Terraforming and settling outside of Earth LiptonCambell: So any thoughts about Terraforming Jupiter? They do have an ocean way bigger than Earth Corwin: A planet like Jupiter could almost be considered a "mini solar system" of it's own... and there's ample water to be found. Europa is thought to have an ocean beneath it's icy surface which may contain much more water than all the Earth's oceans... and Ganymede and Callisto are also thought to have crusts and mantles of mostly ice surrounding rocky cores. The biggest technical problem? Jupiter's enormous and formidable magnetic field. It traps the solar wind and concentrates it into belts of radiation, similar to Earth's Van Allen radiation belts, but thousands of times more powerful. Without some kind of new technology regarding radiation shielding an astronaut in the vicinity of Jupiter wouldn't last more than a few hours before being fried from radiation. It is hypothesized that deep in the Europan ocean it would be shielded from the radiation by miles of ice and water, so it may harbor life far beneath... but up on the surface the conditions are extremely hostile. I was just reading a book that suggests that a spacesuit with a layer of superconducting material could possibly deflect the charged particles around it, as well as superconducting hulls on the spacecraft... but without an as-of-yet uninvented room-temperature superconducting material, it would be impractical or even impossible to construct such a thing. For the time being, Jupiter will be the realm of robots and space probes with radiation-hardened circuitry... and even those take an awful beating. ghostgeek: I've seen it estimated that it would cost $5 trillion, spread over a century, to settle Mars. Even in this day and age that's a fair bit of cash to ask the public to stump up. LiptonCambell: Yea, but think of the resources.....it's certainly nothing we oughta pay for overnight, but longterm, it's an important goal, and one that'll pay itself off. ghostgeek: If one is looking for resources, the asteroids would be a good place to search. They contain oxygen, water, hydrocarbons, steel, nickel, cobalt, and precious metals and have an even lower velocity increment than the Moon. Corwin: The biggest hurdle would be setting up shop. Once we can be established off-Earth (at an unimaginable expense), and be mining raw resources, and manufacturing in space, then there would be the promise of incredible profit. | Science Chat Room 2 People Chatting Similar Conversations |