The Top 5 Places We Could Colonize In Our Solar System | Answers With Joe

For the human race to continue in the far future, we're going to have to live beyond planet Earth. Here are the 5 best options in our own solar system.

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PBS Spacetime on colonizing Venus

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The 5 best options for colonizing in our solar system are:
The moon
Mars
Europa
Titan
Venus

The moon
Gravity: 1/6 that of earth
Air pressure: none
Temperature: extreme (253 in sun, -253 in shade)
- Why go - a place to launch to other places
Orbiting at 2288 mph (3683 kph) - significant boost
Advantages: Instant communication with Earth
Good place to learn how to colonize where Experts are available 24/7
Advantages: Lighter gravity means we could build bigger there
Advantages: could dome over craters to create housing
Advantages: water ice in some pole craters

One place we have talked a lot about is Mars
Mars
Gravity: Just over 1/3 (38%)
Air Pressure: .6% if Earth’s
Temperature: 70 in day (20C), -100 at night (-73C)
Why go: Most comfortable temperature-wise and gravity-wise, but pressure is still abysmal
Down-side: Thin atmosphere means not enough to support life but enough to make landings difficult.
Terraforming option - most potential for terraforming. Melting ice caps could pump CO2 into the air and thicken the atmosphere as well as warm the planet

Europa
Gravity: 13% of Earth’s
Air pressure: barely exists - mostly oxygen
Temperature: -260F -160C
This seems like a swing and a miss, but there’s something interesting under the surface of Europa
Tidal heating causes a sea of liquid water beneath the surface.
One of the best options for finding life in the solar system
Underwater habitats might be the answer.
Downside: radiation carried by Jupiter’s magnetic field would pose an issue

Titan
Gravity: 13% of Earth’s
Air pressure: 1.5x that of Earth
Temperature: -290F, -179C
Of all the places in the solar system, Titan’s air pressure is most like Earth’s
You could just walk around on the surface without a suit, except for the fact that it’s so cold methane flows in rivers.
Could use the methane for fuel

But I promised something controversial, and here it is, my personal favorite option for colonizing another planet… Venus.

Venus
Gravity: 91% of Earth’s
Air Pressure: 100x that of Earth
Temperature: 872F, 467C

Now I know what you’re saying, you’re saying Joe, that only meets one of the three criteria, how can you possibly pick that as your number one?

Because those numbers are for the planet’s surface. Up in the clouds, it’s a different story.

Venus’ air pressure is insane. On the surface, it would crush you like a soda can. But about 50 kilometers up in the atmosphere, it’s about the same as here.

Which means that just like a ship can float on top of the water, we could build colonies that float on the upper atmosphere of Venus.

It would still be hot, but manageable.

And I know people will always say, but what if you fall? Or if you drop something, you’ll never get it back. Well, I go back to the ship on the sea analogy. If you fall off the boat, you’re likely to drown. If you drop your phone over the side, you’ll never see it again. But we still have cruise ships carrying thousands of people and entire navies floating around out there.

Plus the communication time would be smaller than anywhere else.

[jshepard]

Thanks for the Gene Cernan mention. Cernan went to the moon not once, but twice. And he was a classy guy. About a year before his death I sent him a copy of his book and asked him to autograph it to my son, who was 2 at the time. A few weeks later I got it back. It read "Dear Elliott, for you the sky will never be the limit. From the moon! Gene Cernan, commander, Apollo 17." Cernan really wanted
to inspire the next generation and he never stopped advocating for space exploration. He really was a hero.

[shirleymental]

Sulfuric acid clouds ain't so bad. I went to Beijing once.

[michaelklim]

I mean, if humans haven't figured out how to spread out to at least Alpha Centauri by the time the sun explodes, do we really deserve to escape?

[xscale]

Venus is actually much, much better than you suggest. While sulfuric acid is a problem at 50K up, the almost Earth-normal pressure, temperature and gravity at that altitude make it vastly easier than any of your other selections. And we can generate water from the sulfuric acid so it's actually a massive advantage if treated properly.

A balloon filled with Earth atmosphere has about the same buoyancy in Venus's atmosphere as a Helium balloon on Earth so there's no need for any kind of power supply to maintain altitude. And a key point you missed: thanks to Venus's upper atmosphere above you and greater proximity to the sun, you experience vastly less cosmic radiation than Mars or any of the outer moons.

Finally ... low gravity, it turns out, is deadly to humans. Astronauts spending just a year in it come back with permanent disabilities. That means the Moon, Mars and the outer moons aren't places we can colonise without far better genetic engineering tech than we're likely to manage this century. McKendree cylinders inside asteroids are still safer, easier and more profitable places to live than floating cities on Venus ... but if we're going to colonise another planet, Venus is emphatically it.

Also Venus is a better prospect for terraforming than Mars. Much easier to change the composition of an atmosphere through a bioengineered trophic cascade than by nuking the poles ... and nuking Mars's poles doesn't do a thing to fix its radiation and gravity problems. Venus is the closest thing to a second Earth we're ever going to get.

But easier still to use algae farming to fix our carbon pollution problems right here on Earth and then get on with terraforming Antarctica and the Sahara. Both of which are far more hospitable and accessible than Mars or Venus.

[ishouldhavetried]

So live on Mars, store our supplies on the moon, get our water from Europa, and import oxygen from Titan. I like it.

[dalemartin]

8:57 A fart so cold, that it runs down your leg. 😵

[ValensBellator]

It just seems like the moon would be such a good place to practice. I wish we’d started down that road sooner.

[zrebbesh]

I will take would-be interplanetary colonists more seriously after they demonstrate their basic technological competence by establishing and maintaining self-sufficient colonies in Antarctica and somewhere deep on the ocean floor. Both are far easier than the interplanetary targets.

[jimgreen]

Woh, living above Venus would be like living on Cloud City.

[KrisBendix]

This list nicely confirms my idea. Do what peoples say - colonize the space... The Space. Not a planet.
Work more on developing easy to build and maintain centrifugal space stations and ships. Much more manageable. Can adjust the environment perfectly. Can live almost anywhere in space, as long as it is not too close to Jupiter, Sun etc. And can live in the orbits of any potential planets for future colonization and work on terraforming before landing on them.

[oilersridersbluejays]

I'm your Venus,

I'm your fire,

Your desire.

[izzynobre]

7:55 I think he’s talking about Jupiter’s magnetosphere, not gravity, here.

[GiesbertNijhuis]

Or forget about them problematic planets & moons, instead built fleets of huge spaceships.

[BobbyCoggins]

O'Neill Cylinders! Why fight a gravity well when you can spin up your own gravity and build your own habitat to suit your desires?

[SciHeartJourney]

We should try to colonize the deserts of the Southwest.
If you can't make it there, you won't have a chance at surviving in space.

[untruelie]

Venus would also be my top candidate. We could extract water, hydrogen, oxygen and potenially even carbon from it's atmosphere. There is still the problem that Venus' rotation is extremely slow, but the upper parts of the atmosphere go around the planet about every 4-5 days, so there would be day and night periods of about 2 days - which is manageable for humans, I suppose.

[hermeticxhaote]

If they required kids to read good science fiction we could have the world we want.

[septegram]

Living US presidents is more exclusive, with just five.

[michaelt.]

Biggest benefit of Venus (in my opinion): You could spend years there, and still return to earth without significant problems (other than a 10% weight gain).
If your body acclimates to Mars over 2-3 years, it will be a MASSIVE effort to get you back to a shape in which you can function on earth again.
So if you're going there long-term, there's effectively no going back.
So if you want to colonise a place with specialists (and build up a self-sustaining system there), Venus is the better option.
It would be comparable to people working on an oil rig.

[randysmith]

Once you have climbed out of a gravity well, why would you go back into the well??? Build a habitat in high orbit OR one of the Lagrange points and live there. Solar power is free and plentiful.