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The surprising advantages of a colony on Titan (www.scientificamerican.com)

submitted 1 week ago by yogthos@lemmygrad.ml to c/space@lemmygrad.ml

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[–] KrasnaiaZvezda@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Practically, a Moon or Mars settlement would have to be built underground to be safe from this radiation.

Underground shelter is hard to build and not flexible or easy to expand. Settlers would need enormous excavations for room to supply all their needs for food, manufacturing and daily life.

Big solar powered excavators on the moon, built from locally source materials, to push regolith above shelters, or to mine the metals that will be used while opening holes for large scale bases could solve a lot of the scalability problems of building underground on the Moon, I think.

Titan is the only other body in the solar system with liquid on the surface, with its lakes of methane and ethane that look startlingly like water bodies on Earth.

I still feel Europa would be better in that regard. It's water may not be on the surface but it's still water. Although I do prefer if we explore it thoroughly for life before settling there.

It’s cold on Titan, at -180°C (-291°F), but thanks to its thick atmosphere, residents wouldn’t need pressure suits—just warm clothing and respirators. Housing could be made of plastic produced from the unlimited resources harvested on the surface, and could consist of domes inflated by warm oxygen and nitrogen. The ease of construction would allow huge indoor spaces.

The health benefits of being protected from radiation and these things do look like nice advantages to have though. So although there might not have a beeline for Titan from the start, it could serve as a great staging point for the colonisation of the Saturnian gravity well.

For example, you could fly. The weak gravity—similar to the Moon’s—combined with the thick atmosphere would allow individuals to aviate with wings on their backs.

And that does look fun to do around the plastic skyscrapers of Titan.

[–] yogthos@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 1 week ago

I do think the moon is by far the most practical target for a self sufficient colony in the foreseeable future. There are all the resources you could want, you could pressurize existing lava tubes and use them as habitats. There is water, and you can split oxygen out as well. There are rare earths available, so you could even build stuff like electronics and computer chips on site. As you note, solar power is readily available as well.

Once industry is established on the moon, the next step could be to build a space elevator, which we know we can do with existing materials since the gravity is low and there's no atmosphere. A space elevator would allow moving massive amounts of matter into orbit effectively for free. At that point, we can assemble space ships in orbit that would never actually have to land anywhere. We could also build habitats like the O'neill cylinder, and so on. This would be the gateway to deep space exploration and habitation.

The big advantage of Titan over Europa is the fact that you have an atmosphere. It would make life on Titan feel fairly normal in a sense that you just need to put a thermal suit to go outside. I imagine easy access to hydrocarbons is probably more useful than simply having water, because it means having a supply of energy, useful chemicals, and building material. Water can always be extracted from the environment if you have energy to do that.