or die again. The chances of (b3) the various branches of life descended from but very different to your initial bacteria colony falling neatly into a huge and complex series of self-sustaining feedback loops that just happen to work together to maintain a consistent human-friendly environment are... well... nobody knows for sure, but there's no reason to believe it will just happen. There is no guarantee that you'll get any kind of long-term steady-state environment like the one we enjoy on Earth. Even if we were to luck out, it would take millions or billions of years to get there.

      If we are to terraform Venus it needs to be a deliberate, planned engineering project (which may well use various carefully-selected / engineered strains of bacteria, granted) rather than just "drop off some bacteria and hope for the best".

      • (Score: 1) by DmT on Monday May 15 2017, @06:58PM

        by DmT (6439) on Monday May 15 2017, @06:58PM (#510180)

        But that would be cheap, at least:)
        Yes, would take lots of time, but better than the current terraforming efforts (none). At least this would get the process started.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @11:36AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @11:36AM (#509944)

    To find livable areas, you have to look where the atmosphere is ~ 1 bar (Earth surface pressure). On Venus that is about 50 km (check the links in this earlier post[1]), on Titan it looks like ~ 7 km up.[2]

    The mid latitude temperatures (long term average) at these pressures should be:

    Venus: sqrt(1/.723)*288 = 338 K
    Titan: sqrt(1/9.55)*288 = 93.2 K

    So the usual temperature on Titan at Earth pressure is approximately as cold as the lunar night.[3] Apparently Titan is anomalously cold though, so we should subtract ~ 9 K. [4]

    [1] https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?cid=498922&sid=19150 [soylentnews.org]
    [2] https://atmos.nmsu.edu/PDS/data/PDS4/titan_profiles_bundle/data/RSS_T12_R022_P_X_14_E_16K.TAB [nmsu.edu] (Altitude : 2nd Column, Temperature: 3rd Column, Pressure: 4th Column)
    [3] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019103516304869 [sciencedirect.com]
    [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-greenhouse_effect [wikipedia.org]