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https://www.quora.com/Is-Saturns-moon-Titan-the-best-place-to-colonize-in-the-Solar-System
Year old article..
Is Saturn's moon Titan the best place to colonize in the Solar System?
It has an atmospheric pressure of 1.5 bar, which humans can live in and also probably have water under its surface. Even if it doesn't have water, it can be easily brought up from other moons of Saturn. And most importantly, Saturn doesn't emit hazardous radiations like Jupiter.
Most answers have slightly overplayed the difficulty of Colonising Titan.
Imagine yourself in the first wave of Titanian colonists. You know it is about -180C on the surface, and that you would freeze the instant you ventured outside your habitat unless you don a very special suit. You take precautions, and use one with a 1cm layer of silicon aeorogel. That would be a bad mistake since your metabolically generated body heat would not be able to escape fast enough, and you would die of heat stroke within the hour without action. So caught out, you think of loosening your helmet, mixing your own air with a bit of cooler Titanian air but you heard it was toxic. Another mistake, since it is 95% nitrogen, 4,9% methane, with most of the rest being hydrogen. None of these gasses are toxic (although chronic methane exposure may turn out to be a minor health risk), and your lungs can cope with air at least as cold as -80C.
Okay, let's start again. Let's use just 3mm aerogel, which would still cause overheating, but we can pump the excess body heat to the hands where the insulation would be thinner to aid our dexterity. We have to carry all our own oxygen for breathing, and for making fire, plus a spare in case of accidents. Even though we could remove carbon dioxide without need of heavy chemical scrubbers (by freezing it out, then returning the air without too much heat loss via counter-current exchange), we would need to carry extra oxygen to sustain a fire. We could also carry frozen chicken with us and barbecue it as we go – Titan being the only other place in the solar system where you can do this. To build your fire, scoop methane from a lake, or the river, then provide the oxygen. We can cook meat this way – and take it, with a bit of innovation, into our suits. Yes we can have an outdoor BBQ here! We can also use this cooker to provide water for our use by melting the local 'rocks' – as long as we filter it.
It sounds like we would be weighed down. The suit, plus tank, plus spare tank, plus water, plus BBQ set, plus frozen chicken and vege slush to last us for a week could mass up to 50kg. However, even adding your own body weight your legs would only have to hold 40lbs. If you can barely stand naked on Earth, then you are far stronger than is necessary for Titan.
Walking or driving is not the way most transport would occur on this moon. The dense atmosphere and low gravity mean that walking would be clumsier than on Earth, and wheeled vehicles would find less traction and more air resistance. By contrast, flying would be so easy, that even human powered flight is possible. If Titan ever became a popular destination, congestion by flycycles may become a real problem.
Every vista on Mars looks as of Earth's driest and most lifeless desert, but not so Titan. You can raft down its methane rivers, explore its lakes and mountains, or take a trip up on a hydrogen balloon to see magnificent Saturn, and its rings (though they look more like a line from Titan).
Now we come to the biggest problem: food production. You could grow it under nuclear powered lights - but you could do that anywhere in the solar system. How about from sunshine? It is said that the surface of Titan receives only 1/1000 of Earth's surface light, but that is comparing it with a cloudless day here when cloud cover is averages 68%, so 1/300 is close to the mark. Let's go to the max to try and solve this difficulty.
Take a transparent dome habitat 15km in diameters in a valley, and load the hills with mirrors as to increase the amount of sun it receives ten fold. How many could that support? Well, with GE plants of sugar cane efficiency, this one dome could support about a million.
So: will Titan turn out to be the best place beyond Earth to colonise? On Titan you have to mine many heavy elements from great depths, or import them from other bodies. In the future that may also prove cheap, but I think Mars, Ceres, or even Mercury, though each has its own problems, might pip Titan to that post.
Year old article..
Is Saturn's moon Titan the best place to colonize in the Solar System?
It has an atmospheric pressure of 1.5 bar, which humans can live in and also probably have water under its surface. Even if it doesn't have water, it can be easily brought up from other moons of Saturn. And most importantly, Saturn doesn't emit hazardous radiations like Jupiter.
Most answers have slightly overplayed the difficulty of Colonising Titan.
Imagine yourself in the first wave of Titanian colonists. You know it is about -180C on the surface, and that you would freeze the instant you ventured outside your habitat unless you don a very special suit. You take precautions, and use one with a 1cm layer of silicon aeorogel. That would be a bad mistake since your metabolically generated body heat would not be able to escape fast enough, and you would die of heat stroke within the hour without action. So caught out, you think of loosening your helmet, mixing your own air with a bit of cooler Titanian air but you heard it was toxic. Another mistake, since it is 95% nitrogen, 4,9% methane, with most of the rest being hydrogen. None of these gasses are toxic (although chronic methane exposure may turn out to be a minor health risk), and your lungs can cope with air at least as cold as -80C.
Okay, let's start again. Let's use just 3mm aerogel, which would still cause overheating, but we can pump the excess body heat to the hands where the insulation would be thinner to aid our dexterity. We have to carry all our own oxygen for breathing, and for making fire, plus a spare in case of accidents. Even though we could remove carbon dioxide without need of heavy chemical scrubbers (by freezing it out, then returning the air without too much heat loss via counter-current exchange), we would need to carry extra oxygen to sustain a fire. We could also carry frozen chicken with us and barbecue it as we go – Titan being the only other place in the solar system where you can do this. To build your fire, scoop methane from a lake, or the river, then provide the oxygen. We can cook meat this way – and take it, with a bit of innovation, into our suits. Yes we can have an outdoor BBQ here! We can also use this cooker to provide water for our use by melting the local 'rocks' – as long as we filter it.
It sounds like we would be weighed down. The suit, plus tank, plus spare tank, plus water, plus BBQ set, plus frozen chicken and vege slush to last us for a week could mass up to 50kg. However, even adding your own body weight your legs would only have to hold 40lbs. If you can barely stand naked on Earth, then you are far stronger than is necessary for Titan.
Walking or driving is not the way most transport would occur on this moon. The dense atmosphere and low gravity mean that walking would be clumsier than on Earth, and wheeled vehicles would find less traction and more air resistance. By contrast, flying would be so easy, that even human powered flight is possible. If Titan ever became a popular destination, congestion by flycycles may become a real problem.
Every vista on Mars looks as of Earth's driest and most lifeless desert, but not so Titan. You can raft down its methane rivers, explore its lakes and mountains, or take a trip up on a hydrogen balloon to see magnificent Saturn, and its rings (though they look more like a line from Titan).
Now we come to the biggest problem: food production. You could grow it under nuclear powered lights - but you could do that anywhere in the solar system. How about from sunshine? It is said that the surface of Titan receives only 1/1000 of Earth's surface light, but that is comparing it with a cloudless day here when cloud cover is averages 68%, so 1/300 is close to the mark. Let's go to the max to try and solve this difficulty.
Take a transparent dome habitat 15km in diameters in a valley, and load the hills with mirrors as to increase the amount of sun it receives ten fold. How many could that support? Well, with GE plants of sugar cane efficiency, this one dome could support about a million.
So: will Titan turn out to be the best place beyond Earth to colonise? On Titan you have to mine many heavy elements from great depths, or import them from other bodies. In the future that may also prove cheap, but I think Mars, Ceres, or even Mercury, though each has its own problems, might pip Titan to that post.
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