Thread: Populating another Planet

Hello

I was wondering if anybody would have a good idea as to how humans would "set up" on another planet to live on as another place to call home. Would there be one large settlement or several and how would it develop over time?

Originally Posted by stu3521

Hello

I was wondering if anybody would have a good idea as to how humans would "set up" on another planet to live on as another place to call home. Would there be one large settlement or several and how would it develop over time?

Probably the best published place to go if your interest is deep would be JBIS (Journal of British Interplanetary Space) over the last 30 years or so. Some universities have them in back stock or on computer. Though it is very pricey, Martyn Foggs' book on Terraforming is said to be good.

We could live on many rocky/icy planets/worlds, but gas world would be a long time coming. The problem is cost. We have our air free, water almost free, and food just for the growing (no piped in sunlight or special super enclosed greenhouses). Frankly we live the good life in comparison to another potential world in our solar system, unless that world is terraformed. Terraforming would be a hugely expensive and time consuming process by almost all known methods, and favored candidate Mars would never have a breathable atmosphere in less than hundreds of generations (due to C02 poisoning from frozen stock permafrost remnants seeping out in mildly toxic concentrations -- sorry Arnold Swartznegger).

Two unusual potential exceptions to this are really advanced well beyond present technology. One is Mercury, usually with a parasol to limit insolation up to several times that of Earth at present. Atmosphere would be possibly the hardest challenge, especially if a Nitrogen majority type. No one really knows how long any thick atmosphere would last on a low G planet, but it is guessed by some scientists to be well under a million years but over 30,000, which is enough to pay the rent of construction.

Second is Venus. This one is more unusual. Estimates vary, but some state if blasted off, the atmosphere would stay in orbit and eventually be recaptured. I wonder of this. To be at all workable, the temperature would have to be extremely hot, well beyond that to disassociate C02 and to pulse away into solar orbit. Obviously this is well beyond any technique available any time soon. However, it is technically possible to have an atmosphere remaining similar to our own, at sea level or on one of the continent like rises, some almost 10 miles high (Ishtar?). Water would then be the requirement. Quite a few asteroids have a clay formation of locked in water, iirc. In this case, aim to Venus in celestial mechanic pool shoot and let nature do its work after the planet has lost most of its atmosphere (if possible).

Both of these would suffice in an Earthlike world of breathable atmosphere, beyond the many potential locations of a Taylorian Worldhouse.

More likely than these proposals are the old idea of setting up shop in an old lava tube. They have been identified on Mars and our Moon. Seal off the known exits, pump in 02 with a pinch of radioactivity (to identify leak locations), seal off the rest large ones, super heat (relatively easy in a vacuum or near vacuum) to seal off all of the important outlet points. Then you have a miles long tube, potentially. Pipe in sun and some water/soil, then you have a farm far under the harmful rays in any solar storm.

Better off to build a space colony so that it could travel anywhere.

Yes, but he said a planet, not an orbiting platform using artificial gravity (by centrifical force).

If we want to terraform a planet smaller than Earth, then we'd need something to help the colonists not lose bone mass. The human body has a hard time keeping its bones strong at low gravity.

Venus is the only planet in the solar system that meets the requirement. It's 0.9 the mass of Earth, so its gravity would be pretty close. The gas giants are out of the question because the gravity there would squish a human being into jelly. Although some moons of the gas giants, like Titan, are comparable in size to Mars or Mercury, so maybe with a medical advance they might work.

As for Venus, the trick would be finding a way to get all the toxic chemicals sequestered. It's a lot like the problem of carbon sequestration on Earth, only a much grander scale. It might be possible to find a bacteria that metabolizes some of it, and which can live close enough to the upper atmosphere to get sunlight.

If living in artificial habitats is good enough for you, then Earth-like air is a "lifting gas" on Venus, because Venus' atmosphere is so thick. So we could build giant zeppelin - like capsules with habitable environments inside, and let them float around. But if we're going to go to that much trouble, then why not just build space stations in space instead?

The motivation behind the original question is to start writing some sci fi stories, one idea i had involved a fairly recently populated Earth like world. I've no idea how you would start on a new planet though and what it would look 50, 100, 200 years down the line. Terraforming was the method for making the planet habitable for humans and your replies have raised some points i hadn't even considered! Do you think we would colonise worlds under one banner or will different countried/continents do their own thing. SPACE!