REAL LIFE NEWS: A COLONY ON TITAN
by Hazed
Why haven’t we colonised any other planets yet? When I was young everyone took it for granted that by the time the 21st century came around we’d have a colony on the Moon and probably on Mars too. But it hasn’t happened yet, outside of Fed DataSpace.
Well, maybe the Moon and Mars are not the places to start. A new report published in Scientific American suggests that the only sensible place to put a human colony is on Titan.
They came to this conclusion by looking at the planets ecologically, considering the habitat that a human colony would actually need in order to survive. Those things include abundant energy, a temperature we can tolerate, and protection from cosmic radiation.
The report considered each planet in turn. Mercury is too close to the sun and has extremes of temperature we couldn’t survive. Venus is out because of its heat and its poisonous atmosphere.
The Moon and Mars have the advantage of being close to Earth, but they don’t have an atmosphere or a magnetosphere which would offer protection from cosmic rays. Research shows the rays cause cancer and destroy brain tissue. We’d have to build underground shelters to avoid those problems and that isn’t easy.
So we have to look at the moons of the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn, and of them all, Titan comes out the winner. It has an atmosphere to protect from cosmic rays. That atmosphere is thick enough that colonists wouldn’t need to wear pressure suits – just warm clothing and respirators. The surface has an abundance of resources that could be used to create plastic to make housing.
So that’s where we should set our sights.
Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/lets-colonize-titan/
