Talk:Colonization of the outer Solar System

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This article was nominated for deletion on 8/5/2006. The result of the discussion was keep.

Space Colonization WikiProject edit

Core concepts Space colonization Interstellar travel Planetary habitability Space and survival Space habitat Terraforming Colonization and terraforming Colonization of the Moon Colonization of Mars Colonization of Venus Colonization of Mercury Colonization of the asteroids Colonization of Ceres Colonization of the outer solar system Colonization of Jupiter Colonization of Europa Colonization of Titan Colonization of Trans-Neptunian Objects Terraforming of Mars Terraforming of Venus Organizations Mars Society National Space Society

Contents 1 About the introducton 2 Ganymede, Triton 3 separate articles 4 Future expansion 5 Uranus 6 removed "rocket fuel" speculation

[edit] About the introducton

I am not sure their is any formal proof of existing liquid water anywhere in the solar sytem. Steam and ice, and traces of rivers that might have been of liquid water, yes -- but no actual present water.

• so interresting and good source of info. This is wikipedia at its best. Congrat's ;)

I just disagree with the word "iceteroids" because asteroids is from aster+ oids (like a star). At max, it would be iceoids, maybe... -Pedro 00:55, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Well, you and Mr. Zubrin can have it out. For now, it's a common portmanteau. siafu 01:40, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

• • • what?! --Pedro 21:27, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ganymede, Triton

Are there any ideas for these and other major moons? -Pedro 16:06, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

• • An old book that I read had an issue about Ganymede (The Base Ganymede), but without details. :/.--Pedro 19:47, 18 November 2005 (UTC)
  • I've added what I read about Ganymede. It is maybe outdated (the magnetic field was not in that source, obviously). I dont own the book, i just copied the pages about future space exploration.--Pedro 19:58, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

• I know this isnt the place, but there are also ideas for the colonization and terraforming of Venus. -Pedro 20:08, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

• • There's some information about terraforming Venus over at terraforming (it's down after the stuff about Mars). It might be worthwhile to branch it out into something like Colonization of Venus, but we should talk about that over there. siafu 22:39, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] separate articles

do you think there should be separate articles for Titan and Europa? --Revolución hablar ver 17:47, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

No, as Titan and Europa are two very different environments, one having a thick atmosphere (Titan), and the other a deep ocean (Europa). Felix Dance 11:37, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

It appears that the sections discussing the use of floating cities on Jupiter contradict themselves, the first saying that floating cities would be possible (with the right preperations), the second saying that Jupiter would not be a good choice for floating cities due to gravity/radiation concerns. Just a thought. --MrBaseball (talk) 02:12, 7 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Future expansion

I saw that someone added in a bunch of links to articles with no content, and that someone else deleted them. Let's build these articles on this page first, like for Pluto and each individual satellite. Once we get more than a page for each, we can see about breaking it off. Until then, it's not worth it. Chadlupkes 04:44, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

I did the deleting (actually reverting to redirects here) and I agree with you. I left comments on the incident at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Space Colonization--agr 10:40, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Uranus

The section states: "By using balloons filled with hydrogen, large masses can be suspended underneath at roughly Earth gravity. "

But Uranus atmosphere is itself mostly hydrogen. So I doubt the faculty of this statement. Does anyone have more information on this?

84.160.237.96 21:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

Yes, Uranus' atmosphere, as well as the other gas giants, is not entirely composed of hydrogen. According to NASA's fact sheets (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/factsheet/uranusfact.html), Uranus' atmosphere is comprised of only 82.5% hydrogen, with the remainder being mainly helium and methane (which is 2.3%). This would easily be enough to provide boyancy for a large aerostat, with some proposals suggesting hanging loads of several thousand tons suspended below hydrogen spheres over a kilometre in diameter, although I do not have a reference for this at the moment. Felix Dance 11:35, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I recon that those constructs of sphreres for the hydrogen need not be able to endure high pressure densities as the hydrogen inside would have the same preasure as the atmosphere outside, but would have to be very large to provide sufficiant boyancy. Large constructs tend to be heavy. So how exactly would these sphreres look like? If the hydrogen would be under preassure to retain structural stability of the sphere, it'll surely leak out through almost all materials. If not, the sphere needs to have structural stability of its own, adding weight to the structure, decreasing the overall density.

Are there any numberes on that subject? 84.160.217.236 19:45, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

As explained above, a small percentage of the atmosphere is comprised of heavy compounds. Balloons would have to be large, but boyancy would be in the order of Earth's atmosphere due to the large mole mass of the methane (2.3%). The idea has been around in Science Fiction for a while so I would be supprised if there was no independant research on the issue. Balloons weighing a few tons could contain millions of cubic metres of hydrogen, allowing hundreds of tons of lift. Felix Dance 00:19, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] removed "rocket fuel" speculation

While it's probably true that there are goodies out there from which to manufacture rocket fuel, let us remember that even interplanetary distances are so damn far as to make rocket propulsion for getting around amongst them downright silly. for instance, if we are to accelerate to even 100 miles per second, it would still take ~ 7 years just to get to Jupiter, let alone to Saturn, which is roughly twice as far out. I'm not going to do the joules-to-matter math here, but at joule you can see how much energy is required for this sort of trip. Even if you were to use fusion instead of, say, potassium perchlorate, and get much higher efficiency, it would still take an awful long time to get anything done. So, consider the phrase 'sustain life,' which is far more generic. I don't think anyone is going to deny that there are organic compounds (Io and Titan come to mind), water ice (Europa), and liquid water (Europa again) out there. Further, the previously mentioned ingredients plus sunlight do life sustainment make. Indeed, even without sunlight, Jupiter and Io are pretty warm places to hang out. This has been speculated ad nauseum in (science) fiction, and recently by the likes of NASA with, say, the Huygens probe. Anyhow, I think it doesn't need the {{fact}} template now. At least not there. 63.242.163.2 23:47, 24 September 2007 (UTC)

Didn't Cassini Huygens reach Saturn in under 7 years? Saturn is further out than Jupiter as well.WolfKeeper 04:57, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Your edit seems to be based on OR, and from looking at it, you've made some mistakes with your analysis; for example, Cassini used a Venus slingshot I believe.WolfKeeper 04:57, 25 September 2007 (UTC)

Not having tracked more than the last bit of this exchange, just to pipe in with my two cents - there are references out there, which we should collect, for outer Solar System resources being susceptible to exploitation as rocket fuel; Cassini used slingshots of Venus, Venus a second time, Earth, Earth a second time, [fact-checked self — r.d.] and then Jupiter, after originally being launched with chemical rocket fuel; and the relative crappiness of chemical propellant doesn't nullify the potential value of developing chemical propellant resources in the outer Solar System - it can be combined with other techniques, as the creative slingshotting of the Cassini mission planners illustrated, and don't forget that it can be used to ship slow-boat freight, for shipments with relatively low time decay in value per mass density. Spacecraft don't need to move that fast when there are no or few people in them, to be of value. - Reaverdrop _(talk/nl) 05:11, 25 September 2007 (UTC)